What Al Gore may have been (incorrectly) referring to was a study of temperature variation during the grounding after 9/11. What was found was that variation between high and low temperatures increased, since contrails moderate these fluctuations (much like any other water/ice clouds would). The study was based on temperature information gathered by the National Weather Service.
http://archives.cnn.com/2002/TECH/science/08/07/contrails.climate/index.html
http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20020511/fob1.asp
Here's a transcript of an interview of one of the scientists on the PBS science show NOVA.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/transcripts/3310_sun.html
NARRATOR: But the problem Travis faced was to establish exactly how big an effect the contrails were actually having. The only way to do that was to find a period of time when conditions were right for contrails to form, but there were no flights. And, of course, that never happened—until September, 2001. Then, for three days after the 11th, virtually all commercial aircraft were grounded, so Travis set about gathering temperatures from all over the U.S.A., and comparing them to records from the last 30 years.
DAVID TRAVIS: ...initially, data from over 5,000 weather stations across the 48 United States, the area that was most dominantly affected by the grounding.
NARRATOR: Travis was not looking just at temperature, which varies a lot from day to day. Instead he focused on something that normally changes quite slowly: the temperature range, the difference between the highest temperature during the day and the lowest at night. Had this changed at all during the three days of the grounding?
DAVID TRAVIS: As we began to look at the climate data and the evidence began to grow, I got more and more excited. The actual results were much larger than I expected.
So here we see, for the three-day period preceding September 11th, a slightly negative value of temperature range with lots of contrails, as normal. Then we have this sudden spike right here of the three-day period. This reflects lack of clouds, lack of contrails, warmer days cooler nights, exactly what we expected, but even larger than we expected.
NARRATOR: During the three-day grounding, the nights had gotten colder and the days, warmer. Averaged over the whole continental U.S., the temperature difference between day and night had suddenly increased by over a degree Celsius or two degrees Fahrenheit. Travis had never seen anything like it before.
DAVID TRAVIS: This was the largest temperature swing of this magnitude in the last 30 years.