This winter, New York had its largest snowfall in history on a Sunday, followed by a 60-degree day Thursday. A week later, I sat in the audience at the TED conference in Monterrey hearing Al Gore enumerate fact after fact that underscored the gravity of the changes in global weather.

The 1100 attendees — including many of the world’s leading technologists — listened raptly as Gore presented his nonpartisan and well-researched speech outlining the scientific evidence that there is a dire and unprecedented change in earth’s climate underway, seriously aggravated by human activity.

It’s a speech Gore has been giving regularly. But this could be the year when a national uproar finally causes the nation’s leaders to pay attention. A movie based on the speech comes out this summer. Meanwhile, Gore says that he is working with “all of the major environmental groups in the United States” on a new consortium that will enable them to band together on a “campaign of public persuasion” about global warming and its consequences.

The techies who were in attendance are on board. Says Google (Research) co-founder Sergey Brin, who has heard Gore give versions of the speech for several years: “The data coming in is just very compelling. The speech has consistently improved as the data has gotten worse. It’s remarkable just if you look at the rise in global surface temperatures.”

Bill Joy, longtime Sun Microsystems chief scientist turned venture capitalist, says his only complaint about the speech was that Gore left out some of the most powerful data — about how melting arctic tundra in Siberia is allowing vast quantities of methane to escape into the atmosphere. That adds to the concentration of atmospheric CO2 and further worsens the problem.

One after another I heard people say they found the talk convincing and compelling. Says Kim Polese, CEO of open-source software company SpikeSource: “I just don’t understand why it’s still a debatable topic. The evidence is just overwhelming.”

As I spoke to Polese, George Dyson walked up. He’s a historian of science and also son of famed physicist Freeman Dyson, who has argued that global warming does no harm. But even George was wowed. “I question some of the evidence, but Gore made a convincing case,” he said.

Gore’s speech enumerates well-documented scientific evidence that the global climate is changing significantly — and fast. Here are a few data points:

- Global CO2 levels are way outside what have been historical norms over several hundred thousand years.

- All ten of the hottest years on record, globally, have occurred in the last 15 years.

- Last summer, all-time heat records were set in both the U.S. West and East.

- Global ocean temperatures are far outside of historical norms.

- Even after last year’s devastating Hurricane Katrina, the subsequent Hurricane Wilma was briefly the most severe hurricane ever recorded.

- Last year Japan hit an all-time record for typhoons: 10. The previous record was 7.

- The largest downpour ever seen occurred last summer in India.

Thirty-five years ago there were an average of 225 days when Alaska’s tundra was frozen enough for trucks to drive. Today there are only 75.

Gore presented his data in elegant charts and graphs. The series of before-and-after photos of glaciers that have receded in recent decades — from Latin and North America, Asia, Europe, and Africa — was one of the most vivid and shocking moments in his talk.

Then there is what’s happening in Antarctica and Greenland — land masses topped with huge melting ice sheets. If these start falling in quantity into the sea — and Gore’s data suggests it’s quite possible — global ocean levels will rise appreciably. Vast coastal areas could be inundated — areas where 20 million live around Beijing, 60 million around Calcutta, and even large portions of Manhattan.

Gore claims that none of the peer-reviewed scientific articles published in recent decades have disputed that the earth’s temperature is rising, even as more than half of all articles in the US press over the same period have. We journalists, in the search for “balance,” may have contributed to a national complacency.

The movie based on Gore’s presentation, called The Inconvenient Truth, will be released in late May by Paramount Classics. I sat across the table briefly from Gore at a dinner after his talk, and he was effusing about what a great job the filmmakers have done.

The movie is more than just a record of the speech. “It’s Al Gore’s personal journey and how he got to this conclusion,” producer Lawrence Bender says.

Some will object to this movie for obvious political reasons, but it is likely to catalyze a national debate we desperately need. And the world needs to be awakened if his facts are right. Bender says religious and political leaders who have seen the film — including many supporters of the Bush administration — have been highly supportive.

My biggest complaint about Gore’s talk is that despite the overwhelming evidence he marshals of dire climate change, he ends with an upbeat promise that it’s not too late to do something about it. But there’s no question we have to face reality — we’re hurting ourselves by hurting the climate. Thank you, Al Gore, for saying it bluntly.

The Soviet team had captured the previous four Olympic hockey golds, going back to 1964, and had not lost an Olympic hockey game since 1968. Three days before the Lake Placid Games began, the Soviets routed the U.S. team 10-3 in an exhibition game at Madison Square Garden in New York City. The Americans looked scrappy, but few blamed them for it–their average age, after all, was only 22, and their team captain, Mike Eruzione, was recruited from the obscurity of the Toledo Blades of the International League.

Few had high hopes for the seventh-seeded U.S. team entering the Olympic tournament, but the team soon silenced its detractors, making it through the opening round of play undefeated, with four victories and one tie, thus advancing to the four-team medal round. The Soviets, however, were seeded No. 1 and as expected went undefeated, with five victories in the first round.

On Friday afternoon, February 22, the American amateurs and the Soviet dream team met before a sold-out crowd at Lake Placid. The Soviets broke through first, with its new young star, Valery Krotov, deflecting a slap shot beyond American goalie Jim Craig’s reach in the first period. Midway through the period, Buzz Schneider, the only American who had previously been an Olympian, answered the Soviet goal with a high shot over the shoulder of Vladislav Tretiak, the Soviet goalie.

The relentless Soviet attack continued as the period progressed, with Sergei Makarov giving his team a 2-1 lead. With just a few seconds left in the first period, American Ken Morrow shot the puck down the ice in desperation. Mark Johnson picked it up and sent it into the Soviet goal with one second remaining. After a brief Soviet protest, the goal was deemed good, and the game was tied.

In the second period, the irritated Soviets came out with a new goalie, Vladimir Myshkin, and turned up the attack. The Soviets dominated play in the second period, outshooting the United States 12-2, and taking a 3-2 lead with a goal by Alesandr Maltsev just over two minutes into the period. If not for several remarkable saves by Jim Craig, the Soviet lead would surely have been higher than 3-2 as the third and final 20-minute period began.

Nearly nine minutes into the period, Johnson took advantage of a Soviet penalty and knocked home a wild shot by David Silk to tie the contest again at 3-3. About a minute and a half later, Mike Eruzione, whose last name means “eruption” in Italian, picked up a loose puck in the Soviet zone and slammed it past Myshkin with a 25-foot wrist shot. For the first time in the game, the Americans had the lead, and the crowd erupted in celebration.

There were still 10 minutes of play to go, but the Americans held on, with Craig making a few more fabulous saves. With five seconds remaining, the Americans finally managed to get the puck out of their zone, and the crowd began counting down the final seconds. When the final horn sounded, the players, coaches, and team officials poured onto the ice in raucous celebration. The Soviet players, as awestruck as everyone else, waited patiently to shake their opponents’ hands.

The so-called Miracle on Ice was more than just an Olympic upset; to many Americans, it was an ideological victory in the Cold War as meaningful as the Berlin Airlift or the Apollo moon landing. The upset came at an auspicious time: President Jimmy Carter had just announced that the United States was going to boycott the 1980 Summer Games in Moscow because of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and Americans, faced with a major recession and the Iran hostage crisis, were in dire need of something to celebrate. After the game, President Carter called the players to congratulate them, and millions of Americans spent that Friday night in revelry over the triumph of “our boys” over the Russian pros.

As the U.S. team demonstrated in their victory over Finland two days later, it was disparaging to call the U.S. team amateurs. Three-quarters of the squad were top college players who were on their way to the National Hockey League (NHL), and coach Herb Brooks had trained the team long and hard in a manner that would have made the most authoritative Soviet coach proud. The 1980 U.S. hockey team was probably the best-conditioned American Olympic hockey team of all time–the result of countless hours running skating exercises in preparation for Lake Placid. In their play, the U.S. players adopted passing techniques developed by the Soviets for the larger international hockey rinks, while preserving the rough checking style that was known to throw the Soviets off-guard. It was these factors, combined with an exceptional afternoon of play by Craig, Johnson, Eruzione, and others, that resulted in the miracle at Lake Placid.

This improbable victory was later memorialized in a 2004 film, Miracle, starring Kurt Russell.”