Monday, June 12, 2006

Global Warning



Over the weekend Pat and I went to see Al Gore's new documentary called "An Inconvenient Truth", which is all about global warming. My new pal Al cites a study that reviewed a random sample of ~1000 peer-reviewed articles on climate change and found that not one of them questioned whether or not it is happening. (He also shows that in the media, 53% of articles question climate change) .

The doc does a great job of showing the parallels between CO2 emissions and warming, and of explaining the potential consequences of gobal warming. Like, if Greenland starts to melt too fast, the whole gulf stream current could stop existing. That would be hugely bad news for all of us. And if all of Greenland melts, hundreds of millions of people in places like China and Bangladesh will find their homes underwater. (Oh, some of us will too here in North America but the numbers aren't quite as staggering).

Even though the film ends on a relatively hopeful note - I think the intent is to inspire - I left the theatre feeling pretty sad. I think it had to do with my revelation earlier this week that the Canadian government just does not care. And that probably, it hasn't for a while, regardless of the specific administration. What happened to us, Canada? We used to think we were environmental leaders!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I don't blame you for feeling like that. Thanks for the review - I'm going to go see this.

Anonymous said...

This is a comment on your previous post about the Brita water ad, I found this article in the Vancouver Sun yesterday - I'm glad to see that you weren't the only one who noticed that those ads were completely brutal!
http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/voices/story.html?id=11ae4da1-25ee-4866-9709-67bfa0b22a89

Happy Owl said...

Thanks for the link Simone - interesting story! I'm not surprised that they are angry about the commercial. The other older ad they describe at the end of the article sounds awful as well.