We don’t have time for despair. The only way we can rise to these challenges is by looking at them squarely.

teaching journalism presidential election.

He is still a big, broad man. But the beard went quickly, and in single-breasted navy suit, white shirt and tie, with a good all-silver haircut, he still has the charisma of a political leader. Except, he says, he is a ‘‘recovering politician’’, and the longer he stays away, the less likely it is he feels he will succumb to the temptation again.

Gore points out a picture from the Hubble telescope that fills one wall behind him, a vista of infinite blurred amber and diamond sources of light. ‘‘It just goes on and on, further than our human imagination.’’

Does it inspire him when the challenges he lays out seem too much? ‘‘Well, it gives one a sense of perspective,’’ he says. ‘‘We are part of an enormous whole.’’

That sense of perspective has been necessary in his life. Things could have been so different for Gore, who won a popular majority by more than 543,000 votes when he ran for president against George W Bush.

In a politically divided America, scarred by a

after defeat

in the

2000 decade of war, many people who voted for Gore still cannot accept that Bush actually won the 2000 election after the Supreme Court ruled to stop recounting votes in Florida one month after polling. Thirteen years later, it is as if the energy is sucked out of the room when we turn to the subject. Gore’s voice slows and drops in pitch, the excitement of talking about his mission replaced by painful regret.

How often do people come up and say: ‘‘Why did you not hold fast?’’

‘‘Whenever I hear something like that, I remind them that in our system there is no intermediate step between a final Supreme Court decision on a matter of constitutional law, and violent revolution.

‘‘And were there an intermediate step,’’ he says, ‘‘I would have taken it.’’

Gore conceded the election, and Bush entered the White House as the first leader for 112 years to have lost the popular vote. ‘‘I fought to the maximum extent that our constitution allows. I said that a well-informed citizenry is the bedrock of our system. Actually, there is a layer of bedrock underneath that one, and it is the rule of law.’’

Gore writes of the pressing need to restore American leadership internationally, after what he regards as the catastrophic economic, political and military mistakes of the early 21st century. If ever there was a fork in the road for the US, it was with that decision of the Supreme Court.

‘‘My duty, as I saw it, was to accept the rule of law and move forward to whatever healing and restoration of national cohesion we could find,’’ he says. ‘‘I was surprised in the years that followed at many of the decisions that were made, as many people were, and the polarisation that resulted.’’

He says he was astonished at the Bush administration’s willingness to deceive the public with false information about WMD (weapons of mass destruction). ‘‘When a good nation makes crucially important decisions on the basis of patently false information, it leads to trouble, always.

‘‘And we have made a number of such decisions – look at the sub-prime mortgage catastrophe,’’ he says, branding the banks idiotic.

He is disdainful in his book of the ‘‘dangerous vacuum of global leadership’’, writ large in the US, where he sees hidden corporate money controlling politics. Gore has criticised President Barack Obama for a lack of leadership on climate change, but at the start of the second term he can see many positives – starting with a rallying cry on the environment in January’s inauguration speech. After a year of drought ended with the catastrophe of Superstorm Sandy, the US public sees a tipping point too, he believes.

‘‘Who is the British author who said, ‘The prospect of hanging concentrates the mind’?’’ he asks. Google gets us to Samuel Johnson. ‘‘I thought that’s who it was. Samuel Johnson, Winston Churchill, Yogi Bear. You’re safe with any of those,’’ he smiles. ‘ The Jokes of Al Gore’ may not prove to be his thickest volume, but he does have his lighter moments, and his rich Southern vowels alone are worth making a journey for. Economic recovery may not be bringing ‘‘jaarbs’’, but difficult concepts never sounded so appealing.

We meet on the morning after President Obama had dinner with a dozen Republican senators — the sign of a new approach, Gore says. ‘‘Perhaps more significantly, you saw the new approach he took to the debt limit issue at the beginning of this year – in sharp contrast to 18 months ago – where he said, ‘No, you cannot put a gun to the country’s head, I’ll not have it.’ That’s a new approach that is evidence of much greater sophistication in his leadership style and his command of the powers of the presidency.’’

So with his own political aspirations in the past, who is Al Gore now, and what is his purpose? Seven minutes and 47 seconds later, he finishes answering that question, by way of Hiroshima, the tyranny of GDP as a measure of success, England’s floods and droughts, the depletion of topsoil and the global democratic emergency. But he started here: ‘‘My purpose in life is to catalyse to the best of my ability a global response to the climate crisis.’’

In a second attempt, he bills himself as a citizen, a businessman and an activist, and relies upon a folksy metaphor of finding a message in a bottle. ‘‘What obligation would you feel to someone you didn’t know, either the sender or the intended receiver of the message?

‘‘You would feel, because chance had put you in that convergence of time and space, you would feel an obligation that stems from what? From your humanity. You would feel an obligation to deliver that message, and that’s really the simplest way I can describe who I am and what I’m trying to do.’’

He’s going to need a bigger bottle.