Students say training session was ‘really valuable’
About 30 Albertans — including high school students university students business people and activists — recently returned from Montreal where they were trained by former U.S. vice-president Al Gore to give presentations based on his Inconvenient Truth slideshow.
“It was really valuable” says Tara Moran a U of C PhD student who attended the Montreal conference in early April. “He basically took the day and went through the slide show and talked about each slide…. It gave us a chance to see the linkages that he was making and have an opportunity to discuss the science.” About 220 Canadians were at the conference including author and environmentalist David Suzuki.
Moran is studying climate change for her PhD as is her U of C colleague Kate Sinclair who also attended the conference. “There were really good discussions on policy issues surrounding the Kyoto protocol — the ways that governments can legislate to try and reduce greenhouse gas emissions” says Sinclair.
Having completed Gore’s boot camp both Sinclair and Moran will use parts of his slideshow to give presentations on climate change to clubs schools and other groups. “Media isn’t really doing a great job to be honest of giving people the true facts” says Moran. “And so I think there’s a really big push to seek out people with a stronger science background and get them to disseminate more information.”
