The issue: averting climate change and global warming, of which Gore is a known longtime advocate.

In “An Inconvenient Truth,” Gore takes center stage as he — in a demeanor more resembling a professor than a politician — gives a multimedia lecture to draw attention to the perils of global warming as a result of the dramatic increase in the amount of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere due to the burning of fossil fuels such as coal, gas and oil, and clearing of forests. Documentary director Davis Guggenheim also weaves in heartwarming biographical sketches of the defeated U.S. presidential candidate who first became aware of the problem as a college student. (View the trailer here.)

One of Gore’s professors in Harvard University, Roger Revelle, was the first scientist to propose measuring the carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere. Revelle’s experiments began in 1958 and in the intervening decades, the scientific research became a moral issue for Gore that has led him on a global roadshow to convince people of the “inescapable imperative to avert climate change through changing our lifestyles.”

Serving to underscore Gore’s argument are his own country’s failure, along with Australia, to honor the 1997 Kyoto Protocol to and its lamenatable record on carbon and other greenhouse gas emissions. For one, the Bush administration maintains that the threat of global warming is not severe enough to warrant new pollution controls.

In the film, Gore, who has also come out with a bestselling book carrying the same title, enumerates the frightening consequences of rising temperatures already evident in melting glaciers, plants and animals being forced from their habitat, and the increasing number of severe storms and droughts.

The former vice president also warns of changes of even more apocalyptic proportions if the warming continues, including global sea levels rising by more than 20 feet with the loss of shelf ice in Greenland and Antarctica, that could devastate coastal areas worldwide.

The film recently received backing from the conclusion of a Congress-commissioned study of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) that the Earth’s present temperature is “unprecedented for at least the last 400 years and potentially the last several millennia.”

The 155-page NAS report said average global surface temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere rose about one degree during the 20th century, citing human activities as responsible for much of the recent warming.

But the scientific community is divided on the issue, with climate experts contesting the hypothesis that human emissions of carbon dioxide are causing significant global climate change.

The scientific debate notwithstanding, “An Inconvenient Truth” has earned praises from film reviewers, received standing ovations when it was shown at the Sundance Film Festival this year, and was conferred a special rcognition from the Humanitas Prize, which honors screenwriting that helps “liberate, enrich and unify society.”

The 100-minute film is still being shown in selected theaters in the U.S. Hopefully the DVD version of the documentary is already locally available. Because as critic Roger Ebert advised, and after watching it myself, regardless of political affiliations, “(y)ou owe it to yourself to see this film.”

For more information, visit the official site.

I’m here in the Malaysian capital since August 22 to attend a new media training hosted by the Southeast Asian Center for Electronic Media (SEACeM). Today’s session is about WordPress. Most of my fellow Southeast Asian participants are new to the concept of a blog and are being introduced to the open-source blogging software. They are taught how to create a personal blog on WordPress.com.

The exercise was therefore an opportunity for me to tweak around with my own blog, which used to be hosted on another free blog hosting service until I decided to move to WordPress, frustrated by the unmanageable avalanche of spam comments that invaded my posts on the old blog.

The heavy toll of maintaining the PCIJ blog has really been detrimental to having a separate personal blog, although I believe it also provides me with a perfect excuse for being true to my blog title. But I guess, from hereon, this blog will have to shed some of its patented idleness. So, do welcome me back!