Blossoms of disbelief

Late last week, I read, I can't remember where, that only 13% of Republicans in the US Congress believe that the global climate change is caused by humans. On Saturday night, I finally watched Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, which Flame-Haired Angel had given me for Christmas. Sunday, as we strolled in the beautiful Parc Monceau, in Paris, the spring blossoms were out on the trees. In February. The middle of European winter. As we walked, FHA and I discussed my one disappointment with An Inconvenient Truth. As impressive and deftly incontrovertible as it is, it fails to make one of four critical points in the case about climate crisis. Those four necessary points are: 1. Climate crisis is real. 2. Climate crisis, if unchecked, will result in disaster for you and me. 3. Man is causing (or, at a minimum, dramatically exacerbating) it. 4. Man can fix it. Gore makes points 1-3 look like child's play. That is the movie's power. He fails completely to make the last point, however. He does show, quickly and neatly, how we can reduce our emissions to pre-1970s levels, which is good. He does not show that doing so will make things better. Which is bad. He doesn't claim that reducing emissions will slow the cooling of the planet. Nor does he make the more important claim that we can cool the planet back down. Having been hyped into fight or flight mode -- with no option for flight from our only planet -- we need to see clearly what is the potential outcome of the fight. After spending so much of the presentation/movie convincing us that the damage is already at a catastrophic point, it isn't enough for Gore to say we can reduce our destructive pace. We need to know if we can reverse it. ..