And this year it feels to me that the Environmental issues the planet is facing are hard to ignore.

Certainly Al Gore's talk was among the most powerful, disturbing, and relentless i've ever heard or seen. Gore seemed to set the goal of making sure that no one left the hall able to say that Global Warming isn't an immediate, urgent, desperate concern.

In typical Al style, the presentation was deeply academic - but he seems to have learned (maybe from his work with Current) that pictures and stories have an extraordinary impact.

So Gore set out to show Global Warming as both a scientific and a visceral reality. You could feel the room. First there was alot of shaking heads in agreement. Hmmm... yes, Al. It's bad. But then... as he told personal stories of his journey under the polar ice cap, or showed slide after slide of what used to be frozen and snow covered landscapes that are now turning green, you could feel the room shift uncomfortably in their seats. Ok, we get it. It's bad. Can we go on to talk about Nano Tech or even bird flu... please. But no. Al had the stage, and he had a room full of important intelcts, and he wasn't going to let up. More slides. More pictures. More images from Nasa. More - more - more. It was a remarkable, passionate, disturbing talk.

Gore didn't offer any pat answers or top down solutions... which was brilliant. He created a vivid picture of a planet in trouble, and suggested that scientists have told him that we have 10 years to turn things around before we cross the line of no return.

I arrived at TED thinking about Global Warming as a problem that might be immediate, but that the weather catastrophes in the past year may have been cyclical. After Al's talk it's clear that the weather events of the past year are not anomalies - they are a canary in a coal mine. And Gore convinced me of that.