global warning...

i got a bright idea sunday that i would escape the sweltering inferno of my 4th floor apartment by going to the movies. and what did i choose to go and see? "an inconvenient truth", al gore's cautionary tale about global warning. holy christ!

first of all, go see it. it's terrifying and depressing, but its message needs to be heard. the problem, though, is that gore is, in a lot of ways, preaching to the converted. call me a cynic, but i'm not sure that folks other than those already sensitive to what's going on with the planet are going to feel so inclined to check it out. that's a goddamn shame.

second of all, you have to consciously overlook the fact that al gore is kinda dorky. yeah, there's the much expected bit about his having lost the 2000 presidential election, despite having won the popular vote. but even though the film has a few moments of "oh no, al", it does a nice job of making its audience aware that the issue of the environment is not one of partisanship, but one that we'd all better start thinking about, or else. gore describes the crisis as a moral issue; he says that given what we know about carbon emissions and how the environment has changed in the past 30 years, it's unethical not to do something about it. wake up and smell the greenhouse gases, washington!