``You may have been seeing on the television news the effects of this heat wave on kids and old people and families and it's really been very hot,'' Gore told the group of children attending a science camp who gathered to hear him at the National Geographic building in Washington, D.C.
``Of course we had heat waves long before there was a threat of global warming. But because the atmosphere of the whole earth is warming up, it's more common now to have these very, very hot days,'' he said.
He could not resist a political dig at congressional Republicans and their $792 billion tax cut package at the end of the hour-long seminar.
``The Congress of the United States is voting now on whether or not we should have funding for these programmes that help ... to speed up the making of these new kinds of technologies and cars,'' Gore said, referring to the development of new, environmentally friendly vehicles.
``And they've been cutting that budget way back. I don't think most people in the country agree with that. They want to use all the big surplus we have for a big risky tax scheme. We think we ought to use some of it for these programmes that will help save the environment,'' he told his juvenile audience.
Helped by Bill Nye, who hosts a science programme on television aimed at children, Gore explained in some detail and with real enthusiasm the scientific causes of global warming, unveiled some new data on the melting of the Arctic ice cap and discussed the possible consequences.
Gore was been known as an avid environmentalist throughout 16 years in Congress. As vice president, he has been a champion of a global agreement to stem the production of greenhouse gases. In the 1992 presidential race, Republican President George Bush ridiculed him with the nickname ``Ozone Al.''
Though Gore leads his sole opponent for next year's Democratic Party presidential nomination, former Sen. Bill Bradley of New Jersey, his bid for the presidency has been dogged by a series of small gaffes and embarrassments.
Gore has trailed Republican presidential front-runner, Texas Gov. George W. Bush, by 15-20 points in polls all year. The vice president announced the declassification of 59 satellite images of the Arctic Ocean and unveiled findings gathered by a U.S.-Canadian-Japanese project to quantify the rate the Arctic ice camp was melting.
Preliminary findings showed the Arctic ice sheet was roughly 5 percent smaller and one yard (metre) thinner than in the 1970s. Gore explained to the children that ice reflected light back into space while water absorbed it as heat.
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