I like documentaries, but I’ve had Davis Guggenheim‘s documentary about Al Gore‘s presentation about global warming, An Inconvenient Truth (see also the Wikipedia entry), sitting beside my TV for quite a few days now. It arrived from Netflix and I didn’t think I was in the mood for anything quite so serious. I finally watched it tonight, and it is serious. But it’s also entertaining, informative, interesting, and inspiring. And I highly recommend it. And, going forward, I’m going to find more ways that I can live more responsibly with respect to the environment. About all I do right now is recycle. And that helps, of course. But there’s more that can be done. And, while I’m at it, I’m going to write some letters to my boys in Washington and try to hold their feet to the fire about this one. Maybe we can get the US to sign on to the Kyoto Protocal, for starters.
Rent the flick and watch it. Read up on it at the companion site (warning: music). Convince your friends to see it. It’s not a partisan issue (hell, John McCain, and Arnold Schwarzenegger believe it) and it’s not a partisan flick. Gore might not be the most exciting guy in the world, but his passion about this issue and his ability to marshal mountains of scientific data into a format that can be comprehended by non-scientists without dumbing it down to nothing is quite remarkable.
One of the most staggering stats in the flick was a comparison of a research article which surveyed over 900 studies among peer-reviewed science journals on the subject of global warming. This was a representative sample of the last ten years of research published on the subject. Out of those, zero percent disputed the science involved. A smaller survey of the popular press/news media on the same subject showed that over half of the articles in question said the science was still up for debate. I’ll take peer-reviewed science journals over the media machine for 1000, Alex.