From our Storm Digest Blog:
How odd that the first news article I should see after taking in an afternoon matinee of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth is that London experienced its highest temperature of record for a July day since 1911 - 97 F. The all time record of 101 F set in August 2003 still stands, but that’s not much relief to London Underground passengers having to deal with 116 F temperatures and 125 F recorded on London’s city buses. The heat wave the US has been experiencing this week is mirrored in Europe, where French scientific researchers are attributing the climate change to global warming. The topic of global warming, the subject of Gore’s book and movie, appears to be dead center this week.
Since we live pretty far from a theater showing this documentary, the opportunity afforded us the ability to take off work on a sultry summer afternoon and spend it in an air-conditioned and almost-vacant movie theater with popcorn, soda and hotdogs for lunch. I hadn’t read Gore’s book, but have a fiance who was convinced we couldn’t miss this movie. It turned out he was right. I’ve never been a fan of Al Gore, but in the documentary he is personable, funny, touching and above everything else, committed that what he is presenting. He believes that this is the moral and ethical thing for him to do and for us to consider; for that alone, I respect him. His motivation, from the beginning to the end, starts with a Harvard course he took with Professor Roger Revelle, who co-authored a paper in 1957 with another scientist about greenhouse effects causing global warming over time - the only such paper of it’s time that linked greenhouse emissions and increased cardon dioxide in the atmosphere to mankind’s burning of fossil fuels.
Gore clearly articulates scientific data and analysis to support climate changes as indicators of global warming to a non-technically focused audience in layman’s terms and anyone who presents technical data should take this film as a object lesson in how to do so effectively and successfully. He unabashedly lends the full weight of his persona and passion towards telling you the story of how we came to be experiencing the increasing instability of our weather, including the intensity of damaging hurricanes, tornadoes, droughts, heat waves and thunderstorms not just in the US, but all over the globe. Gore intersperses this with his own life experiences, including his son’s accident at age 6, his life growing up in Tennessee and his defeat as a Presidential candidate. Then you get taken to places like Antarctica, where the Larsen B Ice Shelf (as large as Rhode Island) collapsed and broke up in a 35 day period in 2002. Gore shows how glaciers and ice shelves worldwide have diminished over time, especially focusing on Greenland where glaciers are melting twice as fast as they were 5 years ago. He shows you models and predictions of what would happen to some of the shorelines of the most populated places in the world if only Greenland’s glaciers were to melt completely away - a displacement of millions of people. Gore explains the world’s ocean currents and their cooling/heating effect on the Earth and again shows you models of how they could change in the not-so-distant future. He also presents a dismal view of American automakers - sorry Ford, GM and all, but looks like the Chinese and Japanese are 5 or more years ahead of you and have your asses stomped when it comes to fuel economy and alternatives as well as emissions. (Note to Ford Motor Company: *Don’t* play those CEO commercials about how you were the "first" American automaker to produce a hybrid, when the efficiency of that hybrid, well, sucks in comparison to your overseas competition. We knew that before we went to see this movie - it just made it more appallingly obvious.)
The first question co-workers asked us when we went back to work to pick up our laptops (do NOT leave laptops in your car unless you wish for them to be stolen) was "will you be recycling now?"and "will you eat vegan?" What’s weird is the people who asked us this weren’t even in the same room at the time, so the general impression is you’re about to become an eco-warrior after seeing the film, and that really isn’t so. I went into the theater thinking that I understood what global warming meant - I came out understanding better what it is, what it’s believed to be caused by, and what I could do about it. I also unexpectedly came out with a tremendous amount of admiration for Al Gore.
So you see, whether global warming is caused by human factors or not, it can’t hurt to be more conscious of our affects on our environment - if the film’s message is true, the damage that could be done by not doing anything is not one that can be undone readily.
Technorati Tags: Books, Al Gore, An Inconvenient Truth, Kyoto Protocol, Global Warming, Glaciers, Heat waves, Tornadoes, Hurricanes, Tropical Storm, Ford, GM, Hybrid, London, Britian, Al Gore
