A nature hike through the Book of Revelations
More Gore on our screens
A tubby, middle-aged man in a jacket and open-neck shirt does a Power Point lecture. They turn it into a feature film, released theatrically. It is one of the most gripping, powerful and important films I've seen this year. An Inconvenient Truth feels like a great sigh of relief, as America finally wakes up the idea that climate change is a reality and not, as certain government-controlled maverick scientists would have had them believe, a theory. When the ice on the top of Kilimanjaro is melting and hurricanes tear the shit out of entire communities and the hottest years on record are, like, this year, last year, the year before that, and so on, it's time to take your head out of the sand. Al Gore was into this stuff in the late 60s and 70s, and is anything but an eco-warrior-come-lately (actually, even if he was, so what? God loves a recent convert) - he was frankly sidetracked by a career in politics. Having been elected to the House of Representatives, where he truly believed he could do some good, he actually got caught up in a lot of hot air, and, eventually, that tragic, failed bid for the presidency in 2000. At least this put him back into the real world, where he picked up the laptop again and went out on a real campaign trail. It does not bear thinking about: this man could have been president and not coporation-loving, gas-guzzling, Alaska-drilling, regulation-relaxing, climate-change-denying George W Bush whose father, in the 1992 campaign against Bill Clinton, said of Gore, "This guy is so far out in the environmental extreme we'll be up to our necks in owls and outta work for every American." Anyway, Gore is doing more now than he ever could in Congress. He's one of my heroes.
This film is a fairly unspectacular record of one of his presentations, intercut with perhaps one too many shots of him staring meaningfully out of windows, or fiddling with his laptop in hotel rooms (the confessional stuff about his sister dying and his son nearly dying are a little unecessary too - I was on his side already), but the material is explosive - and explosively put across in a series of graphs and slides and then-and-now photographs of the Larsen B ice shelf and the dried-up Lake Chad and so on, with Gore as your genial, impassioned and even sometimes humorous narrator. He's like a quiet preacher, delivering The Truth, but an Illustrated Truth. I actually believe that this film, which is released here on September 15, should be shown to every child in every school in every country in the world. We and our parents and their parents and their parents before them have fucked up the planet, and if the kids don't know this, the cycle will continue. We have to break the cycle. As Gore says, most people go from denial to despair, but he says it doesn't have to be this way, and offers plenty of ways we, as a nation, or as a people, or as individuals, can slow down global warming.
I like the fact that the film has a U certificate, with this warning: CONTAINS IMAGES OF ECOLOGICAL DISASTERS. Yeah, and they're scarier than anything in Hostel or United 93.
posted by Andrew Collins @ 7:05 AM
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Pity he didn't get in 2000 (oh, sorry, he did, didn't he) - we might have got a headstart on the global warming issue. Just read that CFC-removal from fridges/aerosols is closing the ozone hole over the Antarctic - see what happens when the nettle is grasped firmly. Maybe there's hope for us yet.
Good point, Al, and one that Gore makes in the film. It is encouraging indeed. Taking the lead out of petrol was another. The US can do these things. Interesting that only the US and Australia refuse to ratify Kyoto. Why is that?
Gorbachev was in Oz recently and urged Howard to sign Kyoto - advice fell on deaf ears. Indeed, the federal environment minister dissed the protocol saying:
"Unfortunately [Kyoto] ignored almost totally around 70 percent of the world's emissions. Under Kyoto if everyone meets their targets, the world's greenhouse gas emissions will, in fact, go up between 1990 and the year 2012 by around 41 percent."
The concern apparently is that committing to targets for reductions in carbon emissions would wreck Australia's coal-based energy sector and throw the country's economy into recession.
Seems a bit short-termist to me.
Al Gore has fine eco-intentions.
It's a pity that his (and Tipper's) policies on the arts and freedom of expression are to the right of Genghis Kahn....
Yup. Just the name "Gore" makes me think of Tipper and all that PMRC nonsense. She was wrong about that, wasn't she?
It's a shame Jimmy Carter didn't make a film about the imminent ice age back in the 70s.
Don't confuse weather with climate.
"Don't confuse weather with climate," says the brave anonymous poster. Are you trying to be clever? Are you saying that bad stuff is not happening? It seems pretty unequivocal that it is.
Weather is a general term for meteorological conditions. Climate relates to the average weather conditions of a particular place. Pointing up the subtle difference between those two terms isn't going to save us! A hurricane is weather. A hurricane is caused by climate.
Daft bit of trivia but did you know that both the lead additive in petrol and CFCs were invented by the same man: Thomas Midgley. Who says that one person can't change the world... ;(
On one newspaper's weather page today it has the usual map with the temperatures in circles; they range from 15 to 20, but in the circle over London it says 180. And to think in the same paper last week there was an article suggesting global warming was down to the sun and not us - so let's not bother being on the safe side eh...
I may be pedantic here, but I simply quote the lyrics of Half Man Half Biscuit's "Shit Arm, Bad Tattoo": "If you're going to quote from the Book of Revelation / Don't keep calling it the Book of Revelations / There's no 'S'/ It's the Book of Revelation / As revealed to Saint John the Divine". Sorry.
Chris, I am delighted to be corrected via the medium of Half Man Half Biscuit, but my headline is a direct quote from Mr Gore, unless I misheard him. I don't make notes during film screenings. I'm pretty sure he said it with an "s", which just goes to show how deeply the mistake is ingrained. May I quote Half Man Half Biscuit back at you? "Half past ten? Half past ten?" (Doesn't mean anything, but I like it.)
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