An Inconvenient Truth
I recently had the opportunity to see Al Gore’s documentary about global warming, An Inconvenient Truth.
If you haven’t seen it yet, I highly recommend it.
The data and the before and after pictures were all very effective in communicating the point of the movie which is that we are entering a “period of consequences” when we will see rapid changes in the environment due to global warming. Watching the movie, it is hard to escape considering the possibility that the human race could easily go the way of the dinosaurs if we don’t pay more attention to how our actions are impacting the temperature of the planet and consequently other forms of life that share it.
While Al Gore is straighforward and convincing in communicating his message, I found him self-congratulatory at times. When the movie was about him it was less interesting than when it was about the changes that have taken place recently in the environment.
The fact is that the universe doesn’t place a high value on human life. We are no more valuable to nature than any other species which is to say we have zero value to universe.
We can be disposed of through extinction very quickly and the process of evolution will go on without us, creating new species of life that are better adapted to the environment that we abused to the point of killing ourselves.
Remember that over 99% of the species that have ever lived on the planet are now extinct. Humans could easily join that majority.
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January 8th, 2007 at 4:52 pm
I find it difficult to characterize the possibility of human extinction as “easy.” While it’s true that extinction is possible because humans are mortal and extinction certainly does happen to species over time, there has never been a species like homo sapiens in biology or accomplishment.
I don’t see why humans can’t adapt to changes in the environment like we adapt to everything else.
January 8th, 2007 at 5:45 pm
You are correct that there has never been a species like homo sapiens, especially when it comes to our ability to understand the environment and our relationship to it.
But it would far easier for a single species to become extinct under the right conditions than it would be for the many different genera (estimated to be around 1,844) of dinosaurs to become extinct.
It is estimated that dinosaurs, which are many species, roamed the planet for over 160 million years. Homo sapiens, which is just a single species, has only been here for less that 200,000 years which is a teensy blip on the evolutionary timeline. We could disappear as quickly as we arose or in a much shorter time.
Ironically, we could disappear because we arose too quickly for the the global environment to adapt to our impact. If our actions destroy the plants and animals that many believe are “inferior” or were put here by God to “serve” man, we will die because they are essential for our survival.
All organisms must adapt genetically to the environment to survive. If species necessary to sustain human life cannot adapt to human action, they will die and then we will die.
Arthropods (insects) have been here much longer and evolve much faster than humans in response to changes in the environment because they basically exist to mutate and breed, much like bacteria. Their life cycle is being disrupted because the plants they need to survive are blooming too soon or disappearing altogether.
Again, humans are just one species, not a whole collection of them.
Our ability to understand nature can also be our undoing. Our ability to manipulate our environment has also enabled us to have a HUGE impact on it. We usually manipulate without much attention to the long-term consequences of our actions.
We are unique in our ability to consciously manipulate the environment to the point where we can destroy our own ecological niche.
Given the number of humans that are ignorant of these facts or choose to reject them in favor of the fantasy that there is life outside this physical existence for those that follow certain religious beliefs, I’d say the chances that we could destroy our own species are quite good.
It is also possible that some event beyond our control makes us extinct as well.
When put into perspective on the evolutionary timeline, humans don’t look so important, certainly nowhere as important as we think we are. Our arrogance and narcissism may be the death of us.
Nature doesn’t care whether we are rational or not. Evolution will award survival to whatever species has the genes to adapt quickly in the event of rapid global change. As Rand and others have noted, “Nature, in order to be commanded, must be obeyed.”
January 8th, 2007 at 7:11 pm
There was a part in the film I found suspicious. I can’t remember it exactly. When Al Gore showed the giant chart of air temp (CO2?), he was correlating two numbers from ancient times. The number matched in terms of their movement warm and cool. Then he showed a dramatic increase in the last 100 years or so at the edge of the chart. Then, he got on the crane and showed a dramatic increase in one of the numbers, but FAILED to continue to correlate the other number for the last several critical years. Why? Was that data contradictory? I found that part mysterious.
January 8th, 2007 at 7:49 pm
If I remember correctly, he was only correlating CO2 level and temperature.
The chart showed that CO2 is already way above any level in the past. The other number was temperature and he was implying that very shortly (in the next few decades) we should also see a dramatic increase in temperature to correlate with the never-before-seen levels of CO2. (The period of consequences.)
A similar chart going back 400,000 years, with the timeline reversed, is on Wikipedia and labeled “Carbon Dioxide Variations.” It correlates CO2 levels with ice ages.
Adding to my previous post, man is not only a very recent addition to the evolutionary timeline on the planet, the Industrial Revolution is a very recent addition to man’s history and his impact on the global ecosystem. Two hundred years is nothing in the history of our ecosystem, yet we have dramatically altered the composition of the atmosphere, taking it to a level not seen while man has existed on this planet, in that very short period of time.
Gore also made the point that 10 of the hottest years ever recorded were in the last 14 years and the hottest was in 2005. That is a very sobering statistic given where the CO2 level is and how it has correlated with fluctuations in temperature over the past 400,000 years.
January 11th, 2007 at 7:15 pm
Ok I remember more clearly. In the last 100 years at the far right of the chart, before he got on the crane, the numbers (CO2 and air temp) both climbed very quickly. Then he showed the CO2 climb VERY quickly in the last tick of the graph. But- he did NOT complete the data of the air temp for that final tick. THEN he got on the crane. My implication is : what if that final data point showed a divergence between the very quickly rising CO2 and the airtemp? It would not disprove global warming, but it would cast doubt on what he does next on the crane.
Watch it again, you will see what I mean. He leaves out the final air temp data point. I tried to find that data on the net but could not. Overall, he made a great case with his slideshow. But..I suspect he left that data point out because it showed a divergence and would wreck his dramatic crane demonstration. It takes sharp eyes to spot it.
January 12th, 2007 at 8:06 am
I remember having that same thought at the time. But I don’t remember at this point whether he was projecting a continued rise in the CO2 level or if he was using actual data for the entire climb.
I agree that it’s problematic if he had actual data for the CO2 but then didn’t use actual data for the temperature.
Also, given that he did use actual data for temp when he said that 10 of he hottest years had been in the last 14 years and 2005 was the hottest, we can conclude that the temp hasn’t risen at the same rate as the CO2, which from the Wikipedia charts appears to have climbed about 35%. The average temp certainly hasn’t climbed by that much.
The crane was clearly used for dramatic effect, which as you suggest, could have been a distraction from the fact that the numbers weren’t there.
On the other hand, if we get to the point where the average temperature on the planet is increased by 35%, it will be far too late.
March 14th, 2007 at 3:20 am
Watched it last night. The CO2 and temperature on the chart were actual data. The massive increase at the end was a projection for the next 50 years or so. The temperature data was not projected.
January 3rd, 2008 at 9:57 pm
I think we all need better info than what Al Gore has – he’s a salesman for the GW industry. Start by looking up “oxygen catastrophe” for some clues on historical data for CO2 vs. O2 levels and where the O2 came from – ask yourself what “in the past” means. Then try “science steals a base” for an article by Ron Bailey on the accuracy of the “actual data” we get to see in the MSM. Next go do some research on the reliability of the “proxy data” which is used to go back farther than a couple of hundred years, at most, on “average” CO2 and temperature levels.
Recall Eisenhower’s famous, brilliant speech and apply “bureaucratic academic complex”.
February 20th, 2008 at 7:03 pm
I watched the movie the other day. Whether or not humans are causing global warming, Al Gore doesn’t do a good job of proving his side of it. The movie seems more like like a biography of Al Gore than science. If you watched “An Inconvenient Truth” and want to hear the arguments against global warming, too, you should see “The Great Global Warming Swindle”. It has some good points against the idea of man made global warming, although it, like “An Inconvenient Truth”, also uses some fallacies and inacurate information. But it shows the section of “Inconvenient Truth” where Al Gore shows the graphs of temperature and CO2, and it says that temperature does not follow CO2 levels, but that CO2 levels follow temperature, because of the effect of temperature on the ocean, which releases a lot of CO2, or some reason like that. Also, since the movie came out, it has sbeen shown that the record of yearly average global temperature was innacurate. There is an article on it at “http://www.nysun.com/article/60355″ . I’m not trying to prove that we are not causing global warming or that we shouldn’t at least try to find out if humans are really the cause of global warming, I just wanted to say that the information in “Inconvenient Truth” isn’t good evidence for man made global warming.