Save us from an extremely uncomfortable future.
Has anyone other than Al Gore noticed that Lake Chad is missing? Actually, there might have been a tiny portion of water visible in the overhead picture on display, but whatever was left of the once gigantic lake was too minuscule to make out in Gore's film,
An Inconvenient Truth
. The former vice president and presidential candidate (Gore wittily refers to himself as "the former next president of the United States") has made a documentary of the slide show on global warming he's been giving all over the world. Images of Lake Chad are just a couple of
***image1***
many illustrations he uses to point out the simple, terrible, unavoidable "truth" in the title of his film: If we don't do something, we all gonna die, peoples.
Gore is in a unique position to play Chicken Little. In the '60s at Harvard, he was a student of Roger
Revelle, a science professor whose research predicted that carbon particles spewed into the atmosphere would eventually wreak havoc on the earth's environment.
Bodies of water-perhaps not as big as Lake Chad, but just as important-are already missing. Mountaintops have been stripped of their snowy peaks. Gigantic swaths of arctic ice have vanished, leaving polar bears treading water and the scientists who watch over them panicked at the rapidity of their erosion. These are not predictions, but actual pictures of things that have already happened.
Despite the severity of his predictions, Gore refrains from the kind of spastic demagoguery that undid Michael Moore's
Fahrenheit 9/11
. He makes his points in measured, mostly unemotional tones, though not without some humor, however rueful. There are moments when the politician in him comes out and he sounds like a campaigner spinning hokey tales of life on the farm, but overall he makes his case in a thoughtful, convincing manner.
Taking sides is no easy task with the Scylla and Charybdis of this unfortunate "debate." You either
***image2***
deny the overwhelming evidence or risk looking like a crazy person. With that in mind, Al Gore deserves credit for heroic courage in the face of ridicule. For is there a more iconographic image of a lunatic than a man standing on the street corner shouting about the end of the world?
Global warming has been an argument too easy to dismiss. "It is difficult to get a man to understand something," Upton Sinclair wrote, "when his salary depends on his not understanding it." Gore quotes Sinclair all too appropriately. For most of us our salaries depend on not understanding global warming.
An Inconvenient Truth
is a devastating document of a swiftly approaching reckoning with that misunderstanding. Our salaries may depend on our not understanding the truth, but our lives depend on the opposite.
