Want to join the American elite?

No. Elitism sucks.

We're destroying the planet with wastefulness, carelessness and greed and trouble is coming sooner than we think. I know, okay?

I'll wait for the DVD and watch it in non-elitist fashion with some non-elitist friends, thanks.

Elitism rules.

even the media coverage of the movie is tainted by the same pollution that Gore notes in the movie...every review of the movie I've seen so far refers to the debate/controversy over global warming.

It's just like how the media treats evolution...there is no fucking debate in the scientific community.

I'll drive my Hybrid car to go see this movie. If everyone would shop at Whole Foods like me, and use sustainable materials to build their vacation houses, the world can change. Everyone has to do their part and not be lazy.

How about not building vacation houses at all? Or not driving? Or, perhaps, resisting the urge to pop out a brat or two just to give your life some sense of purpose?

not bitter. really.

What's sad is that the best case scenario for a political discussion in this country boils down to arguments made in a feature length film.
The point of movies like this and Farenheit 9/11 has little to do with political arguments anyways. The point is to build up the tribe by presenting a position in a way that people can rally around it, right or wrong.
Getting into whether this or that study is right goes beyond what a movie like this can sustain in terms of argument, and it really misses the point.

Tim, have you even seen both of these movies you are talking about? Fahrenheit 911 was a shock-doc designed to stir up an American outrage and de-elect Bush. It didn't work.

This film is a discussion of *what is going to happen* and *how & why we got into this fucked up position that we are in.* Yeah, it's sad that the only thing that will communicate with a large American audience is a movie. But it's even sadder that in Seattle, the "American Elite" (wtf?) don't even give enough of a fuck to see the goddamn movie. Should you be ignoring the problem, and bitching about something you haven't even seen? Or should you be trying to spread the word to all the ignorant, voting *& non-voting* fucks in this country before it's too late?

No reasonable person could question that the scientific consensus is that global warming is happening that human activity is a significant contributory cause. I say this as a person with a Ph.D. in physics who has numerous climatologist friends and has been interested in this issue for about a decade.

All this is true, and yet: I still think we should do nothing, or almost nothing, to curb carbon emissions.

How can I say such a thing? Once one understands the science, isn't the necessity of doing something clear? It is not. It is not clear that the effects of global warming will be catastrophic, nor, even if they are, that what would be required to stop it is worth the cost.

The IPCC is the UN-sponsored scientific panel that enviormentalists like to cite. They compare scientific models and issue reports about climate change. In short, they are the objective good guys. The IPCC projects a 100-year temperature rise of 2C. They project minimal impact on food production. They project a 100-year rise in sea-levels of 0.5m -- about 1.5'. None of this sounds very catastrophic.

(Alarmists like maps like the one here, which shows the effect of a 20' rise in sea level. The 20' number comes from an equilibrium calculation of what happens after all global ice sheets melt -- a process that will take thousands of years. If the most serious global threat we face in the next few thousand years is a 20' change in sea levels, we can count ourselves lucky.)

Suppose, though, you did want to stop global warming. How would you do it? The short answer is that no one knows; no one actually has a concrete plan to do so. Certainly any plan would involve reducing carbon emissions. We emit carbon to make energy to drive our economies, so that basically means reducing economic growth. So we ought to be able to ask the question: "Which cost is worse -- the negative effects of global warming or the sacrifices in humanity's standard of living required to avoid it?"

To get a feel for this comparison, let's do a simple calculation. Real economic growth has been about 3%/year for the last 100 years. Suppose we could stop global warming by reducing growth to 2%/year. Would that be worth it? (To be clear, given present technologies, stopping global warming would require much bigger sacrifices than that -- not just reductions in growth, but actual reductions in economic output. But let's be optimistic, for the moment, about our ability to innovate.) While you'd probably prefer getting a 3% raise each year, getting a 2% raise doesn't seem so bad, so perhaps that's a worthwhile price to pay.

The current US GDP is $12 trillion/year. If we grow at 3%/year, we will produce $7500 trillion over the next 100 years, ending up with a standard of living about 20 times better than our current one. If we reduce growth to 2%/year, we will produce just $3800 trillion in the next century, ending up only 7 times better off than we are now. What sort of environmental mitigation could we buy with the $3700 trillion difference?

Well, suppose that due to rising sea levels, we wanted to build a sea wall around the entire 12,000 mi coastline of the US. At $1 billion per mile, the entire project would cost $12 trillion. Even though that's an entire year's GDP today, it's only 0.3% of what we would gain by not limiting GDP growth to avoid global warming. That leaves an awful lot of money left over for other grand mitigation schemes you might dream up, not to mention for a happier, healthier, and wealthier society.

The point is, we need to be very careful about doing anything that reduces economic growth, because economic growth allows us to buy our way out of a whole lot of problems.

When I look around at my mostly upper-middle-class liberal friends, I see many people who are perfectly willing to splash for a new Prius (which won't even save energy, in the net, if they keep it for only a few years, because producing a hybrid requires more energy that producing a normal car), but wouldn't dream of not flying to exotic vacation destinations (carbon emissions from airplane trips are about as high as if every passenger had driven the same distance alone in his car). That is to say, environmentalism is more of a cultural icon than a commitment, more of a mating ritual among wealthy young urbanites than a cause requiring sacrifice. I guess that means I don't have to worry about my generation sacrificing economic growth on the altar of environmentalist religion. I just have to worry about us being a bunch of hypocrites.

what happens when being apathetic means people like Dick Cheney get to take over the planet?

David Wright, please take 90 minutes to see the movie. I'm no physicist nor a climatologist, but I would like to hear you explain away the ice core they talk about in the movie that goes back 650,000 years, and allows the measurement of the amount of CO2 in the air ocer that period of time. When I saw the graph Al shows in the movie, my jaw hit the floor.

I need to chime in with David Wright. I, too, have been following climate change articles in the journals, albiet casually. The scientific community, as a whole, has agreed warming is occuring- this is clear, and consensus occured probably a decade ago. However, a 2 degree change given current trends is the consensus prediction; outside estimates would include 0.5 to 5 centigrade. However, I am very pleased to see Gore bring this to the mainstream. Global climate change needs a place in the overall discussion of how our species will manage our growth. It is not the only point of discussion however.

Concerned citizens may wish to note that the effect of global climate change is generally thought to be retardent (through reduced GDP and food production, principally) on further growth. Like yeast in beer, our own by-products will slow our growth.

Having a DVD player is an elist act. The only way to view this movie in a non-elitist fashion would be to wait until it plays a drive-in and view it from outside the parking area.

You could maybe have a person who reads lips provide the translation, but only if they provide a sign language interpreter as well.

David Wright --

I totally agree with your final points, but totally disagree with much of your proceeding logic (and the link between it and your final points).


I agree with you that many "liberals" or "environmentalists" are shallow, lazy, in denial, ignorant--I'm not sure what--regarding such iconic things as a Prius (walk, bike, bus, or just take fewer trips in your current gas guzzler!) and those horizon-expanding (and fossil fuel burning like no other form of transportation can) trips to Costa Rica, India, and other ethno-tourist destinations. Rather than escaping from your life, how about working with yourself and others to make it better? That said, show me a hypocrite and I'll show you someone with principles.


But David, your thought experiment with GDP growth and standard of living is unfortunately baseless. I say unfortunate because it'd be nice if growth in consumption necessarily resulted in increased and widespread well-being (...if eating makes you feel good, obviously eating seven times more will make you feel seven times better!), but it doesn't. Even the smaller assumption that you make that a, e.g., 3% increase in GDP will result in each of us getting a 3% raise isn't grounded in reality.
Climate change is only one issue that we face living on a large (or not so large) island (Earth). We are running out of resources, there is no "away" to throw our trash, and the limits of financial wealth and capital are clearly in sight (though growth in social, artistic, etc. capital IS limitless). As just one small example, there are not enough natural resources and financial capital to rebuild the infrastructure in the US--even just the freeway infrastructure. Yet China is trying to do that and more.
Anyone who has operated any kind of machinery (making a poor analogy that the Earth is a machine--a system), knows that operating it at the extreme limits of its performance capacity eventually results in failure of some part or the entire system. We are redlining Earth. Keeping the needle pegged towards the goal of increased resource consumption (what GDP measures) will break down our biophysical and, likely, or social systems.


What does it mean, anyway, to be seven times better off? Except for folks with a number fetish, simply seeing the artificial wealth represented by a bank account balance (as opposed to a real livelihood) go up doesn't lead to having more fun, feeling more secure, or knowing that our kids or the folks we care about will have a good future. (Gore--I also so IT yesterday--makes this point well when he ridicules the first Bush admin's false choice between more gold bars or a healthy Earth.) The easiest way for most folks to see a seven-fold increase in REAL wealth is to reduce their debt-enabled consumption. I, for one, don't have a positive net worth (yes, I'm worthless); most reading this don't either. How about we work on reducing all debt of any sort by seven times?


So maybe we need a sexier goal than reduced debt (artificial wealth) or carbon emissions. Maybe we should aim for more style. Style is derived from constraints--making creative use of what's available and our individual and collective abilities. Constraints aren't bad, limited time, materials, ability, etc. is what creativity and expression are all about. If style came from anything else, the rich would set fashion trends, not ruin them.

David Wright... I don't believe you accounted for inflation, which would undo a good deal of that surplus. Costs will rise.

Take that back... my mistake. I read your statement wrong.

Anyone who thinks that shopping at Whole Foods is a progressive environmental act needs to get a clue. Step one: read Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma. Whole Foods is even more tightly tied into industrial agribusiness than your old-fashioned store, and moving those immaculate vegetables from California and Chile to Seattle uses nine times as much energy as would have been used to fertilize them chemically around here.

Yogi, I think he's saying that a) nothing we actively do will significantly reduce the problem and b) even WITH the acclerated changes, we'll only likely see a 1.5' increase in sea levels.

Also, another thought: doesn't the temperature of the earth ebb and flow over thousands of years? IIRC, even before the Industrial Revolution, the earth's temp had trended upward since thousands of years ago.

Basically, the question worth asking is: what exactly are we supposed to do about it? As long as we continue driving, traveling and having kids, there isn't jack shit we can do about it. No one who matters is going to care, no matter how loudly you scream about it.

No one who matters is going to care, no matter how loudly you scream about it.

Yogi: I do plan to see the film. Would you please take one minute to read the first two paragraphs of my post, though? You know, the ones where I say that I'm not trying to "explain away" any aspect of the scientific consensus on global warming. The whole point of my post is that believing global warming is real is not the same as believing the US government should do something do stop it.

Mike: Solid evidence that global warming itself retards growth would certainly be important in the context of my argument. (Of course, that negative impact would still have to be compared to the negative impact of any poposed counter-measure.) But the IPCC agrees with me that there is no such solid evidence. On food production (section 5.3.6.1 of their 2001 report), they say: (1) they cannot make predictions with much confidence, (2) their best guess, if they have to make one, is that the impact is actually positive for up to 2.5C of warming, and (3) the impact is in any case small. On the net impact of global warming on world GDP in toto, I have yet to see anyone make a prediction based on economic modeling. Any such prediction would be highly suspect, because there just isn't much economic theory about the coupling of climate and economic development.

One this that should be mentioned (which, incidentally, is mentioned in the movie):

The global increase of 2 degrees celsius is misleading. That is an *average* net increase across the entire globe. The way the ocean redistributes heat, we are looking at a 1 degree increase at the equator, and a (someone check me on this? I'm going from memory) *12 degree increase* at the poles. It's not going to take thousands of years for the ice caps to melt, that's ridiculous, where did you get that number, David? The polar ice caps are going to be gone by the end of the century.

A fundamental assumption in David Wright's analysis, if I may, is quite problematic, namely that economic growth is directly tied to carbon emissions and therefore oil consumption. We'll be running out of oil soon. Global warming is but one more reason to retool our economy.

Actually, do read this article: Is the world's oil running out fast?

On a completely unrelated note to this discussion, I like the fact that all the right (& left) wing detractors from this movie are attributing motives to Al Gore that they would appear to have themselves. Why so suspicious? Saying he's doing this for monetary gain, as a presidential platform, because he's some bat-shit liberal... on and on and on. What about simply "brilliant, luminous passion of a man who has devoted his entire life to this cause"?

Hijacked - the "peak oil" people mentioned in that article are not suggesting that oil is going to "run out" soon. They're saying it's going to PEAK soon. Oil is not going to disappear overnight; that's the scenario of the nutcases, and they've been saying it for fifty years now. Even "peak" oil" is pretty controversial; most observers note that proven oil reserves are continuing to increase, and that there's a lot of oil left.

What's going to happen is that oil is going to get a lot more expensive. And that's a good thing, because the ONLY thing that could possibly reduce our thirst for the stuff, and spur development of alternatives, is a large permanent price increase. No movie's going to have any effect; neither is even a ten-degree rise in temps or massive flooding in coastal areas.

Look at the most ecologically devastated part of the US -- the Mississippi delta. New Orleans. The subsidence of that city, the hundred-mile dead zone out to sea, the loss of the fresh water table and the movement of most of the entire state of Iowa into the ocean, the need for bigger and bigger levees, the skyrocketing costs of flooding -- all of this is old, old news. Yet nothing ever happens until there's a major catastrophe, and even then they get a band-aid -- the levees are put back into their cobbled-together, hopelessly inadequate condition.

Jeez, just look locally, and the viaduct replacement plan, so-called. They haven't actually done fuck-all, and I personally believe they never will. People don't care about the future. They care about their wallets NOW.

The unfortunate fact about the global warming scare isn't that it's "controversial" or in doubt; it's that it's simply too late to do anything constructive about it. China and India don't give a flying fuck about global warming, and every reduction in carbon emissions by rich Westerners is going to be met a hundred times over by increases there.

The real answer is using simple economics to force the rich science-driven countries to do the research necessary to come up with energy alternatives (and I don't mean Bush's bogus "hydrogen fuel cells" anti-initiative). China, no matter how many engineers they crank out, isn't going to do it. We can. But until we start caring about it, and THE ONLY THING that will ever make us care is $.

Tax gas.

al gore is dreamy

Maybe if they printed "The Stranger" on recycled paper using soy ink it could help? Whole Foods has lots of organic, sustainable produce that's worth the extra cost to save the planet. Also please consider getting a bio desiel car if you can't go all the way and drive a hybrid. They even have hybrid SUVs now so their no excuse for not saving the environment.

Most of all tell everyone you know to go see this film! Offer them organic popcorn and chocolate if that's what it takes. But for someone like me who hates tree huggers, spotted owl savers and stupid hippies like that, this film explains why eco vacations, organic food, and hybrid cars are so important now.

Eli, thanks for reminding everyone that Christians have to accept responsibility for global warming. Israel has the best environmental policies on the planet. And although Gay Orthodox Jews can't get married, gay gentiles in Israel can do whatever they want. America has a lot to learn from Israel in stopping global warming.

I can only assume "Kimberly" is a troll. Whole Foods is not sustainable. It's a shame that the Slog is overrun with morons and dingleberries nowadays.

Eli we need to get the word about about Israel's environmental record. Christianity continues to cause global warming, all you have to do is look at Wall-Mart. Please write a feature on Israel's excellent environmental record.

But "Silent Spring" turned out to be bogus. Is that what you want?

Minimal warming is not catastrophic. Most of the objections here are cultural, not scientific.

As long as this movie raises awareness about the environmental damage the Christians cause, it's going to help the world. Cultures can be as toxic as factories, and Eli has correctly pointed out that Christians in American are the ones to blame for global warming. So even if global warming turns out not to matter, getting more people to eat vegetarian, getting people to abandon Christianity, raising awareness about Israel's excellent environmental record will be good for everyone.

Snork: You are thinking of the northern polar ice sheet, which is melting quickly. Because that ice was already floating, its melting doesn't contribute to a rise in sea level. Only the melting of ice on land will contribute to rising sea levels.

To back up what I wrote about the time frame for ice sheet contributions to sea levels, here is a quote from the 2001 IPCC report: "Ice sheets will continue to react to climate change during the next several thousand years even if the climate is stabilised. Models project that a local annual-average warming of larger than 3°C sustained for millennia would lead to virtually a complete melting of the Greenland ice sheet. For a warming over Greenland of 5.5°C, consistent with mid-range stabilisation scenarios, the Greenland ice sheet contributes about 3 m in 1,000 years. For a warming of 8°C, the contribution is about 6 m, the ice sheet being largely eliminated. For smaller warmings, the decay of the ice sheet would be substantially slower."

It saddens me that even after Al Gore's movie comes out people still think there's controversy about global warming. Science has proved that the planet is warming up, and people still insist on their Wall Mart shopping and meat based diets.

I love what Al is trying to do for the planet. What makes me uneasy is what his wife tries to do to modern adult culture. Would Stranger be free on street corners in a country with First Lady Tipper? I think not.

Is Tipper still doing that with the music censoring thing? Or wasn't that like back in the late 80's? Zappa kinda made them all look like maroons back then.

In the movie, Al talks about how there are two ice masses on land that are in danger of melting more quickly than had been previously thought: the one on Greenland, and the one down on Antarctica. As David mentions, these would cause a rise in sea level.

As long as this movie raises awareness about the environmental damage the right-wing Christians cause, it's going to help the world.

Fixed it for you.

The situation certainly isn't helped when the government is run by people who feel they don't need to protect the environment because they seriously believe The End Times are, much like victory in Iraq, just around the corner.

More like towards the end of Clinton's 2nd term, Yogi.

Christians caused global warming. Read Daniel Quinn's Ishmael and you'll understand. From the beginning Christians have caused all the damage. Israel has a much better environmental record that the United States.

Mr. Wright didn't get the memo: according to Weird Al Gore, the debate is OVER. Time for you inconveniently independent thinkers with your inconvenient facts that inconvenience Mr. Gore to, like, shut the fuck up.

"... potential to become a seminal political document—a cinematic Silent Spring ..." Probably true, alas. Rachel Carson's polemic brainwashed the planet's most pampered & privileged generation, & led it into genocidal war against the wretched of the earth. DDT had almost consigned malaria to the dustbin of history. Thanks to Carson and the elitists who bought & swallowed her half-baked research, DDT was swept into the bin instead of malaria, which roared back into parts of the world that soft pasty-white Seattle rarely thinks about.

Actually, Mr. Pudenda, if you understood anything about biological history, you'd realize that malaria was already resurging long before DDT was banned - and by the way, it continued to be in wide use outside the U.S. for decades - due to that other politically controversial theory, evolution. The mosquito populations had already evolved resistance to DDT.

Actually, Geni(talia), isolated populations of mosquitos in isolated areas were developing resistance to DDT. Here's The New Yorker's summary of what happened:

"After the Second World War, malaria-control campaigns were initiated in many
countries, and with the notable help of the insecticide DDT successes were striking. Malaria was eradicated from the United States in 1951; like measles, polio, and other illnesses that no longer threaten us, it is completely unknown to children and largely forgotten by adults. We tend to think of malaria, if at all, as something distant and exotic ... [author domonstrates that malaria surpasses HIV/AIDS as the world's worst scourge in 2005]. The World Health Organization sought to eliminate malaria
even bofore it attempted to eradicate smallpox. The nineteen-fifties was an era of particular confidence in the power of medicine; a new polio vaccine had been discovered, and so had antibiotics. In countries like South Africa, Sri Lanka, and Mozambique, after
extensive spraying, malaria had almost vanished.
India brought the number of cases down from seventy-five million in 1951 to around fifty thousand in 1961, Large swaths of the disease in Southeast Asia were also on the brink of eradication. Yet by the late nineteen-sixties the success had come to a halt. DDT was seen as devastating to wildlife, and mosquitoes had begun to grow resistant to it. The United States banned DDT in 1962, and other developed countries followed. In most of Africa and Asia, where malaria efforts have always been funded by the West, the pesticide became politically unacceptable. Six years after Sri Lanka stopped using it, the number of cases rose from seventeen to more than half a million. By that time, though, malaria had essentially been banished from the developed world, and with it any incentive for continued
research."

- Michael Specter (The New Yorker, 24 October 2005)

The banning of DDT was regarded back then as an unalloyed triumph of emergent enviromentalism. The pressure against DDT was so strong that the ban (I met the mild-mannered Republican who wrote the regs) was an almost undisputed accomplishment of the Nixon administration.

My files are equivocal about the extent of DDT-resistant mosquito populations, and some writers believe that resistance was a fiction contrived by
enviros to assuage their guilt for banning the most effective countermeasure to malaria. Other writers believe that resistance did develop in isolated populations that could have been evaded by other measures. Bottom line is that malaria was almost defeated by DDT.

Hm, I thought agriculture in general, which came about far before Christianity, was the root cause of the problems outlined in Ishmael.

I was helping my girlfriend find a rental apartment near Greenlake all weekend.

Sorry.

But I am watching Call of Cthulhu tonight ...

oh, and to the global warming deniers - it's four degrees here in the Pacific NW by 2050, not the two degrees elsewhere.

If that results in melting all our glaciers than we get - a lot less water in the summer.

So, just burn your lawn this year, you won't have it for long.

Cheap Thrills,

You're wrong. DDT-resistant mosquitoes are very real. You can buy them for research, you can find them in the wild.

What's more, even if DDT-resistant mosquitoes aren't *universal*, there are plenty of DDT-resistant insects that are quite widespread: fruit flies, butterflies, roaches are three that come immediately to mind.

As a scientist, I *HATE* it when politically-motivated bullshit artists post pseudo-scientific lies and try to pass them off as science. You people are the closest thing I know to pure evil.

Mouse Droppings: Did I stutter? Please tell me when & where I said or wrote that DDT-resistant bugs are not very real.

What I wrote is this: "(S)ome writers believe that resistance was a fiction contrived by enviros to assuage their guilt for banning the most effective countermeasure to malaria. Other writers believe that resistance did develop in isolated populations that could have been evaded by other measures."

As a science dropout, I *HATE* it when politically-motivated bullshit artists post non sequiturs and try to pass them off as science. You people are the closest thing I know to pure evil. Learn to ******* read.

And learn to give a damn about the wretched of the earth. Pampered pallid Seattle elitists know that some of their VD and some of the TB that hits the world's non-latte classes are resistant to many of the biggest guns of the antibiotic armamentarium. Does selctive drug resistance mean that selectively ineffective drugs should be banned because they are not effective in all instances & because their use may entail unintended consequences? My point is that you are unlikely to deny yourselves any possible magic bullets for your preferred diseases. But rich, green elitists did not hesitate to deny relief and remedy to victims who are (or were) poor and brown. Millions of them. Read the New Yorker article for yourself, and the pile of files on which it was based, after you learn to read.

sic semper rodentia, I'd recommend that you go back and get that science education that you dropped out of and then spend some time helping "the wretched of the earth".

In some cases, yes, curtailing the use of drugs agains partially-resistant target populations is called for. Those "unintended side-effects" you speak of can be nasty, such as multi-drug resistance. Heard of MDR-TB?

And, could the Greens please take the volume down a couple of notches? Geni, David Wright and a couple of others are not arguing that global warming isn't happening. Anyone that's been near a copy of Science or Nature in the last five years understands this. Can you be satisfied that this is factual, and broadly understood by those with a scientific background?

What is not clear, and David Wright was the first to point this out, was what if anything should be done about it. Fnarf goes further to argue that nothing really can be done about it. Over time, our understanding of what could and should be done will grow. Until then, plant a tree, or buy a Prius or whatever lets you sleep easier at night. Just, please, don't go off half-cocked. Half-baked policies based on knee-jerk or incomplete information are just foolish, and aren't likely to improve things. Hey, wasn't somebody ranting about half-baked measures around DDT and mosquitos?

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