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Frankly, I’ve put off writing up this movie because I wasn’t sure how to say what I feel. Regardless of party affiliation or attitude towards Al Gore, this is very watchable and a film you must see. Assuming you care in the least about the world we–or perhaps more importantly, your children and their children will–live in. I’m not saying its perfect or that the science cannot be challenged.
I am saying that we essentially face a real world variation of Pascal’s Wager. If the science is wrong, in whole or in degree, or if other developments make the problem irrelevant, then there’s little lost in acting as if we are in a climate crisis; if the argument made in Truth is correct, then we either start making real changes or sentence generations yet to come to a horrific future.
Frankly, if the science in An Inconvenient Truth is correct, some environmental changes may come within a decade that will make our present horrific. Two high probability events, significant ice cap melts in Antarctica and Greenland, could kill millions of people living in coastal areas on all continents and make tens of millions more refugees; you can write off big chunks of San Francisco, New Orleans, Miami, Manhattan, Naples, Venice, Amsterdam, Hong Kong, coastal India, Japan, the Phillipines, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Singapore, most of the Caribbean, Caracas and Rio de Janeiro. Plus oil export port facilities throughout the Middle East.
That’s just the most direct, near term effect from one pair of high probability events. Gore lays out much more dire consequences if we maintain the status quo and frankly the research he presents seems very solid to me. Look at the temperatures for the last month or so, 2006 is already shaping up as the hottest year since we began keeping records!
Solutions are available and, Gore asserts, will have positive near-term economic benefits. That is, despite the negative progaganda of the corporate interests fighting them, changing our products and consumption habits in ways that greatly decrease human environmental impact will increase employment and gross global economic activity. Just not for the huge oil and gas companies, which is where almost all the funding for opposition to the changes comes from!
Some related linkage:
- Climate Crisis, official movie site
- “Key” to An Inconvenient Truth: Apple article on how Gore and Co used Keynote to compose the movie
- Harvard University Press Publicity Blog: Spencer Weart on “An Inconvenient Truth”
- The Discovery of Global Warming, a deep site by Weart
- BBC News: A load of hot air?, Q&A on Climate Change
- Matt Haughey on Vinod Khosla on Biofuels at Google
absolutely recommended
