An Inconvenient Truth
Today I watched the movie "An Inconvenient Truth", staring Al Gore, the former US Vice President. It is a documentary both about global warming, Al Gore, and Al Gore's long fight for the issue.
While I had heard it was a good documentary, and I had positive expectations I wasn't entirely sure whether it would actually be good or not. The thing is that environmentalism is such a political correct issue these days, that you can't expect main stream media to talk down any movie or person that champions it.
Some movies like the day after tomorrow tried to put forth the climate issue but it ended up being quite pathetic in my view. I was afraid that this movie was going to be overly emotional like a lot of American movies often get.
But I was very positively surprised. Of course some emotion was in there, but you can't get away with that from an American movie. But what amazed me the most was the immense effort and devotion Al Gore has put into this issue over the years. And it has not been about screaming and yelling. No, he has spent considerable time traveling around the world and seeing climate change effect for himself, and talked to a large number of leading scientists. In fact he has been discussing and learning about these issues from scientists since he was a young student.
It was very impressive the data and statistics he presented and he managed to convey it in a very understandable manner. I never doubted that we were experiencing global warming due to man made emissions. But I still considered it a bit of an open issue how the earths feedback system would balance things out. Al Gore's presented data though was a sort of punch in the face. It made me realize how strong the correlation between CO2 content in the atmosphere and temperature. But most of all what he managed to convey best is how urgent it actually is not act now. The changes that are happening to the environment today are actually accelerating. We might not have much more than one generation to fix the problem. That is not a lot of time.
Some make it out to be that global warming will spell the end of the earth. Of course it isn't. The earth itself will survive quite fine. To problem is us. And I think Al Gore conveys that pretty well. We are facing a natural catastrophe, that although it won't destroy human kind, it will be more devastating than any previous war before.
It is as if knowing that there will be a war on the scale of WWII, only larger in 50-60 years. Like that war it wont mean the end of us, but it will mean immense destruction, suffering and economic loss. Knowing this is were we are heading within such a relatively short time. How can we afford to not do something?
We are literally talking about the lives of our children. It is not a metaphor for generations long into the future. It is up to our generation to fix the problem.
It makes me wonder how I can help fix the problem. I don't believe this go back to nature ideas. We are too many people for that. Nobody would buy into it anyway. You could never convince people to sacrifice their whole modern life, even if was to save us from a catastrophe in the future.
But people could try to minimize their energy footprint as much as is possible without too many changes. For my home country Norway I think more people should switch to burning wood for heating as opposed to electricity and use energy saving light bulbs. But in the end, to make really big changes I think there has to be political initiatives.
More money has to go into alternative energy research. CO2 emission must be made more expensive, and some though choices has to be made. I think a problem today is that we want everything and don't want to sacrifice anything. We want modern life style, low CO2 emissions and be nice to nature. But we have to make choices.
People are against windmills because they make the surrounding nature look ugly and they destroy the habitat for some species. But I think ugliness of windmills is a small price to pay for the catastrophe that would otherwise await us. Nuclear power should also be reconsidered. It is time we put away the ghosts of Chernobyl. It is not something that is even remotely likely to happen again.
But most important of all I think, is to push the transition to the hydrogen economy. Because the transport sector is the only sector were there really is no substitute for oil at the moment.
Ok, before I go off on a tangent here. I really recommend this movie for anybody.
While I had heard it was a good documentary, and I had positive expectations I wasn't entirely sure whether it would actually be good or not. The thing is that environmentalism is such a political correct issue these days, that you can't expect main stream media to talk down any movie or person that champions it.
Some movies like the day after tomorrow tried to put forth the climate issue but it ended up being quite pathetic in my view. I was afraid that this movie was going to be overly emotional like a lot of American movies often get.
But I was very positively surprised. Of course some emotion was in there, but you can't get away with that from an American movie. But what amazed me the most was the immense effort and devotion Al Gore has put into this issue over the years. And it has not been about screaming and yelling. No, he has spent considerable time traveling around the world and seeing climate change effect for himself, and talked to a large number of leading scientists. In fact he has been discussing and learning about these issues from scientists since he was a young student.
It was very impressive the data and statistics he presented and he managed to convey it in a very understandable manner. I never doubted that we were experiencing global warming due to man made emissions. But I still considered it a bit of an open issue how the earths feedback system would balance things out. Al Gore's presented data though was a sort of punch in the face. It made me realize how strong the correlation between CO2 content in the atmosphere and temperature. But most of all what he managed to convey best is how urgent it actually is not act now. The changes that are happening to the environment today are actually accelerating. We might not have much more than one generation to fix the problem. That is not a lot of time.
Some make it out to be that global warming will spell the end of the earth. Of course it isn't. The earth itself will survive quite fine. To problem is us. And I think Al Gore conveys that pretty well. We are facing a natural catastrophe, that although it won't destroy human kind, it will be more devastating than any previous war before.
It is as if knowing that there will be a war on the scale of WWII, only larger in 50-60 years. Like that war it wont mean the end of us, but it will mean immense destruction, suffering and economic loss. Knowing this is were we are heading within such a relatively short time. How can we afford to not do something?
We are literally talking about the lives of our children. It is not a metaphor for generations long into the future. It is up to our generation to fix the problem.
It makes me wonder how I can help fix the problem. I don't believe this go back to nature ideas. We are too many people for that. Nobody would buy into it anyway. You could never convince people to sacrifice their whole modern life, even if was to save us from a catastrophe in the future.
But people could try to minimize their energy footprint as much as is possible without too many changes. For my home country Norway I think more people should switch to burning wood for heating as opposed to electricity and use energy saving light bulbs. But in the end, to make really big changes I think there has to be political initiatives.
More money has to go into alternative energy research. CO2 emission must be made more expensive, and some though choices has to be made. I think a problem today is that we want everything and don't want to sacrifice anything. We want modern life style, low CO2 emissions and be nice to nature. But we have to make choices.
People are against windmills because they make the surrounding nature look ugly and they destroy the habitat for some species. But I think ugliness of windmills is a small price to pay for the catastrophe that would otherwise await us. Nuclear power should also be reconsidered. It is time we put away the ghosts of Chernobyl. It is not something that is even remotely likely to happen again.
But most important of all I think, is to push the transition to the hydrogen economy. Because the transport sector is the only sector were there really is no substitute for oil at the moment.
Ok, before I go off on a tangent here. I really recommend this movie for anybody.
posted by Adam Smith at 02:33
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home