Went to go see Al Gore's Movie this weekend. It was cool to finally be one of the people in the "selected cities" to see a movie before the rest of the country. About the movie...go see it, if for anything else, to support the dude because I'm pretty sure he hasn't had work since 2000.
The trailer tries to make it seem like the movie is about knocking our current administration, and about making claims about how bad the world is going to be if the glacier melt and stuff, but that is the marketing companies mostly trying to cater to they liberal crowd that they think will come see this movie. In all seriousness though, this movie is about very little political anything, in fact half of it is pretty much facts, most of them irrefutable. Its kind of hard to argue with a ocean that dried up or chunks of antartica that has disappeared. It is also hard to argue that hurricanes are getting stronger lately. It is hard to argue with pretty much everything in this movie, and if you enjoy arguing I would encourage you to try. There are plenty of facts in all of these political movies, like Fahrenheit 911, but this movie lacks the biased commentary and the pulling at emotional heartstrings that you would expect of a Michael Moore movie. The heart of the movie is a college style lecture deliverd by Gore to a college style audience, and it is cut up by occasional behind the scenes of the wild life of Al Gore (hard at work putting together a power point). But the facts you get from the movie are only slightly arguable and the only conclusion you come to is that something must be done or shit might hit the fan something serious sometime soon.
2 comments:
dude, so much to say i don't know where to start.
http://www.timesrepublican.com/columns/articles.asp?articleID=1886
then, read michael crichton's speech on environmentalism as religion, and you'll see why all this global warming talk is not nearly as substantiated as it should be for all the attention it gets.
http://www.crichton-official.com/speeches/speeches_quote05.html
the point of the matter is that we can't prove the climate is changing FOREVER to any degree of certainty. the fact is that even our methods of measurement have become more precise in the last five years, thus, how can we be so sure of the validity of the measurements taken 100 years ago? we can't. plus, we have to remember that our earth goes in something like 1,000 year cycles, not yearly cycles like we would expect. the climate of the earth varies on a macro-level, rather than just by century. thus, we have very likely experienced this sort of change long ago.
currently there is certainly more severe weather than in past times. But every time I hear of a record high or a record low or a record-breaking hurricane, the fact of hte matter is that records get broken all the time, and the records that get broken are typically from less than a year go. just as in track and field records get broken due in part to fresh knowledge and better technology... so are climatological records.
this is not to say 'ignore the environment'--but we must be skeptical of anyone professing a scientific finding as gospel. the environment is not a belief, and never should be.
besides, the chinese are the world's greatest polluter anyway--ever heard of "asian cloud"?
seriously, read crichton.
I like that chrichton article alot. It is mainly about the need for separating truth from propaganda, with environmentalism as an example. The people he describes and the religion they ascribe to is annoying. Yet I remember being fed some of the propaganda in eastover, watching a video of somebody in the year 2000 who couldn't walk the streets without a mask or something. And I still have a pine tree growing in my backyard that mcdonalds of all places gave out with happy meals.
On the flipside there has also been this backwards propaganda of mankind's inability to deal with it. In the face of our environmental situation has been a constant stream of "fuck that" which we have also been indoctrinated with. Mostly because we lack the ability to really change most stuff, the problems of our environment, and ideas of conversation tend to just fall by the wayside. The argument goes there isn't any evidence that anything we do is happening so why change.
The big problem is that these two things are at a stale mate. Environmentalism is convinced that any one person's foot print causes irreparable damage to our whole ecosystem, mean while the opposite continues to get proof that our way of life has affected the environment in any way at all ever. Scientists probably put themselves on either side and mainly seek to prove the other wrong. I think this movie tries to fall in between these two sides.
It is inherently environmentally friendly, and it does come with slight doomsday prediction, but not the ones you would predict. Life on earth won't stop, dinosaurs won't rule the earth. The only out landish that he talks about is perhaps an ice age in europe, and even there he stops short of making an actually claim that it may actually happen. Most of the time you see pictures of glaciers melting and desert forming and example of intense weather and you can draw your own conclusion. I don't believe you can find all the information without running into some hippyfest or some completely wrong assertions about shit that doesn't matter.
As far as the chrichton article. That idea of people gaining a religious fervor about social issues instead of, well, religion, is huge, and much of our society fragmented into religious-esque social group. When an issue, like the environment, comes along everyone sides up with their group and there is a frigging jihad, crusade, holy war to win support. All the effort gets focused on serving your cause and your religion, and not what the country needs. Conquest over compromise, it sucks.
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