RSSGore and the Environment
May 23
This article is a good read: The Last Temptation of Al Gore. It’s mostly about the rumors surrounding a presidential run and concludes it’s very unlikely. Also has some interesting bits about him, for example that he’s an adviser to Google and on the Board of Apple.
While I think he’d be a fantastic President, I’m not sure if we’d be better off with him there. He might be most effective as the environmental adviser to a Democrat President (plus his current role).
Two other random environmental thoughts:
- It struck me the other day how much composting has reduced the garbage we put out at my house. Between it and recycling we end up not having enough garbage to put out about every second week.
- People who litter in “wildlife” areas REALLY bother me, I found out yesterday. There’s a pond behind my house with ducks and geese which people feed with bread sometimes. Last night I happened to see some mother (with her small daughter watching) empty a plastic bag of breadcrumbs in front of the geese then toss the bag right beside it. Had I been out back at the time I probably would have yelled over and asked her to pick it up, but we sufficed to pick up the bag when we walked by later.
May 23, 2007 @ 11:34:55
Hey, I loved An Inconvenient Truth as much as the next guy, maybe more so. I gave several people copies of the DVD for Christmas last year.
However, Al Gore is not electable.
There are still a lot of Americans who refuse to watch his movie on the basis that it’s full of liberal lies and propaganda. Al Gore has about as much chance of getting elected President as Michael Moore.
The Neocon Slander Machine may have lost some credibility over the years, more due to repetition than exposure, but they’ve still control a sizable portion of the population.
I still meet Americans who “don’t believe in global warming”. Personally, I think “believe in” is the wrong way to say it. Like it’s a religion that requires a leap of faith. Some people “believe in” God, some don’t. Some people believe in the Tooth Fairy and Santa Claus. Some people believe in aliens and ghosts and honest politicians. But global warming, like evolution, requires no leap of faith. The science is there. If you’re not educated enough to understand the science, then maybe you do have to choose whether to believe it or not. But if you understand basic science, and you’ve seen the evidence, no leap of faith is necessary. You can’t choose not to believe it any more than you can choose not to believe that the sky is blue. It’s obviously true.
In the same way, Al Gore would make a better president than George W. Bush is obviously true. But that is irrelevant to many in the population, an alarming number of whom still “believe in” Bush.
May 23, 2007 @ 12:47:16
It saddens me too how many people think climate change is a myth or something that can be not believed.
Some intelligent people are still clinging to the debunking methods from a decade ago. They say “CO2 levels are cyclical, and we’re just at a high point.” Well, no in fact that’s not true. We are currently well above the previous highs of the last several hundred thousand years (as far back as can be reliably measured), which contains several cooling/heating climate cycles.
I think the problem is just that there’s a very small window of uncertainty about exactly what will happen, and exactly when. It’s no longer arguable that CO2 levels are way too high and that it will have a very bad effect globally. But, exactly how bad things will get is unprovable, at least for now.
We need something more personal than computer simulations to prove this to the remaining unbelievers. Maybe one interesting idea would be to add the same percentage of CO2 to the biosphere as there will be in the world at 2050 or 2100 and watch how that enclosed, working, ecosystem implodes.
May 23, 2007 @ 13:12:14
How about a little closer to home. I tried sending out to a number of blogs the government document, in lthe hands of MPs since about the 8th of May when it was a topic at question period in the House of Commons. The issue? This document (which I had a hard time finding and getting out, eventually needing to phone Ottawa to source it) proves the govt. is giving an exemption to the tar sands alone of all industry sectors to INCREASE some greenhhouse gases a lot. All laid out on Page 21 of the the governments Technical doc. on Industry Standards And the result? Nothing. Nobody picked it up, worked with it, considered the arithmetic, waxed wrothy…. IT DISAPPEARED like an arrow into a pillow. And the only pol to mention it was Layton, a little mildly as an afterthought in a CBC interview. He should have been enraged. So should you all.
May 23, 2007 @ 18:45:15
That does sound bad. Do you have a link to the document and/or articles analyzing it? I’d like to see it.