We can believe in the future and work to achieve it and preserve it, or we can whirl blindly on, behaving as if one day there will be no children to … - Al Gore

The planet has a fever. If your baby has a fever you go to the doctor. If the doctor says you need to intervene here, you don't say, 'Well, I read a science fiction novel that told me it's not a problem.' If the crib's on fire, you don't speculate that the baby is flame retardant. You take action.

The unpleasant truth is that President Bush's utter incompetence has made the world a far more dangerous place and dramatically increased the threat of terrorism against the United States. Just yesterday, the International Institute of Strategic Studies reported that the Iraq conflict " has arguably focused the energies and resources of Al Qaeda and its followers while diluting those of the global counterterrorism coalition." The ISS said that in the wake of the war in Iraq Al Qaeda now has more than 18,000 potential terrorists scattered around the world and the war in Iraq is swelling its ranks.

Having spent the better part of my life for the past several decades trying to learn from experts on the climate crisis and working with technology and policy innovators to develop solutions for the unprecedented challenge humanity faces, I have never been more hopeful. At this point in the fight to solve the climate crisis, there are only three questions remaining: Must we change? Can we change? Will we change? In the pages that follow, you will find the best available evidence supporting the overwhelming conclusion that the answer to the first two of these three questions is a resounding “Yes.” I am convinced that the answer to the third question — “Will we change?” — is also “Yes,” but that conclusion, unlike the answer to the first two questions, is in the nature of a prediction. And in order for that prediction to come true, there must be a continued strengthening of the global consensus embodied in the Paris Agreement of December 2015, in which virtually every nation on Earth agreed to take concerted action to reduce net greenhouse gas emissions to zero as early in the second half of this century as possible.