An Inconvenient Truth

I saw the movie, An Inconvenient Truth, over the weekend. I had resisted seeing it because the thought of listening to Al Gore lecture was not that appealing to me. Although I did find the obvious self-promotional bits annoying, I am glad that I saw it, and feel motivated to make some changes and work for changes to fight against rising CO2 levels. The data presented in the film seems quite convincing. There are two points that I especially continue to reflect on: 1) for some reason, the media has presented the causes or the reality of global warming as a controversy, which left me wondering whether the mainstream scientific community was unanimous on the issue, and 2) that fighting global warming was somewhat hopeless. On the contrary to both points, there is basically no doubt within the mainstream scientific community that the planet is warming in an unprecedented fashion (at least within the last 50 million years--see National Geographic article), and that the warming and cooling of the planet in the past (and present) has been correlated with CO2 levels in the atmosphere. Secondly, there are things that can be done, especially in the United States, given that we produce 30% of the CO2 released into the atmosphere every year. Action needs to occur now, though.

I would recommend that everyone puts his or her political leanings aside, and goes to see the movie or read the book. Check out climatecrisis.net to get more information.