Al Gore warns: UN climate change report shows ‘we have a global emergency’

Former Vice President Al Gore said Friday that the United Nations’ new report on climate change demonstrates that the world is experiencing a “global emergency.”

“We have a global emergency,” Gore said in an interview on PBS NewsHour. “You use a phrase like that and some people immediately say, ‘okay calm down, it can’t be that bad.’ But it it is.”

{mosads}”What the scientists have warned us in this recent report is that if we do not take action quickly … then consequences down the road would be far, far worse than what we’re experiencing now,” Gore added, stating that climate change could become an existential threat to civilization based on the report’s findings. 

His comments came days after the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a report that included a range of dire warnings about the globe’s warming climate. 

The report noted that climate change could have catastrophic consequences in the coming decades if greenhouse gas emissions aren’t cut drastically by 2030.

Gore, who has long been a champion of environmental causes, said the report’s authors “torqued up” their warnings in an effort to get the attention of lawmakers. 

But President Trump appeared to show some skepticism about the report’s authors when asked about its findings this week. 

“It was given to me and I want to look at who drew it, which group drew it,” Trump told reporters at the White House on Tuesday. “Because I can give you reports that are fabulous and I can give you reports that aren’t so good.”

Gore, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 for his work on climate-related causes, ripped Trump over the comment, saying his approach to climate change is “literally insane” and that his reaction to the report is an “outlier.”

“It’s making the U.S. coming off like a rogue nation,” Gore said, before adding that the “large carbon polluters” are Trump’s buddies. 

Trump’s administration has weakened several Obama-era policies designed to cut back on emissions during his presidency. Last year, Trump pulled the U.S. out of the Paris Climate accord, an agreement reached by 195 countries to curb global greenhouse gas emissions through individual, nonbinding national plans.