An Inconvenient Truth

There's a movie teaser line that you may have seen recently, that goes like this: "What if you had to tell someone the most important thing in the world, but you knew they'd never believe you?" The answer is "I'd try." The teaser's actually for another movie, but that's the story that's told in the documentary "An Inconvenient Truth": it starts with a man who, after talking with scientists and senators, can't get anyone to listen to what he thinks is the most important thing in the world. It comes out on DVD today.

The scariest horror film of 2006 was a documentary.

The first thing everyone wants to know, or at least to argue about, is whether Al Gore has his facts straight. The short answer is yes, he does. There are minor errors. They don't detract from Gore's main point, on which the scientific debate has ended.

And the main point is scary, and almost too big to think about or talk about. The earth is warming, because of us. Sometime in the next hundred years, our environment is going to change in big ways. We can't predict it with much accuracy yet, but the best estimates we have are that it's going to be -- measured in lives and dollars -- really bad.

In a way this film isn't really about that story. It's about a man telling that story -- someone who, after suffering a bit of a setback, asked himself, well, what can I do now? What's important to me? How do I want to spend my time?

What's important is a question a lot of nerds may be familiar with. We like to talk about important things. But how do you respond when you try to say something serious and the cool kids laugh at you? What do you do, when you put yourself out there, try to engage people's minds, and instead they make fun of your clothes?

The good news for anyone who's had a prom invitation rejected is that people can come back from worse disasters. His presidential bid didn't go so well in 2000. Gore had given talks on global warming before; after he was forcibly retired from public service, he took a Powerbook and Keynote on the road, sharpening and expanding his slideshow talk in airports and hotels.

Half of the film is that talk, and it's an engrossing talk. There are charts and diagrams and footnoted stats (and a Futurama clip) and it's about as fun as numbers and chemicals get. Turns out Al Gore has a sly sense of humor (but not a nasty one -- the film's only two political nudges are pretty gentle). Unless you're a climate scientist you'll probably learn something too.

But the other half, interwoven with the lectures, is a man picking up the pieces and rediscovering something important in his life, a message that he has to tell. That succeeds as a film.

And Gore's lecture succeeded too. Somehow, I'm not sure how, this documentary changed the way Americans look at global warming. In early 2006, global warming was still seen as one of those things that may be true or may not. Pundits were fairly evenly divided and both positions were routinely heard. It's now late 2006 and the debate has moved from "is global warming happening?" to "it's happening, we've caused it, and what if anything should we do about it?"

Most of the warming-deniers left are the real extremists out in Rush Limbaugh territory. We're not yet all the way to a serious, scientifically-informed debate, but somehow, overnight, this film pulled most of the fence-sitters over to where the scientists were years ago.

As for actually fixing global warming, it will take a miracle. Maybe two miracles. I think in the next few decades we're going to need to start an Apollo moonshot-type miracle of technology and engineering to beat back the greenhouse effect. Nanorobots. Reflective dust in the stratosphere. Giant mirrors at the Lagrange point. Bioengineered plankton to sink carbon or change the oceans' albedo. Something. That's just a guess.

But meanwhile, though we hope someone can build us an airbag before we crash the car into the tree, that doesn't absolve us from stepping on the brakes. Right now, we need a change in attitude, in our community and our politics, to start slowing the damage we're doing every day to our grandchildren's Earth -- to buy them time, and give them more options. The only way that happens is when the governments of industrialized and developing nations decide this is a priority.

And the only way that happens is for people everywhere to stop listening to the cool kids and, once again, pay attention to the nerds.

Go buy the nerd's DVD.

Comments

Re:The scientific debate has ended?

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

>Science has been wrong several times about climate change in the past few decades (The big chill never happened, a

Here's a bibliography of 1970s era scientific papers about climate change.

>We may or may not have a role in the warming.

If it's possible to put as much CO2 in the atmosphere as we have and *not* get a climate effect, that would be one of the most astonishing scientific results in history.

Re:Nothing inconvenient about the results

[Sqwubbsy]

it was the Bush administration which refused to ratify it that's all.

And the Clinton administration. Kyoto protocol was passed on December 12, 1997. Clinton never submitted it to the Senate for ratification.

Bush has problems with China and India (two of the top polluters) being exempt. This is not a Republican issue, although I encourage you to yell at Reid and Pelosi to pass it.

Relavant wikipedia section:

On July 25, 1997, before the Kyoto Protocol was finalized (although it had been fully negotiated, and a penultimate draft was finished), the U.S. Senate unanimously passed by a 95-0 vote the Byrd-Hagel Resolution (S. Res. 98)[37], which stated the sense of the Senate was that the United States should not be a signatory to any protocol that did not include binding targets and timetables for developing as well as industrialized nations or "would result in serious harm to the economy of the United States". On November 12, 1998, Vice President Al Gore symbolically signed the protocol. Both Gore and Senator Joseph Lieberman indicated that the protocol would not be acted upon in the Senate until there was participation by the developing nations.[38] The Clinton Administration never submitted the protocol to the Senate for ratification.

The Clinton Administration released an economic analysis in July 1998, prepared by the Council of Economic Advisors, which concluded that with emissions trading among the Annex B/Annex I countries, and participation of key developing countries in the "Clean Development Mechanism" -- which grants the latter business-as-usual emissions rates through 2012 -- the costs of implementing the Kyoto Protocol could be reduced as much as 60% from many estimates. Other economic analyses, however, prepared by the Congressional Budget Office and the Department of Energy Energy Information Administration (EIA), and others, demonstrated a potentially large decline in GDP from implementing the Protocol.

The current President, George W. Bush, has indicated that he does not intend to submit the treaty for ratification, not because he does not support the Kyoto principles, but because of the exemption granted to China (the world's second largest emitter of carbon dioxide [39]). Bush also opposes the treaty because of the strain he believes the treaty would put on the economy; he emphasizes the uncertainties which he asserts are present in the climate change issue.[40] Furthermore, the U.S. is concerned with broader exemptions of the treaty. For example, the U.S. does not support the split between Annex I countries and others.

Re:Nothing inconvenient about the results

[FhnuZoag]

That's because there's a difference between *weather* and *climate*. I might not be able to tell you if it'd be raining this time next month, but I can tell you if it'll be cold in winter, or, more apropos, what things are going to be like averaged over the entire earth with error bars to qualify my prediction.

Re:Proof is for mathematicians

[Abcd1234]

If you want to prove a hypothesis - you need evidence.

Nice, you just illustrated the GPs point.

You *can't* prove a scientific hypothesis! All you can do is provide more and more evidence to back it up. Even General Relativity isn't "proven" in the scientific sense, and as far as theories goes, it's as rigorously tested as they get.

So, the question is, at what point will there be enough evidence to convince you? Personally, I think the answer is "never", because you have your beliefs and you're unwilling to deviate from them.

Re:Gore is out to lunch

[cliffski]

Nice impartial study you quoted there:

Pity that 'think tank' is funded mostly by oil companies isn't it?

"Competitive Enterprise Institute has received $2,005,000 from ExxonMobil since 1998."
source:
http://www.exxonsecrets.org/html/orgfactsheet.php? id=2

Re:I'm REALLY Serial!

[Stephan Schulz]

Piltdown Man was not accepted as totally valid, although it made it into a few textbooks. Pluto's alleged warming is based on a grand total of two datapoints (each corresponding to it crossing in front of a star and its atmosphere distorting the light in different manners, with the density of the atmosphere (sampled along one line!) assumed to correspond to the temperature), and would be not really surprising, given that Pluto has passed its closest point to the sun only recently, and should still warm up if it has any thermal inertia. Triton's warming likewise is attested via a comparison of 15 year old data with recent earth-bound observations. We know nothing about it's climate cycle. The Saturn article does not mention any warming, just a storm. The Jupiter article does not mention any warming, just a storm that causes regional climate change. The "global" warming on Mars is a 3 Martian year local trend, influenced by the frequency of dust storms. Mars is very hard to compare with Earth anyways, as its orbit is much more eccentric and hence orbital cycles have a much higher influence.

Anything more I can help out with?

Re:Nothing inconvenient about the results

[zdavek]

... giving a tremendous market advantage to local farmers who produce food in smaller amounts and with less impact on the environment.

Do you have any idea of how much fuel is used by family farms? I do. Tractors, combines, farm trucks , irrigation wells: all use a lot of fuel. A good percentage of farming expenses come from fuel costs so anything that inflates fuel costs would tend to drive more family farmers out of the business and leave it to the big conglomerates who get savings on the scale of their operations.