I went to see the movie “An Inconvenient Truth” the other evening in San Jose. It was an odd experience. The first thing that I noticed is that it was pretty easy to find a place to sit with less then 20 people in the theater. To be fair, I didn’t see any more people going to the other shows in the six-plex, Maybe it just wasn’t a movie night.
The movie itself was very different from anything I have ever seen. It was in the format of a slide show presentation in a hall. Gore was on the stage presenting “his slideshow” and an audience was watching. It was kind of like a video of a presentation. There was more to it than that, often we would be shown clips of various places around the world to illustrate his point. These filled the screen, and were therefore different from what a person would experience in the audience of his talk. However, basically it was a lecture by Gore on the threat of global warming.
I already was aware of almost all of the things that he presented, but I may be unusually interested in the topic so have made the effort to educate myself on the topic before seeing the movie. Even with these things he did a nice job of explaining them, and illustrated them in new ways. For me it only brought a couple of new items, but there would probably be much more for folks who have not spent much time thinking about the problem. I think he did a good job of cutting through the controversy to the heart of the matter – we are causing the earth to enter an era of heating that is unprecedented in our knowledge of the past many millions of years. We have already driven the CO2 concentration higher than it has been at any time in the past 600,000 years, which includes six ice ages and huge fluctuations in CO2 and temperature. What we have already done is far out of the normal, and what will happen in the next few years if we don’t really get serious about stopping it will be orders of magnitude worse than anything that the earth has experienced in millions of years. As far as we can tell, it appears that will be a far larger effect than volcanoes, ice ages, or whatever other unbalances the earth has been subjected to.
Just as a note to those that believe the oceans can absorb the extra CO2 in the atmosphere. That is probably correct at any instance in time. If we stopped producing new CO2, the oceans could probably absorb the extra and bring it back into equilibrium. However, that is not what is happening. The oceans are right now absorbing as much as they can, but we are clearly adding more faster than can be absorbed, that is why the concentration continues to increase. It is a good thing that there are large “sinks” available, otherwise there would be no hope in reducing the concentrations, and the temperature, even if are capable of solving the problem of adding too much. In any case, it is clear that the oceans are not capable of absorbing it nearly as fast as we are in making it, otherwise we wouldn’t be seeing the increases that are very evident.
I think the scariest part of Gore’s talk was his clear presentation of the idea that this is a process that accelerates on itself, meaning there is positive feedback. For example, the more ice melts on the poles exposing open water, the less sunlight gets reflected back into space, meaning that more sun goes to warming the exposed oceans, meaning that the ice melts faster. There are many positive feedback loops involved, and few negative ones. (There are a few negative ones that I know of which he didn’t mention, such as plants growing faster in warming weather, using more carbon dioxide to add to their growth.) However, the overall effect is that the feedback is a positive one, leading toward run-away (moving away from equilibrium) increases in global temperatures.
Then of course there is the big potential problem of turning off the huge energy pump sometimes called the “conveyor belt” that runs around the world through our oceans. This giant “heat pump” is responsible for much of our excellent weather because it transfers excess heat from the tropics up to the northern regions, and brings cold water back to the tropics to cool them. It results in moderating the overall temperature of earth. If this stops working, then the tropics will get much warmer, and the poles much colder – throwing us into another ice age. So global heating results in ice ages – interesting. This is most likely to occur if the ice melts and changes the salinity of the oceans in the vicinity of the down currents.
If the ice melts, stopping the conveyor belt, the same water would result in raising the oceans about 20 feet. If the ice on the other pole melts also, it would add another 20 feet. Hum, that would be a problem.
Gore ended up with a bunch of recommendations on how to get ourselves out of this mess, made a compelling point that this effort would be good for the economies of the world (including the USA). He also pointed out that we have been successful in banding together to solve the ozone depletion problem, and have all of the tools and know how necessary to solve this one – but seem to be lacking the will to do so.
I find it very odd that people object to doing anything because it would be inconvenient and expensive to do anything about it. That seems like a pretty short sided view of expense and convenience to me. If the oceans rise 30 feet or so, it will destroy untold trillions of dollars worth of property and real estate, not to mention the cost of displacing billions of people. I think that could be considered to be “expensive” by any ones thinking. What good it is to save a few billion dollars if the outcome of doing this is to destroy most of human civilization and wealth. This doesn’t include the effects of changing the climates so that floods and draughts prevail over large parts of the world, making it impossible to grow enough food to sustain our population. Large scale death and disease is bound to result, which is both quite inconvenient and costly.
To me it just makes no sense at all to not take on this problem. We know it is there, there is scientific question that it is happening, that it will happen faster and we could do something about it. It is about as close to a scientific certainty as science can get. I talked to a local friend about this last night and his response was, “it doesn’t matter, God is coming back soon.” That is taking a whole lot of faith that I don’t see any reason at all to support.
Even if it turns out that we aren’t on the verge of causing a global catastrophe with our use of petroleum products, what harm could possible be caused by cutting back on that by conservation, creating new and more efficient products, in using renewable (non-polluting) energy sources? How could not burning fuel have a negative impact on us, particularly if we are careful and do it in ways that do not reduce, but rather enhance, our style of living and productivity? For example, how has cutting automobile pollution resulted in anything bad happening to us or the economy? It looks like we still have pretty good cars, that we still go where we want, and that our lifestyle is better, not worse. Why does the prospect of a change necessarily mean reverting to the dark ages? (Actually, not making the changes might very well mean reverting to the dark ages.)
The biggest problem and complaint that I had with the movie was the more or less constant self-aggrandizing of Gore as a person and a politician. He should have stayed with his topic, and stayed away from any discussion of the person of Gore. As it is, there is so much political stuff in the movie that I can’t honestly recommend it to my conservative “friends”. They will just see it as the beginning of a run for the Presidency. They will entirely miss the good points that he is making because they are forced to see Gore the politician, rather than Gore the concerned citizen. This is a very big, and nasty mistake. It is similar to the mistakes that Gore made in his last run for the Presidency. Instead of telling us what he thinks and believes, he tried to tell all of America what he thought that we wanted to hear. This didn’t work at all. We just needed to hear him say what he believes in, and let the chips fall as they may. This is the same. We need to hear about global warming, not about Gore. Once again he has ruined the opportunity by using the forum for multiple messages.
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