When All Else Fails, Fear

I've sat through "An Inconvenient Truth" twice now in the last few days and I must say, it is far worse than I possibly could have imagined. Long strings of completely random events, all thrown up on the dartboard of global warming, interspersed with long periods of reflection by the Goracle that border on confessional in tone, at times.

The many heart-felt pleas for people to just think a little harder for solutions in their own energy consumption will more than offset his February energy bill. How many carbon offsets does one get for Spreading the Good Word anyway? Can the importance of carrying the global warming message of guilt and fear even be measured?

Some of the movie was hysterical, but most of the time I sat in kind of a trance wondering how anybody could take it seriously for even a second. No clear thinking person could walk away from this movie thinking they just saw a convincing scientific case for global warming.

There was though, one very sobering moment in the film when Al depicts the global flooding if Greenland melted. Sobering in its blatant fear mongering.

He shows the worlds coastlines and depicts them as the evil water rushes over the land. Naturally he doesn't fail to note the "X millions of people" who would be suddenly dead or displaced. The sequence is played over very dramatic music. It is quite literally "The Day After Tomorrow" shot from a satellite perspective.

Al doesn't do one thing in the sequence to suggest the process would take decades, or much longer, no one would drown, and there wouldn't be huge hordes of refugees. Instead he feeds the notion of a catastrophic event.

If I was a 5th grader, I wouldn't have slept for months. The sequence's only purpose is to keep 5th graders awake at night. Whatever Al Gore believes, he should be ashamed for intentionally removing relevent context in order to instill fear in children.

In fact, they should have called the movie "No Inconvenient Context." Context requires science and science is nowhere near the film. I would recommend it though, to anyone interested in how every tragedy that ever occurred in Al Gore's life made him reflect on man's relationship with the earth.