An Inconvenient Truth

I went to see Al Gore's film, "An Inconvenient Truth", yesterday, and it was an excellent piece of work. The title "An Inconvenient Truth" refers to Gore's presenting of the issue of global warming to Congress as a very young member, early on in his career, and soon finding that the evidence for global warming was deemed to be an inconvenient truth, both for Congress as well as for many others who preferred to either deny or turn away from the mounting degree of evidence indicating that our planet was warming at a rate that was far beyond that of the mere cyclical patterns of recorded history, heating up at a rate which showed that some other unusual and highly powerful agent was now having a profound effect. This effect, we now know, is being caused today by man. The film shows Gore trudging around for about the last 30 years, trying to get this message across to anyone who would listen, and as of more recently giving a slideshow presentation which devastatingly illustrates the profound changes occurring as a result of global warming over the last several decades. Particularly striking for me was his information on the polar ice caps, but even more so concerning Greenland, where he showed a fresh water, streaming torrential river, raging in the middle of the ice cap, where one had not existed before. Here's an article just from today, indicating that temperatures are at a 2,000 year high.

When I was a kid (which was not all that long ago, thank you very much), a 90 degree day was somewhat of a rarity in the summer. Today, we can have 90 degree days for sometimes up to 14 days in a row. This was unheard of, if I remember right, when I was growing up. When I was a kid, we used to have a lot of monarch butterflies everywhere during the summer. Now, it's a rarity to see any type of butterflies during the summer. We used to have a rainy season, with torrential downpours which would green up the environment for many weeks. Now, we have a few drops, a hint of lightening and thunder, and a quick evaporation which dries up the potential moisture before it can reach the ground in any significant amount. Things are definitely changing weather-wise, as we know from stories like these, and with the severity of hurricanes like Katrina from last year.

What can we do? We can do things like trying to beome carbon neutral; doing things which balance out the CO2 which we are personally responsible for putting into the environment. Ideas on how to to do this can be found here. However, it really, like so many other things, boils down to how national policy is formulated. And for that, we have to vote in (and make sure the vote is counted) the people who have an interest in the future survival of our planet; smart, intelligent, and most of all moral people. Al Gore states in his film that it is ultimately a moral issue above all else, a decision to begin to take steps to do the right things now for both ourselves as well as for future generations, or, to bequeath to them an environment that has become essentially unlivable for all species of the planet. The choice, it now seems, really is up to us.

I do hope Al Gore decides he going to run just one more time. For us, more than anything else.