http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=468
I think he's right however. Gore's hypocrisy and self-serving PR stunts notwithstanding, global warming is nothing to scoff at. Perhaps the greatest immediate threat that global warming seems to pose is the potential shutdown of the gulf stream:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/climatechange/story/0,12374,1083419,00.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/story/0,3605,1654803,00.html
Aditya Mopur <mopuradityabharadwaj at yahoo.com> пишет: http://www.bobharris.com/content/view/941/1/ --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Spent last evening at the opening night of the new Al Gore enviro-flick An Inconvenient Truth.
First, an aside. I have mixed feelings about Al Gore. I'm not a fan for about a dozen reasons, some of which you'll gather below.
Two thoughts on the way out, however: (1) surprisingly fascinating, funny, and moving, given that you're basically watching a cinematic treatment of a PowerPoint presentation. And (2), AAAIIIIEEE! I never really looked this all at once before.
Yeah, I've read about the rising CO2 levels. We all know about the increasing water temperatures and the shrinking icecaps. I've seen arctic glaciers fracturing and river beds drying up with my own eyes. But assimilated piecemeal like this, it's easy not to see how all of these small impacts are adding up. So I went in thinking, OK, I know the rough outlines of this.
But put it all together, and mix in some truly stunning visuals the way Gore and the producers have, and holy angels' armpits on a flaming stick -- LOOK! LOOK! GAH! AAAIIIEEEEE!
Even if Gore is bullshitting by (loose thumbnail here:) a factor of ten -- and I'd say, given the occasional gloss over a few minor areas of some dispute (an almost inevitable occurence, actually, in trying to summarize something so large in such a short period of time) and his history as a politician, it's probably a factor of two or so -- this conversation needs to move front and center in a way I hadn't realized before.
Go see the damn thing.
Find a theater and go. If you live in a small town, call your theaters and bug them to bring it.
That all said, one huge caveat. I dearly wish it wasn't Gore at the center of all this, because as an American politician, he retains veneer of residual sleaze that (for me, at least) gets in the way of an extremely important message.
It's very hard for me to square his self-serving talk about his precious connection to the farm he grew up on knowing that there's a big ol' zinc mine on the same land, just walking distance away, that the Gore family have collected hundreds of thousands of royalties from over the years. I can never square Gore's greenspeak with his and Clinton's behavior regarding the WTI waste incinerator in East Liverpool, Ohio. That one was unforgivable to me in 1992, and it's unforgivable now.
So screw any image of Al Gore as a saint. The guy got screwed by the press about a lot of little crap over the years. But still. East Liverpool alone. School kids, Al. School kids.
But that does not make the underlying scientific consensus about global warming and its causes untrue. New info comes in every damn day now -- every single goddam day -- about how badly we are screwing our own future. The BBC just reported that new studies show that rising temperatures will also accelerate the release of additional CO2 from the world's ecosystems, snowballing the problem worse than had been previously expected.
So when Al Gore -- yes, often-self-serving frequent-hypocrite Al Gore -- compares the denial-for-profit of fossil fuels' impact on the environment to the decades of denial-for-profit of tobacco's impact on human health, he's correct. When Al Gore -- seen throughout the movie zipping around the globe on jet airplanes, which produce enormous emissions -- urges that we should urgently start cutting our emissions, he's right, despite the inability to find a convenient mirror to look into. And when Al Gore -- yes, still a politician, one who refuses to deny his possible candidacy in 2008 -- tells you that the potential melting of Greenland and Antarctica would be exceedingly dangerous to human civilization, he is telling the truth.
So see the movie. Forget who's doing the talking, think critically, and realize that he's mixing indisputable facts with a few minor glosses over what seem to be open points, all while mixing in some worst-case scenarios.
But consider how nice it would have been had worst-case scenarios been taken seriously prior to Katrina.
Go see the movie.
Then go back again, and drag along your friends, your family, and people you can't even stand, and make them watch, too.
Afterwards, go home, talk about it, do your own research and thinking, and come to your own conclusions. When you're done, you may want to tap Gore lightly in the head with a piece of zinc, or a bit of toxic waste from Ohio, just as I do.
But you'll probably also feel an urgency to become more environmentally involved. You'll want to know more. You may be a little less freaked out than you were on leaving the theater, but a little more than you are now.
That will be a good thing.
Go see the movie.
That is all.
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Has anyone else seen the movie already? what are your thoughts?
-Aditya
--
"All our lauded technological progress -- our very civilization - is like the axe in the hand of the pathological criminal." -Albert Einstein
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