Gore climate change protégé lectures at Atwater Library

Désiré McGraw, who was recruited by Gore to be among the 1,000 people trained to deliver his climate-change message, made a presentation of his award-winning lecture on global warming at the Atwater Library last Tuesday.

McGraw, a West Island resident, became involved with environment and government policy issues early in her life. At age 16, she was featured in a documentary for the cross-country trip she made with classmates to give presentations on the subject of nuclear war. Three years later, she served as a youth adviser to the Canadian delegation to a United Nations special session on nuclear disarmament.

She first became involved with the environment when serving on the Canadian delegation to the Earth Summit in Brazil in 1992. She has also recently served as head of the Liberal Renewal Task Force on Environment and Sustainable development, where she developed a report last fall that has greatly influenced the party’s current environmental policy.

McGraw is one of 20 Canadians who have been trained to deliver the former US vice-president’s slide show. In the last six months, Gore has run what is called a ‘climate-change boot camp,’ where each participant has gone back to their homes with a copy of the slide show and a charge to present it at least ten times over the next year.

The training took place in Nashville, and lasted for a week. As a Canadian presenter of the slide show, McGraw has put a personal spin on the presentation, providing the material in French as well as including slides about local phenomena that she associates with climate change, such as the break-up of ice on Ellesmere Island and its effects on the polar bears in Canada’s Arctic.

Her adaptation of 'An Inconvenient Truth' began by attacking the ‘false notion of earth as an infinite resource.’ Attendees were surprised at her chronological pictures of glaciers in Switzerland and Canada, all of which could be observed to have significantly diminished in size. McGraw also spoke about how climate change data is gathered, asserting that the consensus on the reality of global warming is at an all time high.

“Of all of the [over 930] scientific reports that have been done to prove or disprove the reality of climate change, none have strayed from the consensus that it is happening,” said McGraw. “There is almost as much agreement by scientists on the validity this theory as there is on the theory of gravity.”

McGraw gave other evidence of global warming’s effect on climate change, citing examples such as the increase in the strength and number of Atlantic hurricanes, and she pointed out that more evidence can be observed in the dissolving of ice shelves in the Antarctic.

“Gore mentions that both the Arctic and the Antarctic are our canaries in the coal mine, warning us about global warming,” she said. “In the span of 32 days, an ice shelf the size of Rhode Island was dissolved completely into the ocean, an event that had alarmed scientists who predicted this would only happen over the span of four years or more.”

McGraw closed the presentation by giving her own opinion on the solutions to the climate change issue, offering that both governments and the people need to alter both their way of life and their way of thinking. She defined this by saying that consumption rates in developed countries must be lowered and food and water demands must be properly managed in poorer countries.

A bit of controversy followed the end of her presentation when one member of the audience began questioning McGraw over her mentor Gore’s policies when he served as vice-president, and another questioned how Gore’s vision of using food as gasoline was going to affect countries in which ‘families eat only once a day.’

McGraw, refusing to speak on Gore’s policies when he was the vice-president, closed the presentation by saying that she is currently making efforts to have Gore come to Montreal to instruct more Canadians about the climate issue.