Wednesday, October 04, 2006

Al Gore's Movie, "An Inconvenient Truth"

The seminary I work at is among some 4,000 churches and faith-based institutions that are showing in October the movie, "An Inconvenient Truth." Produced by Al Gore, it is both a filming of the talks he gives on global climate change and on the ethical/moral implications of how we live, especially here in the United States.

We have had two showings so far, one on Monday afternoon and the other on Tuesday evening. I was the facilitator for the discussion after last evening's movie showing. And we have one more showing this coming Saturday afternoon.

The movie is worth seeing. Even though it focuses mostly on the implications to global climate change (and is not a movie about "Peak Oil" per se), it does portray fairly the science behind measured CO2 increases, the implications of exponential growth in population, and the use of fossil fuels, particularly in the U.S., and the effects on the atmosphere. The movie is a good starting point for discussions to take place, and hopefully will have an impact on all who see it in suggesting that changes are needed in how we live.

I recommend that you find a showing of the movie to attend.

And I heard over the last weekend that there is a second movie now out on global climate change, with Keanu Reeves as one of the two narrators. I have not seen this one yet, but the radio story I heard about it suggests that this movie is even more "hard hitting" than "An Inconvenient Truth" on the need to change how we live.

Global climate change, which is already happening, is pretty scary. It is changing everything with how we have come to expect the physical world to behave (or at least what we are used to experiencing) with respect to climate, and in the global distribution of water. I've accepted global change as happening since the summer of 1990, and in the time I've been watching climate, even I can see the changes taking place. While local changes in some places may be to the good, the overall impact of change is only toward the negative, no matter how warm or cold, dry or wet, it may get. And the evidence is fairly clear to me that humans are playing a very major role in the climate changes that are happening - these are not just further cycles of change with glaciation and inter-glacial warm periods - those feedbacks and cycles have been modified by human intervention. And like rates of global population growth not being able to reverse themselves immediately, same too with the warming of global climate. Inertia is going to drive things forward for yet some time. Yet we need to make changes now in how we live - drastic changes that consume less, don't reproduce population so quickly, and don't pollute - if we hope to have some chance of alleviating (lessening) the impacts later of what is already happening.

See the movie if you can.