From: Less is better
Posted At: Wednesday, June 21, 2006 11:38 PM
Posted To: RSS2
Conversation: Less is better
Subject: An Inconvenient Truth
In a way, my life was on a collision course with this movie.
My formal education is in science (I have a Ph.D in Organic Chemistry). I am a skeptic by nature, and I really hate people who hijack “science” to support their positions. Science oftentimes has a hard enough time sorting out the truth without help from the lunatic fringe, yet more often than not it winds up self-correcting (I fondly recall grad students from Polanyi lab working to debunk the cold fusion debacle of 1989).
Earlier this year I renewed my love affair with my iPod while taking care of my newborn son in the evenings. I spent quite a few hours in the late evening listening to podcasts to help pass the time as I was walking around the house carrying/rocking/jiggling/shushing my son. While searching for new content, I discovered the Stanford iTunes site and started downloading some really great talks – one of the best was Robert Dunbar’s Reunion Homecoming lecture Is Global Warming Real? Climate Change and Our Energy Future.
That talk summarized in a very approachable way the overwhelming amount of evidence about the relationship between CO2 levels and global temperatures. This was the first time that I had heard about polar glacial ice core evidence that provides very accurate climatic data that spans many hundreds of thousands of years.
So at lunch today, I decided to play hookey and went to see a matinee showing of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. The movie is largely based on his presentation on global warming that he has given over a thousand times on the road. It’s interspersed with personal commentary by Al Gore that reveals a very human element to his story. And what a story it is. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, but most important of all, you’ll learn something. And perhaps you’ll be moved enough to do something about it.
That’s the really great part of the story. It’s not all doom and gloom. There is a positive message that carries through the movie: it’s not too late – and you can do something about it. As technologists, we like to think that technology can help solve our problems. That’s a core theme in this movie: embrace technology that helps us reduce our carbon emissions. And developing that technology is not only good business, but a moral imperative.
When you’re done, head on over to RealClimate.org and read what real climatologists have to say about it. After reading that, you should read this widely cited article that presents the opposing viewpoint. But please, make up your own mind.
I’ve made up my mind to do something about it. I hope that this blog will help some of you to do the same.
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