It's 11:06 and My Life Has Been Changed
Okay. I know some of you hate Al Gore, or at least hate his politics. I know, okay? I know.
But all of you, each and every single one of my millions of readers, must go see An Inconvenient Truth.
I know. Some of you hate Al Gore. And although the film contains a few partisan digs, they are well deserved precisely because of the data behind them. Ignore the politics if you must (and I promise there's not a lot of political stuff), but I guarantee your perspective will be changed in fundamental and profound ways.
The data are incontrovertible and terrifying, and that ain't hyperbole. Go see it. You'll be better for doing so.
posted by Trout @ 10:10 PM
9 comments
9 Comments:
Is that the movie about the Global Warming? Cause I want to see that.
but i'm so happy living in my denial bubble.
Softball Slut - Yup, that's the one.
Jonashpdx - You can't afford to live in your denial bubble. Unless your denial bubble comes equipped with an air filter, water recycling kit, and very strong air conditioning.
Anna - Everyone should be scared about this, and taking it as (if not more) seriously as any other global issue. But yes, there is hope, and yes, the film offers good ways of addressing the problems... but I must emphasize that we are currently not addressing the problem very well at all.
Super Secret Guest Reader Who Knows a Thing or Two About Nanotechnology - I'm interested in hearing your thoughts about nanotech and chemical engineering.
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Due respect, Blue Eyes, but kindly post citations of your "experts."
I've read enough of your blog to know your political leanings, and you're entitled to your opinions, but you're an effing idiot if you choose to believe what crackpot and/or rightwing-funded "scientific institutes" claim about global warming. No one in the real scientific community - you know, the independent one with peer-reviewed publications - disputes the data or what the data predict.
Those who dispute global warming have political and/or monetary reasons to dispute it. Too bad you and your party have been wrong about this all along.
dude, you're referencing lindzen?
okay, then let's look at this lindzen quote from the wikipedia writeup blue eyes linked:
"Picking holes in the IPCC is crucial. The notion that if you’re ignorant of something and somebody comes up with a wrong answer, and you have to accept that because you don’t have another wrong answer to offer is like faith healing, it’s like quackery in medicine – if somebody says you should take jelly beans for cancer and you say that’s stupid, and he says, well can you suggest something else and you say, no, does that mean you have to go with jelly beans?"
read that carefully, blue eyes. lindzen is not debunking/discrediting greenhouse gases as the cause for global warming. what he's saying is it may or may not be the cause, we simply don't know one way or the other.
for conservatives to hold him up as a proponent of theirs in their pursuit of further environmental destruction is absurd. he has not ruled out greenhouse gases as a cause for global warming; he's simply a scientist who believes there isn't enough data to know one way or the other.
further proof of his neutrality can be found again in the wikipedia writeup:
"In an article for the Wall Street Journal (June 11, 2001), Lindzen stated that "there is no consensus, unanimous or otherwise, about long-term climate trends or what causes them" and "we are not in a position to confidently attribute past climate change to carbon dioxide or to forecast what the climate will be in the future."
lindzen seems to be all about data, while the conservative folks who misuse his research are mostly about spin.
ol' blue eyes,
don't play the "i never said anything against global warming" card. what follows are your clearly biased prior comments (including strategic placement of quotations, sarcastic adjectives, and cheeky use of capitalization) in case you forgot about them:
"I've read some 'stuff' about that movie and almost everything he says has been debunked by experts. You'd have thought he would have gotten it right, he DID invent the internet and all..."
and
"Here's one big expert for you...
http://bopedia.com/en/wikipedia/r/ri/richard_lindzen.html
But I imagine that he's too right wing for you to believe, or maybe its in a publication you don't trust."
but you are absolutely right about the following:
"WE DON'T KNOW ENOUGH about global warming to be alarmists, but we DO have to do SOMETHING."
Oh, I don't know, Blue Eyes and David, I think the scientific community overwhelmingly (but since there's always someone out there that says the world is flat, I'll admit that it's not "everyone") agrees that greenhouse gasses cause global warming.
We do, in fact, know enough. Claiming anything else, especially if your sources are iffy at best, is just silly.
I can see how all of this sounds alarmist, but that's because there's a remarkable lack of urgency on behalf of policymakers (not to mention the public).
Blue Eyes, I'm really not trying to pick on you because of your politics. I truly, deeply believe this issue should transcend mere ideology. But this kind of thing is frustrating - policymakers of all stripes are ignoring the urgency, and the spin machines peddle junk science in the name of protecting whatever it is they need to protect.
Meanwhile, the scientific community has data that strongly indicates a major climate change is in the works due mostly to carbon dioxide.
And if the high fallutin' data doesn't do it for you, buy earplugs, go see the movie, and look at the pictures of glaciers and ice caps from 50 (and in some cases 10) years ago compared to today. It's an unpleasant site at best.
Oh for Pete's sake.
"Sight." Unpleasant sight. Not site.
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