I saw An Inconvenient Truth last night. At the end almost the entire audience broke into spontaneous applause. The last time I experienced that was at a showing of the first Star Wars in 1977. I have never heard applause for a documentary in a cinema. The data is pretty damn conclusive that unprecedented (may I emphasize that, unprecedented) stresses are being placed on our environment. The consequnces may be dire and, one way or another, will likely affect every single reader of this post — including you. For a bit of historical perspective on what can happen to extremely powerful societies when environmental stresses become too extreme, may I suggest the excellent latest book Collapse by Jared Diamond, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Guns, Germs and Steel.
I just got back from seeing it this evening with people from Drinking Liberally. All of you reading this who haven’t seen it – go soon!
I enjoyed it. I learned little new information, since I’m a pretty avid science-type guy. But, given that, the way in which he presented the information was clear, precise, and novel. That’s why folks like me — scientifically educated politically involved people — should go see it anyway.
decided to start drinking when we got home, not to stop until the water starts coming up the front steps….and I’m at the top of Winter Hill!!
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I feel pretty informed, but I felt like this was a huge kick in the stomach. To see that CO2 graph….I can’t believe we haven’t cooked yet. Oy.
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All those millions who may die.
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I know people kept saying Al did a nice job of keeping it hopeful at the end, but I am not confident that we can convince enough people who matter. I think it looks very bad for us. And I’m a hugely optimistic person in general.
Puh-lezzz. “..why we haven’t fried yet”? Are you serious?
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Unless you read only the NYT/Boston Globe and listen to NPR, there’s still a lot of debate going on about global warming and it’s causes. A CO2 graph by Al Gore isn’t sufficient to get the bulk of Americans wound up over the issue. The’s sun’s output has been increasing. Maybe that’s the problem.
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I’m over in Italy right now, and the weather’s been much cooler than usual. What’s with that? I remember some years ago the liberal media warning about global cooling. Cover of Time and/or Newsweek, “The Coming Ice Age,” IIRC.
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No wonder global warming, real or imagined, and it’s causes, natural or man-made, has NO POLITICAL TRACTION in the US … people think it’s just one in a long series of made-up, Chicken-Little environmental scares. Al’s movie fall’s into that category.
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Maybe progressives should get Gore to run and then help elect him president afterwhich he can ruin the American economy by imposing job-destroying carbon taxes and get people killed by mandating we drive tiny cars and ride bicycles to work.
You sound like you are commenting on this movie but haven’t seen it yet.
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You also sound like you don’t know much about the subject in general.
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For example, it is entirely possible for global climate change (aka “global warming”, a misleadingly mild-sounding term) to cause an ice age. In fact, that’s one of the possibilities Gore explains in the movie, which is one of the reasons I think you didn’t see it.
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I haven’t seen any actual scientific papers that dispute the basic theory of climate change in well over a decade now. I know there’s still a lot of talk about “debate” but it’s all trumped-up, and real scientific journals don’t show any of it anymore. The debate is over among scientists, the public is just lagging.