Was on global warming and covered Daley’s efforts briefly.
But hey, Willard Scott isn’t so sure.
And on that note, I received a screener for An Inconvenient Truth and haven’t had time to cover it.
First, it’s pretty good. A bit too much Al Gore for me, but a little of him goes a long way. That said, the documentary is well done in presenting fairly complicated scientific arguments in a very accessible manner giving both anecdotal and visual evidence tied to scientific data and explanation. That’s a hard thing to do and Gore’s presentation does a good job of presenting the data well visually–something most people are quite bad at–he doesn’t fall into the PowerPoint traps that so many do.
Despite all of the claims that it’s a new Al Gore, don’t believe the hype. He’s still the condescending ass who talks down to everyone and is very self-congratulatory in his self-righteousness. It just so happens that the presentation is enough to overcome the grating nature of Gore. How it is that Democrats flock to the same type of candidates in the last two elections blows my mind. How some now seem to see him as a savior for progressives after what he did to Bradley infuriates me.
All that said, the film is good on another front. During the Clinton administration, James Hansen upbraided the Vice President for going to far on the science before consensus was reached–Hansen has now been muzzled by the Bush administration for pointing out consensus has been reached. One of the film’s strengths is that it sticks to the consensus pretty tightly when presenting the science. One might argue that some of the potential effects are outside the most likely scenario, but nearly all of them fall within reasonable probabilities given the context and for that, it makes an incredibly difficult problem to illustrate comprehensible to the general public. Definitely take a look at it if you haven’t already.