Friday, July 21, 2006

Surviving the Heat-Wave

I know it’s July, but it’s been way too hot this week:  Every morning, the weather map shows the US looking as brown and toasted as a breakfast cornflake.  As a pale northern European myself, once temperature hits the eighties, I start feeling miserable & acting cranky.

But I’ve developed some low-tech strategies for coping with the heat.  I work with a damp washcloth on my neck, turn on the ceiling fan - and, like my colonising forebears around the globe, refresh myself with scalding hot tea.  When all else fails, I head for free air conditioning at the public library or at the movies.

And that’s how I came to be at the local multiplex when an oddly familiar voice intoned the voice-over to an idyllic scene of a clear brook, sparkling across the verdant Tennessee farmlands.  Yes, I went to see the Al Gore movie, “An Inconvenient Truth,” on global warming, to escape the 90 degree Michiana weather outside.

The format of the movie doesn’t sound promising - it’s structured around a lecture and slideshow that Gore has been presenting around the country for years, in his campaign to educate his compatriots about the evidence for climate change.  But, it’s a darn good lecture, the slides have some killer graphics, and the script is propelled by a lively recounting of Gore’s personal quest to understand what the best science says.

The movie offers engaging glimpses of Gore the student in the 60s, first grappling with Roger Revelle’s studies of CO2 increases in the atmosphere, Gore the parent, shocked by family tragedy into re-evaluating his priorities in life, and Gore the Gore-tex clad adventurer, examining ice core samples in Antarctica.

What Gore understands is bad news:  the scientific consensus is that global warming is occurring and we are headed for imminent catastrophe.  He’s not talking more sticky days next July, he’s talking melting icecaps, droughts and more hurricanes like Katrina.

If the news is so bad, how come we haven’t already heard?  According to Gore, American mass media have misrepresented the scientific debate over the reality of global climate change.  When virtually no-one in the scientific community has anything to say for one side, the model of media objectivity as “presenting both sides of the case” has mislead the American public.

People in Europe take it for granted that climate change is underway. When I visited the UK this May, I noticed that even my parents’ small-town newspaper was peppered with off-hand references to “carbon offsetting” and “green energy.” A recent poll by the Pew Research Center shows that, among the industrialized nations, only the Chinese are as blasé about global warming as are Americans.

The same poll shows that, ironically, Americans’ beliefs on the purely scientific questions depend more on partisan affiliation than on educational level and what you learned in school.  Democrats are much more likely than Republicans to agree that global warming is taking place, to worry about it and believe that it’s partly due to human activity.  So, maybe Gore is the wrong man to educate Americans on our peril.

However, Gore’s movie presents the issue as a moral, not political challenge.  We have the know-how and resources to tackle global warming successfully, just as we already have tackled CFCs and damage to the ozone layer.  Gore’s challenge is whether we have the moral integrity to face the facts, rise above political ideologies and cut back on fossil fuel consumption for the sake of our common future.

Broadcast by Louise Collins on July 21, 2006
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