Al Gore Inconvenient Truth

al gore inconvenient truth is quite a phenomenon.

A top grossing movie ($50 million on a $1 budget), several best-selling books, a lecture tour of global proportions, an army of supporters and even a Nobel peace prize for a man who, bar a handful of votes, would have been American president.

Eventually there will be a movie about the movie.

Like most phenomenon, the inconvenient truth is not without controversy.

Some of the science used to create the imagery is questionable, most famously the ‘hockey stick’ graph that neatly makes the Medieval Warming and the Little Ice Age disappear just to make a point.

Some of the claims for climate change effects are on the extreme end.

Sea level rise is not going to be that catastrophic and whilst there is evidence that the poles have been ice free this does not happen in ice ages, such as the one we are in now.

And then there is the position Al Gore holds as an investor, and some say, major beneficiary of the climate change rhetoric. Should a guy spruik future catastrophe and then invest in the solution?

But let’s go back to when al gore inconvenient truth film was released in 2006.

Even though there had been climate change talk since the Rio Earth Summit more than a decade earlier, most of us knew very little about climate change in 2006, or the array of climate change effects. The movie and subsequent media attention certainly raised awareness that there was an issue.

This was, and remains, important.

Awareness of an issue goes a long way to finding a solution. Millions of people letting their subconscious turn over a problem is a powerful process that has given us great innovation time and time again.

Plus ignorance is bliss for the lemming until it reaches the cliff.

So while the al gore inconvenient truth phenomenon might have been slightly economical with the truth by

• not fully explaining climate change over geological time, or
• admitting that most of the warming predictions rely on models with considerable inherent uncertainty, or
• forgetting to mention that many of the same models have Antarctic ice growing in thickness and extent from greater precipitation under moderate warming;

the list could go on; the overall message was designed to be acute enough to raise awareness for more than just a few specialists.

And in that it succeeded.

the conundrum

Whether global warming will be acute or not, or even if al gore inconvenient truth claims for anthropogenic global warming turn out not to be true or not; awareness of climate change is critical to our progress as a species.

It is especially important to our continued co-existence with other species. Many more of us now know that clearing land, burning fossil fuels and using up water resources has consequences. There are so many of us that the Earth can no longer absorb our actions without impacting on the way the natural cycles work or on the other organisms who share the space.

In short the environment is changing as a result of our actions — and this is an inconvenient truth.

If we had not realized that our environment was changing, the consequences would have come to bite us; and they may yet.

Only now we have begun to do something. For example, the main premise of carbon trading is to gather externalities onto corporate balance sheets through the policies generated by more environmentally aware politicians.

This is quite a remarkable outcome given the unfettered economic growth paradigm that has dominated western society for generations.

Yes it is a small step, but a significant one.

Tall oaks from small acorns grow.

this raised swamp in NSW Australia is a habitat at risk from climate change

More reading from CCW

Environmental Issues for Real by Dr J. Mark Dangerfield looks at some of the obvious, and some of the not so obvious, challenges for a growing human population living as we do in a finite world.

Only this time it's not about the impending disasters or the guilt or the blame.

This time, it’s 10 brief essays that are about the bigger picture. In less than an hour you could glimpse something different, a view that we can only see when we take a fresh look.

Download your copy at Smashwords