By Fred Kockott
President George Bush has apparently not yet seen the movie, An Inconvenient Truth. When he does - or if he does - it would be interesting to hear what he thinks about it.
Speaking from an aircraft on Wednesday night, the movie's narrator, former United States vice-president Al Gore, phoned into a Durban cinema audience warning of a "planetary emergency" of a kind never experienced before.
Gore says people have only five to 10 years to avert cataclysmic disasters, one thousand times worse than the terror of September 11 - and all directly due to global warming. Posters of penguins traversing a desert are being used to market the film which opened Durban's 27th International Film Festival this week.
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Could this actually happen?
Gore, for years introduced as the "next president of the United States", says yes: the planet's biggest glaciers are melting with dramatic, life-altering speed; Glacier National Park has alarmingly few glaciers left and polar bears are now drowning in search of icecaps on which to hunt.
The entire planet's climate system, says Gore, is heading into a tail spin of epic destruction - more floods, extreme weather, droughts, epidemics, killer heat waves, rising ocean levels . . .
The film shows how Gore became aware of this massive, looming environmental crisis in the 1960s after a college professor, Roger Revelle, mapped out the results of his research into the correlation between carbon dioxide content and atmospheric temperatures.
"He (Revelle) saw where this story was going," says Gore.
"He was startled by results of his own research. He said unless we make adjustments, the results were as clear as the light of day."
After his controversial defeat in the 2000 US election, Al Gore embarked on a travelling "global warming roadshow". It has now now been translated into this feature film by director Davis Guggenheim.
Environmental activist, Laurie David and producer Lawrence Bender asked Guggenheim to make the film after they'd watched several of Al Gore's presentations.
The end result is not usual film entertainment, but a compelling drama - a real one at that - about one's man's personal journey into a compelling crusade to turn back the clock on global warming.
The US, according to Gore, is by far the greatest polluter of Earth's atmosphere, pumping into the sky more than 35 percent of total atmospheric pollutants, much of it from cars not using new, available cleaner technologies as in Europe and beyond.
In the US, the rationale appears to be the bigger the car, the greater the fuel consumption, the better. It's good for the US automobile industry and US government. It makes the oil men rich, and after all, they drive the economy and practically run the government. But as the increasing pollution thickens the atmosphere, temperatures are rising.
Perspective
While the impact might not be immediately apparent, when viewing earthly life on a greater time scale, like 650 000 years, events of the past 10 to 15, and even just the last year, 2005, take on an entirely new dimension and cosmic perspective.
Gore captures this perspective in an engaging, open, forthright, funny, frightening and entertaining manner. Mapping out climate changes over 650 000 years, Gore points out how this graph hit a sudden trajectory over the past decade. He then climbs aboard an elevator to indicate where temperature levels will be in 15 years time if we do not start responding intelligently - and quickly.
Writing late into the night from a Durban beachfront flat, I ponder whether the map of the world might change before my lifetime is over. I look down over my balcony imagining a new shoreline.
What disasters might unfold even sooner?
It's easy to imagine chaos in Durban's streets during the 2010 World Cup soccer matches, but what if such chaos (possibly far worse than what's been witnessed during the recent national security workers strike) is simultaneous to larger, mind-boggling stuff that Gore predicts - like flooding never experienced before except in the minds of those who literally interpret readings of the Old Testament?
Gore maintains that solutions are in our hands; that we can avert disaster, restore the planet's health through changed habits and new technologies; that it's already happening; that people, worldwide, don't have a choice but to embark on a "century of renewal" involving energy conservation, carbon capture technology and engineering for efficiency.
Gore's message is powerful: it is urgent and invigorating; it is rational and common sense. It would certainly be enlightening to hear what the incumbent US president makes of it all.
Bush's administration, says Gore, has turned back the clock on efforts to protect the global environment, revoked critical legislation, refused to sign the Kyoto protocol on climate change, fraudulently altered scientific research on the matter and propagated the myth that global warming is a theory, not a fact supported, unanimously at that, by scientific thought.
Gore says a recent survey of all peer-reviewed scientific studies on climate change showed that 928 reviewed papers supported global warming and zero denied it. In contrast, a similar sampling of stories in the mass media, showed that 53 percent suggested global warming is unproved.
Therein lies the tension in the film, and it's significance. For many, particularly leaders of the current US administration, global warming is simply an inconvenient truth they would prefer to ignore. For others, it's a reality, but something that can be dealt with tomorrow. For Gore, it's all here and now. Humanity sits on a time bomb, about to be triggered. To defuse it, there are things needed to be done, and things to be stopped, but how quickly can we react? The minutes are ticking.
fred@sundaytribune.co.za
An Inconvenient Truth will be screened at the Elizabeth Sneddon Theatre at 4pm on Saturday, 25 June. Screening at South African cinemas begins at the end of September.
- This article was originally published on page 21 of Tribune on June 18, 2006
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