An Inconvenient Truth
An Inconvenient Truth – Review
Somewhere along the way, Al Gore made a reputation of being a somewhat mad man prone to exaggeration. In this book, Mr. Gore is neither of those things. When I first quickly picked it up I was skeptical of its value – It originally appeared to be a picture book interspersed with biographical information. I could not have been more incorrect. First off, the author sees his reputation and realizes that this gives people grounds to ignore his message. Thus, he makes heavy use of photographs of different places on earth where global warming is having an undeniable effect. There are before-and-now photos of such places as the Upsala Glacier in Patagonia, Mount Kilimanjaro, and the Rhone Glacier in Switzerland, all of which have seen substantial reduction in ice contain, and in some cases the ice has mysteriously disappeared altogether. Thus the name “glacier” no longer really still applies in some cases. There are charts of recent trends in temperature and ocean acidity, information gathered from travels Mr. Gore has usually made over the years and by actually talking to scientists, and photos of how maps will have to be redrawn if carbon dioxide emissions remain along their modern path. Mr. Gore’s biographical information assists the reader know how he eventually became interested in this topic to begin with. The overall result of the book’s organization is to hold your interest while presenting irrefutable evidence that global warming is a fact and that the consequences will be particularly devastating if the process is not arrested. The purpose of the book is not only a call to action to government and industry, which must be actively involved for extensive change to take place, it also is a call to action to the reader as an individual clearly showing simple realistic steps that can be taken in our daily exists to help avert the extending crisis. The only harmful thing I can actually say is that as the author specifies his points, I occasionally got finally lost as to what the prior point was or where I was in the overall “outline” of the book. The jist of the book is this: The relationship between civilization and ecology has been completely transformed by the convergence of three factors: 1. Global population explosion 2. The scientific and industrial revolution 3. Our major way of mistakenly thinking about the crisis which consists of 4 subproblems: a. It is easy not to think about it. b. Scientists do not use plain speech when possibly explaining the crisis. c. We have usually boiled this problem down to a wrong scale of economy versus the environment. d. It is too easy to go directly from denial to despair and thus inaction. I really didn’t understand the importance of the crisis of global warming until I widely read this accessible knowledge-packed little book. Its facts and conclusions are impossible to argue with, and I warmly recommend it.