Al Gore gave a talk at the recent TED Conference. It’s an updated and abbreviated version of his climate change slide show, with both alarming new data on the increasing speed of climate change and some heartening information on the growing public awareness that we need to act and soon.

What it doesn’t include is some fairly new information strongly suggesting that things are even worse that we thought a few months ago. As it happens, considerable particulate matter is expelled into the atmosphere along with CO₂. Those particles, by themselves and in droplets of moisture that condense around them, reflect sunlight and keep it from reaching the planet’s surface in an effect called “Global Dimming.” This phenomenon masks the true warming force of gaseous emissions, and has resulted in an underestimation by 30% to 50%.

What is worse is that efforts to reduce fossil fuel burning will cause a more rapid reduction in circulating particulates, which have a half-life measured in months, than in atmospheric CO₂ which will persist for decades. The result will be to accelerate the rate of increase in global temperature, by as much as a doubling. We will need to be very careful in what we do, or we may make things even worse that doing nothing at all.

While we’re trying to get it right, there should be some sort of organized effort to spread the economic boom that will flow from the coming Green Revolution. Community organizer Van Jones decided to do something to make sure that would happen, and help deal with the chronic inner-city unemployment problem at the same time. He’s the founder of Oakland (CA) Green Job Corps, which he’s taken nation-wide through the Green For All campaign.

Jones got the attention of Nancy Pelosi, who inserted a $125 million provision in the 2007 Energy Bill for green-collar jobs training. Edwards, Clinton and Obama are all on the Green for All bandwagon, although the sums promised are far too small. On the other hand, if something like this can get started in an urban environment as harsh as Oakland’s, maybe the “from tiny acorns” aphorism has some validity.

Here’s Gore; remember, this is the unreasonably optimistic view: