...is that he told a story. Ever seen An Inconvenient Truth? A lot of the movie is him sharing personal details about his own life, about growing up on a farm, about the values instilled in him from a very young age. This has nothing to do with global warming, so why include it? It's powerful.

People can argue back and forth until they're blue in the face about whether or not the facts he presented in his documentary are right or wrong, but ultimately, Al (I can call you "Al", can't I?) won a Nobel Peace prize because of the story that he told. And, whether you love him or hate him, he did manage to change the world.

It turns out that culture is an excellent conductor of stories. Stories resonate. Facts, on the other hand, are like files on our computers: we put them into a directory somewhere on our hard drive, and then when we need them, we have to go searching for them, and unless we remember where we put them, in that massive directory structure we created in our E:/ drive, and what the bloody hell we named the file, we won't find it.

What you need to be, if you want to change things, is a narrator. There's an interesting book called Tell Me A Story, in which the author argues convincingly that one limitation of artificial intelligence is that it will probably never be able to compose stories. Computers can remember all the facts in the world, but Moore's Law will probably never grant them the ability to compose the kind of fable that Aesop could.

Culture is an excellent conductor of stories; turns out that culture in the age of the Internet is a superconductor, on crack.