All I'm doing, all I have done for 40 years, is spend time with the best scientific experts, gain their confidence, and take advantage of their patience in explaining things to me over and over again in progressively simpler language that I can understand, so that I can read it back to them and get their sign off, where they say, "Yep, that's it, Al. You've got it." When I understand it, I know I can explain it to other people. When the scientists' predictions end up being true, I see that as an opportunity to say to people, "Listen carefully to what they're saying now."

I've been dreaming of this moment since I was a kid growing up in Tennessee: that one day, I'd have the chance to come here to Madison Square Garden and be the warm-up act for Elvis.

Future generations may well have occasion to ask themselves, "What were our parents thinking? Why didn't they wake up when they had a chance?" We have to hear that question from them, now.

Any of us who work on the task of solving the climate crisis have at times an internal struggle between hope and despair. But that's one of the things that connects this climate movement to the previous great moral revolutions, like the civil rights movement and more recently the gay rights movement. So those who feel despair should be of good cheer, as the Bible says. Have faith, have hope. We are going to win this.

While President Bush likes to project an image of strength and courage, the real truth is that in the presence of his large financial contributors, he is a moral coward.

The global warming deniers persist in this air of unreality. After all, the entire north polar icecap, which has been there for most of the last 3 million years, is disappearing before our eyes. Forty percent is already gone. The rest is expected to go completely within the next decade. What do they think is causing this?

We have a planetary emergency. We have to find a way to create, in the generation of those alive today, a sense of generational mission.