Saturday, May 31, 2008

An Inconvenient Truth

Have you seen ‘An Inconvenient Truth’? I just did. If you haven’t yet, please do watch it. It is a movie- a docu feature rather, on global warming presented by former US vice president, Al Gore. The content is so engrossing that soon you don’t care if it’s a ‘movie’ or a ‘documentary’ It is presented simply and clearly- with visuals and graphs that would jolt your consciousness. Are we all really sitting on such an important issue and not realizing it?


This is the crux of the matter: The Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere forms a shield on top of the atmosphere, trapping the reflected sun rays off the earth to stay around us. This in itself is not a bad thing. In fact it helps to maintain the warm living condition that we all need to survive. The problem is, off late there’s been so much carbon dioxide up there, that it is blocking too much of the heat from escaping out of the atmosphere. This obviously means earth has been getting hotter, ice has been melting, sea levels have been rising, animals trying to get away from the heat have started moving towards the poles, many plants have already died…all this and more, while you and I were sleeping. Of course when we wake up, we do read about the hurricanes, floods, heat waves, the droughts. And we go, ‘Isn’t it all happening more and more frequently? Or is it that I started noticing all this only now?’ You somehow think it’s the latter and move on. But as per the facts and figures Mr. Al Gore presents, the truth is not that. The truth is rather inconvenient.


This is only the beginning. What really is scary is what would happen if this goes on. We see graphs with projected rates zooming off the charts, which when translated into words would mean that within next Fifty years a million species will be extinct, There wont be much ice left at the poles, Many of the major cities of today would be gobbled up by the rising seas (told you, its scary!) Life on planet earth would cease to exist as we know it.


About this movie, Roger Ebert of Chicago Sun-Times wrote “In 39 years, I have never written these words in a movie review, but here they are, You owe it to yourself to see this film”

He is right. Go see it.



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