Gore on the Globe

Today's high carbon-dioxide levels dwarf those present in the atmosphere when Al Gore was at the College. Photograph by Jon Chase

One question Jiang Zemin never heard was posed the night before by Vice President Al Gore '69, LL.D. '94, in town to inaugurate the new Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs (CSIA) at the Kennedy School of Government. Asked by a College senior what question he would ask Jiang Zemin if he were still a Harvard undergraduate, Gore paused 15 seconds, then said: "When you were a student during the Japanese occupation of Shanghai, you felt that your freedom of communication was suppressed [and that] you were not free to say what was really on your mind. Can you draw upon that personal experience to understand the feelings of students exactly that age today, in China, who may disagree with this policy or that pursued by the current government, and [who] feel that they don't have the freedom to say what is on their minds?" This response from Gore drew tremendous applause from the Arco Forum audience.

Gore's speech kicked off a two-day symposium on international security issues sponsored by the CSIA. (The Belfer Center was founded in 1973 to study U.S.-Soviet relations during the Cold War. Now renamed and headed by former Kennedy School dean Graham Allison '62, Ph.D. '68, the center is refocusing its mission for a post-Cold War world.) Gore spoke about global warming, with particular emphasis on the poorly understood relationship between global temperature and carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere--which have skyrocketed in the past few years. Gore chastised those who think "it's probably OK" to keep pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere simply because temperature changes don't yet reflect today's high CO₂ levels. "I think it is probably crazy to do it," he said.