Second Globalwarming Awareness2007

An Inconvenient Truth

In the eary 60s, Al Gore had the good idea to study under Roger Revelle at Harvard University. Professor Revelle was one of the first scientists to claim that the earth may not be able to effectively deal with all of the carbon dioxide generated by the earth’s rapidly increasing human population.

The American Institute of Physics called Revelle’s 1957 paper with Hans Suess “the opening shot in the global warming debates”. Gore took Revelle’s lessons to heart, becoming a keen supporter of the environment during his government service.

Al Gore lost the 2000 Presidential election in United States against George W. Bush, and began to focused his efforts on things other than politics; among other things, he’s been crisscrossing the world delivering a presentation on global warming. To make this presentation, Gore’s used a movie call An Inconvenient Truth (view the Youtube trailer).

The film has some small problems; many of the asides about Gore’s life (particularly the 2000 election stuff) don’t seem to fit cleanly into the main narrative, the connection it makes between global warming and Katrina is stronger than it should be, and the trailer is a little silly; this is a documentary about Al Gore and global warming after all, not The Day After Tomorrow or Armageddon. But the film really shines when it focuses on the presentation and Gore methodically and lucidly making the case for us needing to take action on global warming. An Inconvenient Truth opens in the US on May 24…do yourself a favor and seek it out when it comes to your local theater.

But Watching the film, I realized and far too late to move to Florida and vote for him in 2000, that I could have been a fan of Al Gore. He’s smart and intellectually curious (the latter doesn’t always follow from the former), understands science enough to explain it to the layperson without needlessly oversimplifying, and despite his reputation as somewhat of a robot, seems to be more of a real person than many politicians.

This is nothing short of life-changing; a film that needs to be seen by every single person on this planet. The simplest of changes in our daily lives can make the most profound difference to the world we live in and these are changes that must be made. See An Inconvenient Truth and see it as soon as you can.