David's World

November 17, 2006

A scrapped, boring and inconvenient blog entry about Al Gore.

Nothing new to see here. Move on.

If you'd like to see the draft of a blog post that was prepared and scrapped for lack of individual, newsworthy contribution, read on.

The other day, I saw the documentary about Al Gore and his campaign for a climate change, "An Inconvenient Truth". As Gore displays it, mankind is ignoring the facts and heading right for a global catastrophy that will ridicule the tens of thousands of deaths due to terrorist's aggression and the hundreds of thousands of deaths on the American tab. If you can believe the scientific evidence and Al Gore's presentation, even conservative estimates of the effects of global warming paint a picture of Manhattan, the San Francisco Bay Area and most of the Netherlands underwater and heat waves and hurricanes displacing millions.

Are the signals really that hard to see?

It's not news. Gore and film-maker Davis Guggenheim do not add anything to the debate. But they manage to reach out to new audiences.

It is not difficult to see how humans (and the universe) together form a form of conscious intelligence. But this global, intelligent ecosystem fails miserably where the individual would have to give up freedoms for the benefit of future generations and people far away on other continents. The result: No one is as dumb as all of us.

A few people may disagree about certain details of "global warming" - for example, how much of the increase in temperature warming we're causing with CO2 emissions, and how much of it is beyond our control. However, the risk of erring on the wrong side is associated with a tremendously high cost. We can't afford to make the wrong decision.

I suspect I've contributed more than my share this year, even more than the average American - flying in jets produces significant emissions. I'll see what it would take to offset carbon usage. Can we go completely carbon neutral?