I went and saw Al Gore’s new movie (some would say the new movie about Al Gore) An Inconvenient Truth this weekend. Aside from the many product plugs for apple, this was a good movie.
Being the kind of internet geek that compulsively trolls all media sources for news about everything there was not a lot of things in the movie that I have not seen. Judging from the repeated shocked gasps from the audience it seems that others however have not. This movie is nice, very nice. It lays out the arguments for why we need to act now to stop global warming. Only the most fact-resistant among us can withstand its calm, logical, and scientifically based claims. Gore does an amazing job of illustration just how important it is that we start doing something major about global warming, and that we start doing it now.
The movie also highlights a version of Al Gore that makes many in the liberal community almost cry. We cry because if the Al Gore in this movie, would have been the Al Gore that ran for president in 2000, he would have won by an even greater landslide. When we in the progressive community look back on the last 6 years of out of control rampage by George W. Bush and his ilk we yearn for what could have been.
I remember being fooled like everyone else in 2000. Thinking there was “no real difference” between Gore and Bush. Thinking that both men seemed somewhat robotic, and uninteresting. Both “seemed” to be saying almost the same thing. I voted for Gore, more because I didn’t like Bush, not because I had much good to say about Al Gore. If only Gore would have demonstrated this passion then that he has shown since the “loss” in 2000.
If you have not seen this movie yet, go see it. If you are a skeptic of global warming science, go see this movie. If you want to see a man that is passionate about one issue, go see this movie. Most of all, if you want to see the shadow of “what could have been” go see this movie.
While the movie has many good points, there are many misunderstandings around the science. Especially in relation to CO2 & the Greenhouse Effect
“the temperature effect of atmospheric carbon dioxide is logarithmic (that means there is a diminishing response as you keep adding more). If we consider the warming effect of the pre-Industrial Revolution atmospheric carbon dioxide (about 280 parts per million by volume or ppmv) as 1, then the first half of that heating was delivered by about 20ppmv (0.002% of atmosphere) while the second half required an additional 260ppmv (0.026%).
To double the pre-Industrial Revolution warming from CO2 alone would require about 90,000ppmv (9%) but we’d never see it – CO2 becomes toxic at around 6,000ppmv (0.6%, although humans have absolutely no prospect of achieving such concentrations).”
See http://www.junkscience.com/Greenhouse/ for some more information on CO2 and how it relates to the greenhouse effect. As always, take what you read on a heated topic like this with a grain of salt. The possiblity of us destroying the earth is a very emotional topic.
But Greenhouse effect or not, We should all do out part to reduce our enviromental footprint.