I'm posting this a few weeks after it was published but, in case you haven't see it yet, make sure you take a look at the speech Al Gore gave at a TED conference in March:
In Al Gore's brand-new slideshow (premiering exclusively on TED.com), he presents evidence that the pace of climate change may be even worse than scientists were recently predicting, and challenges us to act with a sense of "generational mission" -- the kind of feeling that brought forth the civil rights movement -- to set it right. Gore's stirring presentation is followed by a brief Q&A in which he is asked for his verdict on the current political candidates' climate policies and on what role he himself might play in future.
Having just taken a course on sustainable development I know what Gore is talking about -- i.e. about how things are worse than we thought they'd be -- and it's getting scarier as time goes by but not much seems to be happening at the global level to fix this problem.
Which is the point of the presentation: unless we collectively raise a ruckus about this issue, not much is going to happen. The speech is American-centric, of course, but is nonetheless very inspiring.