"I remember, again going back to my early years in the South, when the Civil Rights revolution was unfolding, there were two things that really made an impression on me," Gore said. "My generation watched Bull Connor turning the hose on civil rights demonstrators and we went, 'Whoa! How gross and evil is that?' My generation asked old people, 'Explain to me again why it is okay to discriminate against people because their skin color is different?' And when they couldn't really answer that question with integrity, the change really started."

The former vice president recalled how society succeeded in marginalizing racists and said climate change skeptics must be defeated in the same manner.

"Secondly, back to this phrase 'win the conversation,'" he continued. "There came a time when friends or people you work with or people you were in clubs with - you're much younger than me so you didn't have to go through this personally - but there came a time when racist comments would come up in the course of the conversation and in years past they were just natural. Then there came a time when people would say, 'Hey, man why do you talk that way, I mean that is wrong. I don't go for that so don't talk that way around me. I just don't believe that.' That happened in millions of conversations and slowly the conversation was won."