A Movie with Gore

Went to see "An Inconvenient Truth" tonight. A great movie and a great story. I had discussed the movie previous to seeing with a friend who was rather annoyed by two things: that it was "all about Al Gore" and that Gore used a Mac -- the constant product placement. Well, of course, Al Gore happens to be on the board at Apple Computer, so the product placement is rather a given (especially since the movie is basically about the "slide show" he has on his computer). But the personal stuff is the story in the movie -- I don't think the movie would have felt like a movie without that narrative. It would have felt like a slide show.

The scariest thing was the data graph showing the rising levels of CO2 -- when Al Gore gets on this electric lift so he can point out the "spike". Here is the study, conducted by a group from the University of Bern, specifically cited by Gore:

From a BBC News article:
"We find that CO2 is about 30% higher than at any time, and methane 130% higher than at any time; and the rates of increase are absolutely exceptional: for CO2, 200 times faster than at any time in the last 650,000 years." (Thomas Stocker, study leader)

CO2 levels are higher than at any time in the last 650,000 year. Ack! And not just a little bit higher, but nearly 30-percent higher than at any time during that period. This is not a piddling look back a few hundred years, or even a few thousand years -- but over half a million years. Our civilization is just over 2000 years old. Our species is likely about 200,000 years old. We have never ever faced a crisis like this. Ever.

These are recorded levels (the lift is used to get to the predicted increase over the next fifty years); it gets pretty vertical!

Reading some of the blog posts in reply -- some millions or billions of years ago, CO2 levels were thru the roof. Al Gore is a nut case; he's Chicken Little. But the 650,000 year time frame is pretty much coincident with the appearance of our "species branch": modern man. Homo sapiens heidelbergensis dates back to approximately 800,000 years at the extreme. We have never lived through a geologic change of this scale.

The question is: why should we not do everything we can to assure that our species survives? That civilization can move forward beyond the next two generations? Why dismiss this?

One scene in the movie, Gore shows a slide that he says was from a Republican "slide show". It shows a scales with the word "Balance", and in one pan is a pyramid of gold bars, and in the other is the globe (I think representing "environmentalism"). Economy vs. ecology. Will some please explain to the Republicans how this is supposed to balance?

In the end, this is a very personal story; the movie was right about that. Even though it is a story that may touch and affect more than 9 billion people in less than fifty years, it is personal on a global scale. Each of our actions will have an intense and direct affect on everyone else. The politics of this are clear, too; as Robert Green Ingersoll famously said, “In nature there are neither rewards nor punishments; there are consequences.” The scale of those consequences are now readily apparent.

So I take the story very personally, too. And, hey, I get to write this blog on my very own PowerBook -- looks just like Al's.