Al Gore joins Live Earth environment drive

NEW YORK: The global "Live Earth" music event to fight climate change has won the high-profile backing of US former vice president Al Gore, who announced he was joining its drive to slash harmful carbon emissions.   

He said he would be in New York to join the 24-hour event, which will span 109 countries with major concerts in cities including London and Tokyo. It is modelled on the 1985 "Live Aid" event that raised money for the starving.   

"Live Earth will ask people across the world to commit to changes in their lives and to move other people, communities, companies and governments to reduce our carbon output by 90 percent by 2050," Gore told reporters here on Thursday.   
The July 7 series of concerts will also aim to "ensure there is a new, global treaty on climate change by 2009," he said.   

"I am going to be at the concert here, and in one other location about which you will have to learn more information later," he told a news conference. He will be joined in New York by Madonna and other musicians. There will also be an event at a meteorological station in Antarctica, "where the climate change is more visible," Gore said.   

"There will be several more surprises between now and July 7," he said.  Emissions of greenhouse gases from human activity are widely agreed to be contributing to global warming, causing weather changes that threaten to hit the poorest people in the world hardest.   

A UN panel of the world's leading climate change experts warned earlier this year that Earth was already warming and predicted severe consequences including drought, flooding, violent storms and increased hunger and disease.   

Gore lost the race for the US presidency to George W. Bush in 2000. He has since thrown himself into environmental campaigning and appeared in an Oscar-winning 2006 documentary on the subject, "An Inconvenient Truth."   

"If we are going to solve the crisis, we have to commit, and we have to do it now," he said on Thursday.