Vicky is one of the lucky ones.

She owns a pair of excellent tickets to An Inconvenient Truth, the climate-change slide show that unlikely pop icon Al Gore is to present tonight at the University of Toronto.

And, she says, she had every intention of going to the Convocation Hall event. Until, that is, she got an idea how much the tickets might be worth.

The hall holds about 1,500 people, and about 500 of those seats were reserved for invited guests. About 23,000 hopefuls vying for the rest swamped the university’s online ticket office when sales opened at 11 a.m. on Feb. 7. The site crashed, and the telephone order desk and onsite box office were also overwhelmed.

“I thought about the money and whether or not I was that committed to seeing Al Gore,” Vicky, who asked her last name not be used, said yesterday in an email. “I figured that since I even contemplated parting with the tickets that I might as well try selling them.”

Now, she hopes they’ll fetch as much as $200 each, 10 times their face value.

“An associate of mine had four tickets – one pair sold for $400 and the other for $500,” she said.

On the other side of the fence, buyers, one of whom describes himself as “desperate,” have posted offers to pay $100 to attend Gore’s two-hour show.

Whether the deals – illegal, because scalping is banned in Ontario – actually occur is beside the point.

They simply reveal how Gore’s popularity has soared in the past year, as the release of the movie version of his presentation coincided with growing concern about climate change.

“He’s definitely got the star power,” Ingrid Stefanovic, director of the U of T’s Centre for Environment, which is hosting tonight’s event, said in an interview.

Continue reading the full article at The Toronto Star.