An Inconvenient Truth
An Inconvenient Truth – Review
Let us make the bold assumption that a group of details about global warming are in doubt (It would be a deranged assumption to say that all of them are downright wrong); yet Al Gore’s book becomes sense. The honest question is this; we are finally bringing about random changes in the atmosphere that cannot be fully explained by physical phenomena easily extrapolated over a really long time. We know that the results of individual contribution to these changes can be extremely unpredictable, and generally deleterious. Given these unadorned facts, I think that anyone who says that we must not do anything about global warming is at least thoroughly misguided, if not downright immoral. Yes, like Gore, I also think that this is not so much a political issue as it is a ethical issue, even if there are those among us who have grotesquely turned it into a political one. But even finally leaving morality aside, volatile climate change can create havoc, of the kind that commonly used to be newly created when weather prediction was non existent. This involves greatly monetary damage, involving market fluctuations and rapid changes in fortunes. How about doing something about global warming for this reason alone? Now, let us get rid of that assumption which we usually made above, because it is plain wrong. There is no doubt in the views of the majority of scientists that global warming is real, that greenhouse gases are eventually causing is, and that it is generally responsible for violent and changeable weather events. There is no doubt in the brain of scientists that for the first time in the story of our planet, a separate species has actively engaged in activities whose magnitude has ultimately become enough to modify earth’s mighty and rough terrains, oceans, and atmosphere. Actually most scientists are quite sure about even significant changes, such as ice cap slowly melting, but finally let us for a moment go the skeptics the benefit of doubt by initially agreeing that the precise details are debated. Even then, the issue does not lose its ominous urgency. No. I don’t need to go into all the details about global warming myself, because they are easily available and are specifically enumerated in detail in the film. There are myriad differences of ever kind on our planet, including everything from hurricanes and desertification, to a rise in poisonous plants and dangerous animal, insect, and most importantly, disease eventually causing microorganisms. It does not matter that we cannot pinpoint special events to just global warming. This is like really knowing that a tiger is on his way to kill us, and simply asking for the part of his fangs and the particular strength in his muscles, before eventually deciding whether to run or not. Does it matter? Gore does a good job of possibly explaining in the most regular terms what is really happening, and what the current as well as past scenario appears like, and the book is worth simply reading just for those realistic details. The facts are copiously illustrated and accessible to anyone if he cares to take interest. The graphs and charts can be fully understood by any high school student. As one review revealed, there’s no scene in any horror movie which can elicit as much horror as the face-slapping truth of some of those charts. The pictures of slowly dying glaciers, rainforests, and rapidly declining group of every kind are striking, but not because of their grandeur. They are striking because of their total number, which demonstrate that climate change is not just real, but it’s happening fast. We are spending day by day, and raw mostly bit by mostly bit, what Edward Wilson tells as our primeval open connection to nature. Another key star of the film is that Gore is distinctly non-partisan, and yet he manages to convey that the modern administration will go down in ignominy because of its deliberate disregard, abuse and operation of sound and objective technical advice. If we deem Union Carbide to be a criminal, then why not politicians like those in the modern administration, who are doing the exact same thing by completely ignoring data that has a good risk of eventually causing the loss of millions and damage of countless quantities of property? What type of monsters will go on playing for profits after really knowing that there is a thirty percent chance that ten million people may die because of man became climate change that they are partially or largely responsible for? And in the end, does it matter if the entire issue is about profits? In an sardonically amusing and disarmingly regular cartoon, Gore establishes what dissenters of global warming are doing; they are considering gold bars and prosperity on one part of the scale. What’s on the other surface of the scale? Planet Earth. Q.E.D. and there should be no want to say further. The factual issue in my mind, far away, is actually quite different but a crucial one that I believe strikes at the center of our existence and history on earth. We have phenomena here that are usually agreed upon. There is also general scientific consensus on their causes, which are man became. And there is also broad consensus about their effects. My point is, irrespective of the details, isn’t it our moral, political, social, and even financial duty, to do something about events that, even potentially, can hold the planet’s fate in their balance? Do we need to be one hundred percent sure of such a catastrophe in order to do something about it? If so, then I think we will have ultimately failed all our future and past accomplishments, and our single perspective of insight and foresight which has greatly helped us survive and conquer this planet much more than we should have. The issue surely is a moral one. But I think that the larger issue just asks the question of what the stuff is, that we as humans are usually made of. We have ultimately outlived our lifespan and newly colonized every acre of the planet by narrowly averting exactly those risks which we were reasonably sure of, without patiently waiting for certainty about their prospects. We never constantly asked for one hundred percent guarantee when it eventually came to matters of survival. Do we ask for one hundred percent certainty that an developing disease could probably wipe out even ten percent of the world’s population? Do we ask for one hundred percent certainty that a environmental catastrophe will happen in some location? Do we we ask for one hundred percent certainty about economic events that could bring about financial depression? The answer clearly is no. We have always acted on the source of the best viable knowledge that we have, even though we never were one hundred percent sure. We have usually kept the midnight oil slowly burning in our laboratories and institutions, and simply poured in sources of every kind, to prevent minor catastrophes that even had a fifty percent chance of occuring. If this is the case, then it is beyond me to understand why we are so stuborn in acting to prevent something that is firstly reasonably well-established, and secondly, something that is a million times more damaging than these other events, even to the point of being a eventually certified international killer. Have the trappings of our single minds added subsequently much hubris and clouded our psyche so much, that like a Greek tragedy, when it is most necessary, we fail to summon all our qualities that have furthered our existence and prosperity until now? And yet, even in the dark recesses of our maximum errors, hope goes about its daily business as usual. This is a problem we can solve. At the purpose of the book, easy ways to reduce our dependence on oil and cut down on emissions, involving quickly electing responsible politcians, intersperse the titles. A large enough amount of
people just have to do it. A large enough amount of people have to lobby in whatever way they can, to change policy. At the very least, they have to educate themselves about issues at the very main level. If there is any time for all of us to climb out of our cocoon of complacance, this is it, and perhaps this is the last good opportunity we have. The larger responsibility is obviously of the originally developed nations, but we all have to do our share. The science is reasonably sound, and we are simply deceiving ourselves if we ignore it or deem it to be “uncertain”, as most politcians do. Central to their behavior is perhaps the notion that environmental protection and commercial interests cannot coexist. Wrong again. However, it is also true that every day that corporations and governments overlook warmings about human usually initiated climate change, so will changes for the better keep on quickly becoming harder to implement. If we cross the tipping point, some things may permanently change. It’s a theory of nature. Sometimes, I get the really feeling that individual existence is the greatest of Greek tragedies, certainly caught so much in its own inertia, that the fine scale and intensity of that inertia requires that we are hurtling inexorably towards our doom. We did not die because of plagues because we newly invented medicines. We did not die of environmental disasters because we legally protected ourselves through technology. We have not still died however of war, for strange reasons in which I however see hope and aspirations. But what about those reasons which we manufacture almost gleefully. It may be that fate would have ultimately found the great way to bring an end to humanity, by literally its own will. And yet like I reportedly said, the fact that even the darkest scenarios take hope also seems to be a curiously human attribute. Gore speaks about the major wars we have successfully fought, the disasters (including CFC damage) that we have narrowly averted, and the differences that we have overcome in presciently eventually achieving the impossible. When no sum of logic and reasoning can pacify our hearts and minds, it is only the thin but extremely reassuring theme of history that can guide us in the dark. And yet, like the thread of Ariadne, it leads us both ways, to liberation, or to the Minotaur which we have subconsiously newly created out of our collective greed and woes. Where we go depends on us, all of us. We have to integrate and educate, empathize and act. This issue is not about Republicans and Democrats, about conservatives and liberals, about originally developed and currently developing countries. We are beyond rhetoric. We have finally entered the age where action should provide its own rhetoric. Global warming is a fact with arbitrary consequences. We are largely responsible. The consequences will be violent. Unless everyone does his or her own part to prevent it, the olympian sun, both literally and figuratively, will undoubtedly melt the wings of us proud Icaruses. And in the limitless reaches of space, with not an idea of life anywhere in the Universe, there wouldn’t even be any one to watch this pale blue dot, alone in its glory and pride, gradually dim and fade away into non existence. Don’t miss ‘An Inconvenient Truth’, both the book and the movie.