Gore: Too Little, Too Late

In an extraordinary outburst aimed at America’s failure to tackle global warming, Al Gore says that if scientific agreement on the climate crisis had been reached sooner it would have been easier to “galvanise the public and persuade Congress to act”.

“The nature and severity of the climate crisis had seemed painfully obvious to me for quite a long time,” claims Mr Gore, writing in a new foreword to a revised edition of his book, Earth in the Balance, being published this week.

In a swipe at the scientific community, he says: “I wish that we could have had in the 1990s the deafening scientific consensus that has emerged in more recent years.”

Mr Gore accuses his nemesis, President George Bush, of having taken “virtually no steps to address the problem. Worse, he and Vice President Cheney have led the nation in precisely the wrong direction.”