Doom and Gloom

I admit that one of the things that I generally found annoying about the otherwise excellent An Inconvenient Truth was the ending. After being told the entire planet was about to crap out, Al Gore comes along and says, "Now, wait... there's something you can do. Inflate your tires. Use CFL lightbulbs. Drive less. And Global Warming will GO AWAY! YAY!" I'm paraphrasing in a South Park kind of way. The argument, while giving us some hope to cling to, always came across a little bit like Duck and Cover in case of a nuclear attack. Extremely optimistic, to say the least.

Which is why I was extremely pleased, and entirely disheartened, to watch the Frontline report on PBS the other night, "Heat" about the Global Warming crisis. Make no mistake about it, Frontline doesn't sugarcoat anything. When things were bad in Iraq, they told us just how bad they were. The same thing with Global Warming. By the end of the episode, I was fairly convinced that the planet was screwed.

The problem is that whether we like it or not, Americans tend to be the leaders of the free world. And, as Americans, we tend to react to things rather than act preventively. I mean, let's be realistic, we've known about the concept of global warming since the 50's (one of the rather amusing highlights of the Frontline documentary was a TV show clip from the 50's where the scientist explains the concept of Global Warming and what it might do if it happens, and everything he mentions has pretty much happened). But we've never done anything to act upon it. We knew about Hitler and didn't get involved in the war until 1941. And many of us suspected the financial crisis that is destroying us now, and we did nothing to stop it either. How much more so are we reacting to global warming?

Well, that was the truly scary part of the documentary - so far, we aren't. We've paid a lot of lip service to the idea of attacking global warming, but on every single issue that's come up as a potential solution, the American people, the American government, and, most obviously, American business have worked hard to successfully thwart the solution. Electric cars - flattened. More robust fuel standards - slashed. Clean burning coal - too expensive. Anything that we've come up with as a solution has been stopped.

In the meantime, the world keeps getting hotter. And whether its man made or not - the situation is getting dire. In twenty five years, Peru could lose up to 70% of its river water as the last Andes glaciers completely melt. In thirty to thirty five years, over 500 million people in the Indian sub-continent might be out of water and over 250 million people in China, as the glaciers in the Himilayas disappear. The desertification of a good portion of the world that once fed our growing 6 Billion Plus population is an ongoing problem - one that will spiral out of control if we can no longer water these lands. We are literally a world civilization on the brink of destruction.

Like I said, they don't pull any punches. At the end of the episode, Al Gore didn't come out and tell us to use more peanut butter or some such nonsense. The entire gist of the show was, we're screwed, and if you're expecting big business or government to bail us out, you're also delusional.

Now, that being said, we Americans do tend to bounce back from hard hitting disasters - whether it be the Dust Bowl, the Great Depression, Pearl Harbor or 9-11. If global warming really does start to impact the United States, I've got to believe that we're going to do something about it - something really profoundly good. Unfortunately, I'm afraid that it'll probably already be too late. We basically need to change the entire world society in the next ten years or we're all toast.

Is it any wonder that I stayed up late last night to watch South Park and SNL? When faced with doom and gloom, sometimes the only response is to laugh about something a little more tangible. And by those standards, maybe Al Gore was right.