‘An Inconvenient Truth’ – The Al Gore Movie on Global Warming

 

The wait is over and finally I got to see Al Gores report on Global Warming at the Hamilton Film Festival. To cut right through to the conclusion: Go and see it! You owe it to your children (as a commentator aptly put it before).

 

While the film did not divulge many facts on global warming that were new to me, it nevertheless was very worth while seeing. Al Gore delivers his message in a clear and succinct manner, easily comprehensible to all. His conclusions follow a rational and measured analysis of the state of the science of climate change and global warming and project the message that he deeply cares for the world we will leave to our children. You will likely come away from his lecture with the determination that something must be done to reverse the current trends. If you are a global warming skeptic, I think you will be moved to rethink your position.

 

Al Gore’s message is simple: Since the beginning of the industrial age some 150 years ago, humanity as expanded explosively from perhaps one billion to about 10 billion people today. Collectively humanity is now able to affect our atmosphere and the global climate with our ever-growing need to convert fossil fuels into energy and the burning of bush and forests across the globe. A startling nighttime composite image of the Earth showed the near continuous belt of burning bush across wide swaths of Africa and Asia in the drive to convert bush to agricultural land, framed by the glare of burning gas flares in the oil and gas fields of the oil producing nations and the bright belts of our civilization’s lightshow in the developed world.

 

The time of ‘consequences’, as Al Gore puts it, has come. A barrage of images showed the Now and Then of mountain ranges, just half a century ago covered in thick glaciers now laying bare baking in the sun; lakes like the lake Chad in Africa, once perhaps the largest lake in the world and providing drinking water to 40 million, now a mere trickle; the Caspian sea, dried out by Russian irrigation projects; the Larsen B ice shelf in Antarctica, stable for at least the last 10.000 years and the size of the US state of Rode Island or over 3000Km square and 200 meter thick, suddenly entirely collapsing in the year 2001; the prospect of an ice free north pole in summer mid century; the last of the ice on Kilimanjaro… and the list goes on and on.

 

The center of his evidence is a graph showing the level of CO2 and temperature closely related over the past 600.000 years with CO2 levels suddenly rushing upward and truly off the charts within our life times to twice of what it has ever been in all these hundreds of thousands of years. The fingerprints of the culprits are unmistakable: Homo Sapiens and his greed. The signs of massive and geologically speaking sudden changes on Earth can not be disputed as seems.

 

Of cause Al Gore is also a politician. And his dismay with the current Republican US administration is obvious and expected. He shows an image from a Republican discussion poster where a set of scales is weighing the ‘negative’ economic effects of conservation – symbolized by a stack of gold bars – against conservation measures – symbolized by an image of the Earth. Hmmm Al Gore says: “What would you rather have, the gold or the Earth? And well, what would we do with the gold of economic success when we lost the Earth in its pursuit?”

 

Al Gore makes the excellent point that environmental protection and economic success are not contradicting each other, to the contrary. As an example take the US auto industry. For decades the US automotive industry lobby has held that the introduction of higher fuel consumption and emission standards would cost jobs and hurt the US economy. But now look where Ford and GM have ended up – all but bankrupt, while Japanese auto makers with their innovative fuel efficient designs and hybrid technologies are outselling US built fuel guzzlers hands down. US cars can not even be sold in China because they do not meet the strict Chinese environmental standards!

 

The message is clear: progress happens when the right things are done, not when entrenched parties uphold outdated paradigms with the weight of their political influence. The protection of the environment is a necessity for progress, because without it, there is no future.

 

I have heard the argument that Global Warming is just a conspiracy perpetrated on us by money hungry governments. Nonsense! Take the profit of Exxon Mobile for example. Their last quarter profit was a staggering US$10 Billion. Now imagine the World would embark on a crash program to curb 10% of our global fuel consumption. The oil price would recede and what do you think would happen to Exxon’s profits? See who is really profiting from inaction and the status-quo and who is sponsoring the false debate over if – or if not – the world is warming due to our actions.

 

Al Gore’s father was a tobacco grower. Then Al Gore’s older sister, a life long smoker, died of lung cancer. Now the family’s tobacco plantation lays bare. Al Gore drew the parallel between the ‘debate’ whether smoking can cause illness and the global warming debate. In both cases leaked memos from then the tobacco industry and now the carbon industry reveal their strategy: “undermine the notion that a scientific consensus has been reached, confuse the public” or as the Romans used to say: “Divide et Impera” (Divide and Conquer).

 

Just as with the smoking debate, time will surely give the definitive answer. But while smoking is a choice of individuals, the direction of our civilization and the protection of our environment is a choice we must collectively make. And with climate change, once the Genie is out of the bottle far enough, there will be no turning back.

 

Al Gore showed images of the Larsen ice shelf in the Antarctic in the years before it suddenly collapsed. It showed strange pockmarks all over, where surface melt water had made puddles in the 200-meter thick ice. The Scientists thought that the water would simply seep down into the ice and re-freeze there. But what actually happened was different. The melt water bored tunnels all the way down to the base of the ice shelf causing it to weaken like a Swiss cheese until the entire 3000 square km ice shelf suddenly collapsed in the year 2001. Then Al Gore showed footage of the same symptoms happening on the Greenland ice shelf. On about half the land-based Greenland ice deep melt water rivers form in summer now and torrents of melt water are gushing down hundreds of meters into ice tunnels, disappearing under the ice and drilling a maze of holes and rivers through it. Underneath the ice the water is forming a lubricating layer on which it can slide. The flow rate of some of these glaciers has sped up by a factor of 3 in the last years.

The Larsen ice shelf was floating on ocean water and therefore its sudden collapse did not raise ocean levels. But if what happened there is repeated in Greenland, then the amount of ice that might slide from the land into the ocean could raise sea levels by 26 feet world wide, submersing the livelihoods of hundreds of millions of people. Take to that the images of melting permafrost – you could drive a truck over it 200 days a year two decades ago, now it’s down to 80 – and you get the picture. Besides, the rate of species extinction is currently a thousand times higher than the expected background rate. Wherever we look, it seems obvious that we are entering a time of rapid change.

 

Al Gores message is not desperate though. He points out that with technology available to us today we could lower our rate of emissions to below that of 1970 in a decade or two. It would simply take the political will to do it. And as much of this effort would directly lower our dependency on fossil fuels – well, we might just postpone the end of oil for while longer if we tried.

 

As of myself, I think that the biggest question will be if we manage to live in peace, a necessary prerequisite of tackling any major global issues, despite a looming resource crises and emerging religious fascism.  Welcome to the 21^st century – you will be living in interesting times….. as the old Chinese curse goes.

 

Thomas Everth