ON my return flight to Manila yesterday after almost two weeks in Kuala Lumpur to attend a new media training, I was switching channels in search of a movie to while away the three-hour travel time enroute to a stopover in Hong Kong. Of Cathay Pacific‘s in-flight entertainment menu for September, I was easily drawn to the documentary featuring former U.S. Vice President Al Gore and how he makes a compelling case for an equally crucial global campaign besides the one being waged against the world’s leaders’ current preoccupation — terrorism.
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.”
Idleness Personified 