Left to right: Barry Lopez, Ted Clarke, and Al Gore

From Barry Lopez's Diary:

In the austral spring of 1988, I camped for a month in West Antarctica with a field party of four glacial chemists, on Newell Glacier in the Transantarctic Mountains. After several weeks of surveying, the scientists pinpointed a promising site at the head of the glacier where they could drill to retrieve an ice core. Two drillers were flown in and, with some of us dressed in sterile gear to handle sections of the ice core, we began work.

On November 17, 1988, Al Gore flew out to our camp from McMurdo Station, the main American base in Antarctica. He was eager to learn first-hand how ice cores, which preserve a record of the Earth’s atmospheric history, were being retrieved and how they might be used to clarify growing concerns about global climate change.

Gore impressed us as someone unusually well-informed about the scientific questions involved, and he struck us as the model of a public servant. He was smart, courteous, a determined questioner, and a keen listener. It was -5° F and he'd had to hike a half-mile uphill to the drill site from the spot where the helicopter set him down. He didn’t complain and never struck a pose. He was a man on a mission.

Gore refers to this visit to our Newell Glacier camp in his documentary, An Inconvenient Truth. In the film, the difference between a public servant and what you might call a corporate servant among America’s political leadership becomes profoundly and sickeningly clear.

In a relentless and devastating way, the film dismantles the claptrap that characterizes efforts by the Bush White House and American energy corporations to misrepresent and refute global warming. Willfully uneducated, greedy, and arrogant, this small consortium of wealthy men in business and government represents one of the greatest examples of political cowardice and irresponsibility in the history of the Republic.

Given what is at stake, and the number of voters who remain “unconvinced” about global climate change, they constitute a dangerous and malicious group of people. Please see the film, if you haven’t already. And thank Gore for the constancy of his citizenship.