A record number of attendees are expected at this year's SF Climate Week conference, which kicks off in just over a week, and Al Gore is booked to speak at one of the opening events.

Former Vice President Al Gore, who after a stinging defeat in the presidential race in 2000 went on to make the widely seen climate-warning documentary An Inconvenient Truth in 2003, will be giving the keynote address at the SF Climate Week opening ceremony on April 21. The event and the conference are being organized by local nonprofit Climatebase, and they tell the Chronicle they're expecting a record number of attendees this year, around 25,000.

That's up from around 18,500 in 2024, and 7,000 in 2023.

The first scheduled events are on April 18, and the conference, which focuses on solutions to climate change, goes on through April 27 at multiple locations. The opening ceremony, per the Chronicle, will be held at the Exploratorium.

"With Trump back in the office and everything he’s done in — it feels like a lifetime already, but it’s only been a couple months — the backlash taking form as people taking action at SF Climate Week is no surprise to me," says Climatebase co-founder Evan Hynes, speaking to the Chronicle.

Regarding the booking of Gore, Hynes said in a statement, "Few figures in the environmental movement command the global recognition and respect" as him, and "His keynote underscores SF Climate Week’s role as a catalyst for collective action, bold ideas, and community-building at a time when the world feels divided, distracted, and overwhelmed."

Will Gore basically just come out and say, "Toldya"?

Likely no, and the conference organizers say they hope that attendees leave feeling "energized" about ways to address climate change in the present day.

Gore kicked off a world tour two weeks ago in Paris of his 19-year-old organization the Climate Reality Project. He told the New York Times last week that he doesn't think Trump will succeed in doing the utmost damage that he hopes to to clean energy initiatives and the like. "I think we’re more resilient as a constitutional, representative democracy than a lot of people of fear," Gore said.

Gore also told the paper that he expects to see similar things occur in the US as did during Trump's first term, namely that overall emissions in the US fell, solar capacity more than doubled, and coal use actually went down, despite all of Trump's rhetoric.

"Has he slowed some things down? For sure," Gore said. "But will this [process of climate action] continue? Of course. It’s inevitable."

Nevertheless, Gore is hedging his bets and taking some of his climate activism abroad, where it may do more good in the next couple of years.

Top image: Vice President Al Gore speaks onstage during Big Bets for Climate Action at Rockefeller Foundation on May 30, 2024 in New York City. (Photo by Mike Coppola/Getty Images for CNN International)