Al Gore To Give Commencement Address

January 23, 2019

The keynote address at this year’s Columbia Mailman School Commencement ceremony on May 21 will be given by Former Vice President Al Gore, Jr.  

Vice President Gore is a leading, prescient voice on climate change. As early as 1992, he drew public attention to global warming with his best-selling book “Earth in the Balance: Forging a New Common Purpose.” In 2007, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, for his career-long dedication and groundbreaking work to raise public awareness of climate change. He founded and is currently chairman of, The Climate Reality Project, a nonprofit devoted to solving the climate crisis. He served multiple terms in the U.S. House of Representatives and U.S. Senate prior to being elected as U.S. Vice President in 1992, a position he held for eight years. He is the subject of the documentary movie “An Inconvenient Truth,” which won two Oscars in 2006, and a second documentary in 2017, “An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power.” Several of his books are #1 New York Times best-sellers and detail the increasing likelihood of an environmental planetary disaster due to climate change.

“We have long been inspired by Vice President Gore’s unwavering commitment to increasing the public discourse and understanding of climate change and the stakes involved,” said Dean Linda P. Fried. “As a School, we have responded to this challenge in several ways, including the 2010 launch of our Climate and Health Program—the first such program in a school of public health. More recently, the Mailman School led in the creation of the Global Consortium on Climate and Health Education whose mandate is to create a global community of all health professions schools to educate on the health impacts of climate change and means to mitigate these impacts, and share best scientific and curricula practices worldwide.”