Earlier this year in San Francisco, I was lucky enough to sit it on Al Gore's slide show on global warming. It's the most brilliant articulation of climate science I've ever seen. With time-lapse photography, excellent graphs and charts, snippets from cartoon shows, and vivid examples, the former vice president makes it easy to grasp the scale and the urgency of the climate crisis. His delivery is perfect -- he roams the stage, sometimes whispering and sometimes shouting. It's enthralling.
Gore's slide show is the subject of a forthcoming documentary and book, both titled "An Inconvenient Truth." It's also a welcome sign that climate change is finally a blinking red light of concern on the American radar screen. Two new books with rich and heartbreaking details -- Elizabeth Kolbert's "Field Notes From a Catastrophe" and Tim Flannery's "The Weather Makers" -- also deliver an exceptionally clear picture of how global warming is already on us and what disasters lie in wait should we fail to act.
All of this should be good news because it offers Americans a better handle on climate change. But it's not all good news, largely because it's all bad news. Really bad news. Something is missing from all of these stories: hope. |
