An Inconvenient Truth

It's a great movie. Highly recommended.

It's amazing that a documentary about a man giving a slide-show presentation is so gripping from beginning to end. But, then, he does have that whole actual-end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it thing going for him.

This movie will probably help bring an end to the always-cockamamie idea that humans are not causing the warming of the planet. And it's telling that it took a documentary by Gore himself to do it. That humans are causing climate change has been as plain as the nose on your face for a long time. There's no controversy about it among scientists who study the issue.

In fact, in the movie, Gore presents a couple telling statistics. First, a study done of over 900 articles in peer-reviewed scientific journals found that zero percent claimed humans may not be the cause of global warming. Zero. But that same study of articles in the popular press found that over 50% claimed that humans may not be the cause.

What an indictment of our news media. On the one hand, scientists have an extremely strong consensus that humans are causing global warming. On the other hand, PR firms working for oil companies and other polluters claim the science is inconclusive.

And the news media in our country considers that a toss-up.

So Al Gore had to go from city to city making a direct presentation of the facts. He had to make a movie of that presentation and release it with an independent company. He had to disintermediate. Because the traditional medium between his message and the audience was corrupted.

We've paid a price for that corruption. Americans should have reached a consensus that global warming is real, human-caused and dangerous almost two decades ago. Any other view of this serious crisis should have been considered a crackpot idea, like believing that the moon landing was faked.

But, despite the overwhelming facts, we didn't have that consensus. We elected presidents who ridiculed environmentalists as part of their campaign platforms. In his first term, President George W. Bush failed to sign the Kyoto treaty, and there was no outraged response from the majority of Americans.

Just two years ago, the current administration actually encouraged over-consumption of fossil fuels as an American tradition:

REPORTER: Does the President believe that, given the amount of energy Americans consume per capita, how much it exceeds any other citizen in any other country in the world, does the President believe we need to correct our lifestyles to address the energy problem?

WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECRETARY: That's a big no. The President believes that it's an American way of life, and that it should be the goal of policy makers to protect the American way of life. The American way of life is a blessed one.

It's tempting to blame the oil-company PR firms or the oil men in the White House for the problem. But oil companies have a mission to sell oil. PR firms have a mission to deceive people for their clients. Oil men in the White House have a mission to help the oil industry. They all did as we should expect.

But the news media has a mission to deliver the truth to us. And it failed. We should have been getting the truth about global warming from the media in the 1980s. Instead, many people, possibly most, will first be encountering it in a movie theater in 2006.

It's a sad story. It's a great movie.