An Inconvenient Truth
With special thanks to the USP’s University Scholars Seminar, I managed to catch the ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ movie on its premiere at Plaza Singapura Thursday night. For the blur ones, that’s the environmental documentary movie featuring Al Gore on the topic of the cause and effect of global warming (ain’t it surprising that USP gives free tickets to go watch a ‘nerd’ movie? Trailer on Apple.com is available here (I think I’ve posted it before, but no harm in reposting). YouTube video below. An Inconvenient Truth Trailer
NOTE: Review below contains spoilers from the movie ‘An Inconvenient Truth’. Don’t read this post if you still want to enjoy the documentary firsthand. In summary, the 100 min movie was slightly boring, for different reasons than what you may imagine. The movie was meant for the laypeople to understand the science of global warming and their effects. Since I’m already sold on the issue and is already knowledgeable on the basics of the scientific basis behind global warming I’m essentially going through a recap of what I have read up on global warming over the past 3 years. Some of you may recall the humongous Powerpoint presentation Chester, Krishna and I gave for LAN Moral (nope, I started reading way earlier still). Some of the material in our presentation was also covered in the movie, so you get some idea on what’s being shown in the movie. However, I do recommend that if you truly care about the environment but is still not very clear on what is global warming and how it affects us, watch the movie. Even if you are a humanitarian rather than environmentalist, go and watch it too. Why? Apart from warfare, most major humanitarian disasters are caused by climatic change. You’ll understand a bit more when you watch the movie, but I shall not go into the subject for now.
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The man who used to be the next President of the United States gave a clear-cut yet simple explanation of how global warming occurs (YouTube video clip below shows part of the presentation), how the effects are manifesting in the world today and why we are not seriously tackling the problem although we are technologically capable of dealing with it.
An Inconvenient Truth - Global Warming Cartoon
He goes around showing compelling comparison pictures of climate change in progress. In no particular order, it goes around showing entire glaciers vanishing; the deaths of pine trees across hundreds of thousands of acres; rate of species extinction 1,000 times above normal; heat waves in Europe and South Asia; record hurricane, typhoon and tornado formations in 2005; ice core samples from the poles showing CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere today is the highest in the past 600,000 years and so on. Hopefully, you’ll get scared.As for me, I have gotten too desensitised to the whole thing already. Good luck.
Of course, to drive the point in further there’s no substitute for modelling of coastal flooding predicted from the melting of glaciers in Antarctica and Greenland. The human mind is sensitive only to perceptible changes, and since global warming in its current progress will not be immediately obvious the only way to increase awareness is to extrapolate into the future. If you’re skeptical of the projections, I’ll tell you that what is being shown in the movie are nothing like the worse case scenarios predicted. What is being shown is probably flooding when sea levels are raised by ‘only’ 20 feet, when predictions range to a maximum of >130 feet (out of a maximum of 250 feet). And yet, when faced with even modest projections, critics make accusations of scaremongering.
That’s all the time I have to spare on this post. If you want more information, watch the movie or go to www.climatecrisis.net.
In the meantime, here’s something else for laughs.
A Terrifying Message from Al Gore
