Inconvenient, Hell

We watched An Inconvenient Truth last night.

I'm not quite sure what to do with the information in the movie. Accepted as being exactly correct, I cannot see how the picture it paints is not absolutely dire. And his most basic premises--human population has exploded exponentially in the last hundred years or so; the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere is directly linked to global temperature; the amount of carbon dioxide currently in our atmosphere, and the amounts being added by human sources, are unprecedented in any recorded history and are presently trending sharply upward; corroborating evidence that these things are contributing to a warming of the planet is amply at hand--these seem things which can't be credibly refuted. The consequences of global warming--as opposed to the argument that the planet is, in fact, getting warmer--seem only slightly less certain, but even then he puts together a pretty convincing summary of the effects of acidifying the oceans, of rising ocean levels, and of the effects on vegetation and other lower-tier life forms of these increasing temperatures.

The ten hottest years in recorded history have occurred within the past 14 years. And the recession of the glaciers (at least the dozen he showed before-and-after pictures of) and of the ice caps seem pretty tough facts to counter. He quickly dispatches with the argument that global temperatures are cyclical and that we're currently in a normal upward cycle by showing us exactly what the cycles have amounted to over the last 650,000 years and how completely out of the ballpark we are in our current conditions and our near-term projections. In my own lifetime, I have seen changes in, for example, the amount of snowfall we receive in Minnesota and Wisconsin. Growing up, we rode snowmobiles extensively, and now for the last decade, people have had to trailer their sleds further North to find snow. I used to need a four wheel drive truck to get around in winter; I would not have engaged the 4WD now for five or six consecutive winters, at least here in Appleton.

Whether all of this is responsible for, say, Katrina seems debatable; but when hurricane and typhoon and cyclone activity is looked at worldwide, it's hard not to see Katrina as something other than just another hurricane, as an outcome of measurable things--like increasing oceanic temperatures. In addition to record-setting high temperatures all around the world in the past handful of years, the number and severity of these tropical storms has risen everywhere, and they have begun threatening places previously thought immune to them. It just seems like quite a feat of denial is needed not to see all these elements converging toward a single conclusion.

Blowhards like Rush Limbaugh have long contended that global warming is some kind of hysterical liberal plot, and one can even find people who aren't bloated, self-hyping entertainers obsessed with the sound of their own voices who question the prevailing science. But their views are much harder to find (even if our current warped sense of journalistic "balance" implies that the topic has two equally competing sides, which seems far from the case), and personally I find their arguments less convincing than the case Al Gore is making--not least because his critics mostly concentrate on questioning his conclusions without putting forth a more convincing case for a different one.

The movie ends with a call to action, and an assurance that this problem can be tackled like many other difficult things have been tackled throughout human history, by awareness and by all of us pulling in the same direction. This may be, and in any case I think we must do what we can, but his presentation makes it seem as though we may already be far past the tipping point. We can have little short term effect on world population (and we may be able to effect very little long-term without the influence of certain opposed "moral" institutions), and the amount of fossil fuel being burned--a major contributor to this problem--cannot be curtailed simply. To bring about the kinds of changes he recommends--increasing the fuel efficiency of our cars and homes, for example--will take some time, and, I'm afraid, some more dire consequences felt by people, to bring about; and then the "healing" of the planet will take decades or longer. If, say, coral reefs and plankton are both negatively affected by the higher oceanic temperatures and by higher acidity levels in the water, these things begin to affect the whole food chain from the bottom up; and they'll take probably longer to repair than they took to break.

As I say, we have no choice but to do what we can do, but one wonders if a wholesale retooling of human civilization is not required (and, assuming it is even possible, if it would succeed in saving us from what is in store). The numbers of people who stand to suffer and die from the worst-case extrapolation from his data make Katrina seem like a walk in the rain. Roger Ebert said that after seeing the movie he found himself turning off all the lights in his house. I find myself doing the same thing, but without the optimism that I'm doing anything real to ward off armageddon. It's a useless symbolic act, something nowhere near as inconvenient at what may be in store for all of us.

Grades:

As a compelling entertainment: B+
As a message transmission: A-
As a feel-good flick: F-