Yes - all those bad things are now frowned upon where once they were tolerated - sort of. Gore believes that the "conversation" about global warming is heading in a similar direction.

In an interview with WaPo's Ezra Klein, the foremost authority in the world on...whatever, compares "deniers" with some pretty rancid people:

EK: Give me the optimistic scenario on what happens next. If all goes well, what do the next few years look like on this issue?

AG: Well, I think the most important part of it is winning the conversation. I remember as a boy when the conversation on civil rights was won in the South. I remember a time when one of my friends made a racist joke and another said, hey man, we don't go for that anymore. The same thing happened on apartheid. The same thing happened on the nuclear arms race with the freeze movement. The same thing happened in an earlier era with abolition. A few months ago, I saw an article about two gay men standing in line for pizza and some homophobe made an ugly comment about them holding hands and everyone else in line told them to shut up. We're winning that conversation.

The conversation on global warming has been stalled because a shrinking group of denialists fly into a rage when it's mentioned. It's like a family with an alcoholic father who flies into a rage every time a subject is mentioned and so everybody avoids the elephant in the room to keep the peace. But the political climate is changing. Something like Chris Hayes's excellent documentary on climate change wouldn't have made it on TV a few years ago. And as I said, many Republicans who're still timid on the issue are now openly embarrassed about the extreme deniers. The deniers are being hit politically. They're being subjected to ridicule, which stings. The polling is going back up in favor of doing something on this issue. The ability of the raging deniers to stop progress is waning every single day.

When that conversation is won, you'll see more measures at the local and state level and less resistance to what the EPA is doing. And slowly it will become popular to propose steps that go further and politicians that take the bit in their teeth get rewarded.

A skeptic is more likely to receive cheers than boos by challenging orthodoxy. And Gore fails to mention in the interview that US emissions of CO2 have dropped to levels not seen since 1996 -- without any of his carbon get rich quick schemes or silly government pronouncements about CO2 being poisonous.

We are racing to convert to natural gas - an outgrowth of a shale oil boom that will see the US become the number one energy producer in the world by 2020. To ignore this development and pretend that the world is in dire shape and only AL Gore can save it is typical of global warming fanatics.

The world is changing and Al Gore is stuck in the last century.