I don’t know about you, but I get an icky feeling all over when I see the Rev. Al Sharpton sitting next to Pat Robertson (or was that Pat Buchanan? I could only bear to keep one eye open!) for any reason at all, let alone so cozily coupled on a couch on Virginia Beach in an ad that nearly leapt out of the pages of my New Yorker magazine. I had to check it out. And this is what I learned.

The unlikely alliance and the irresistible ad are part of the We Campaign, a project of The Alliance for Climate Protection — a nonprofit, nonpartisan effort founded by Nobel laureate and former Vice President Al Gore. To achieve the ultimate aim of halting global warming, the We Campaign is educating people in the US and around the world that the climate crisis is both urgent and solvable.

So far, more than 1,300,000 people have logged on to www.wecansolveit.org to add their names to the cause of seeking solutions to the climate change dilemma. And the unlikely pairing? Well it’s just one of several visual ideas in the works to coax all of us to put aside our differences to focus on a global crisis. Best of all, you can nominate the next unlikely alliance to be featured in future ads. I’m thinking maybe Mike Tyson and Madeleine Albright.