An Inconvenient Truth
With a rare day to myself, I went for a run, did some errands, and then headed off to Tinseltown to catch the 12:30 viewing of "An Inconvenient Truth". My friend David MacLachlan blogged about this documentary a few months ago after being smart enough to have been hired by Google and therefore fortunate to have attended a talk by Al Gore given to Google employees back in April. The film is subtitled "A Global Warning" and deals with the climate crisis.
Gore's arguments are ironclad; the imagery in his presentation is striking. It's one thing to hear about glaciers vanishing, it's another to see before/after images of Alaskan, European and African mountain ranges taken 25 years apart. The photos of the collapse of the Larsen B ice shelf are terrifying, especially so when coupled with the explanation of how it happened, and the information about other ice masses that are also headed in the same direction.
Although skeptical about many things, I've never really been a skeptic about Global Warming -- the science behind it has always seemed tremendously sound -- and so the information presented in this film is not really new to me. What I did get from the film was a sense of the terrible urgency about the issue. Timeframes for dramatic, perhaps even catastrophic effects are in the 20-50 year range. Well within my lifetime and certainly within my daughter's. There are good arguments that we're already seeing catastrophic effects if we consider that last season's hurricanes are caused by warmer sea water, and that the drought in sub-Saharan Africa is one cause of the human tragedy in Darfur.
Please go see this film and visit climatecrisis.net for more information. It will make you feel like you should probably do something.
Gore's arguments are ironclad; the imagery in his presentation is striking. It's one thing to hear about glaciers vanishing, it's another to see before/after images of Alaskan, European and African mountain ranges taken 25 years apart. The photos of the collapse of the Larsen B ice shelf are terrifying, especially so when coupled with the explanation of how it happened, and the information about other ice masses that are also headed in the same direction.
Although skeptical about many things, I've never really been a skeptic about Global Warming -- the science behind it has always seemed tremendously sound -- and so the information presented in this film is not really new to me. What I did get from the film was a sense of the terrible urgency about the issue. Timeframes for dramatic, perhaps even catastrophic effects are in the 20-50 year range. Well within my lifetime and certainly within my daughter's. There are good arguments that we're already seeing catastrophic effects if we consider that last season's hurricanes are caused by warmer sea water, and that the drought in sub-Saharan Africa is one cause of the human tragedy in Darfur.
Please go see this film and visit climatecrisis.net for more information. It will make you feel like you should probably do something.
posted by Brent at 3:52 PM
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