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Dr. Steven Leibo, a
Sage Colleges professor who was trained by Al Gore to present
information about global warming, applauded the number of Albany High
School students who had seen the former vice president’s award-winning
film on the topic at a Tuesday morning assembly.
Then Dr. Leibo
proceeded to give the 500 students in attendance a live presentation of
An Inconvenient Truth, Gore’s documentary about the causes,
effects, and call-to-action surrounding climate change that recently
netted an Academy Award.
“Global warming has
already happened,” said Dr. Leibo, a professor of international history
and politics at The Sage Colleges. “You have the power to make it worse;
you have the power to make it better by changing what you do.”
Dr. Leibo’s multimedia
slideshow offered a compelling case that global warming has been caused
by human’s treatment of the earth, and that the damage can be scaled
back by human actions. He spent three days in Nashville, Tenn., in
January as part of a group of 200 people that Gore trained to give these
presentations around the country.
Essentially, Dr. Leibo
said, emissions caused by the use of energy sources such as petroleum,
gas and coal, have resulted in Earth’s atmosphere trapping a an
increasing amount of carbon dioxide, causing a variety of problems that
begin with increased temperatures on both land and sea.
Dr. Leibo stressed that
although global warming will affect different climates differently, it
will touch everyone’s lives increasingly more if it is not reversed. For
example, the insurance industry is affected by more powerful storms that
wipe out homes and buildings; more droughts could affect the food supply
worldwide; populations in certain areas are not prepared for the heat
waves that will follow a warming climate; and the economy is vulnerable
because commercial centers near the coast are at risk as ocean levels
rise.
Albany High School
teacher Cathy Vitas, who teaches living sciences and coordinated Dr.
Leibo’s visit, said she wanted students to understand the basic causes
and effects of climate change – and what they could do about it.
“The effects of global
warming will be more prevalent in their lifetime,” said Cathy Vitas, a
living science teacher at Albany High School who coordinated Dr. Leibo’s
visit.
Indeed, Dr. Leibo concluded on an optimistic note, leaving students with
a list of concrete steps they could take in the future to reduce global
warming. These included adjusting their thermostat, using energy
efficient lighting, planting trees and driving less.
“This is not written in
stone,” Dr. Leibo told the students. “It doesn’t have to happen. It has
started to happen. But, what happens depends on what you do.”
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