Short Film Review: "Recount"

Having suffered through HBO's fictional re-run of the 2000 presidential election, which Alessandra Stanley correctly describes as an "astute and deliciously engrossing film," here's what we think:

Reconsidering the Democratic Campaign

Hillary Clinton has totally pissed off half the Democrats in American by seemingly campaigning for John McCain. Meanwhile, Barack Obama's chief foreign policy advisor resigned today after calling Mrs. Clinton a "monster." And another of his advisors says neither Hillary nor Obama is "ready to have that 3 am phone call." Do you happen to have another resignation form handy?

Says a Kos contributor, "The only one happy" about all of this "is John McCain." What we say is, it's time to reconsider this idea from a month ago:

He foresaw global warming. He "took the initiative" on the Internet. And he knew exactly how Iraq would turn out. Who's to say that Al Gore hasn't known all along that the Democratic race would descend into some weird state of gridlock--and that only he, the Goracle, could rescue the party from civil war?

As a Pennsylvania blogger points out, that's what "super-delegates" are for.

Dispatch from the Culture War Front

Stephen Colbert has won the Associated Press' annual editors' award for "Celebrity of the Year." He beat out J.K. Rowling and Al Gore for the honor of being named the person who "had the biggest impact on pop culture in 2007."

It's a dead certainty that Al Gore is relieved, although he probably did draw more votes than Brittney and Kynne Spears combined.

The news was announced in a globe-spanning dispatch by the AP's culture beat reporter, Jake Coyle. But guess who's quoted to explain that vote to the rest of the world? Pensacola's own Julio Diaz, editor of the Pensacola News Journal's Weekender magazine and Santa Claus fan.

"Colbert is more than an entertainer, he's a force of nature," said Diaz. "He's influenced the way we look at the news and even the way we speak. Whenever a major news story breaks, one of my first thoughts is what Colbert's spin on the story will be."

Now, the Florida Panhandle is just about as far as you can get from the center of the Cultural Universe. So you have to wonder: How it is that New York City's Jake Coyle turned to Pensacola, Florida's Julio Diaz for an explanation?

Could it be that whenever a major cultural happening occurs in America, one of Jake Coyle's first thoughts is, "I wonder what Julio Diaz is thinking about this?"

Al Gore's Nobel Speech (Video and Text)

(22 min.)

(prepared text)

SPEECH BY AL GORE ON THE ACCEPTANCE
OF THE NOBEL PEACE PRIZE
DECEMBER 10, 2007
OSLO, NORWAY

Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, Honorable members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, Excellencies, Ladies and gentlemen.

I have a purpose here today. It is a purpose I have tried to serve for many years. I have prayed that God would show me a way to accomplish it.

Sometimes, without warning, the future knocks on our door with a precious and painful vision of what might be. One hundred and nineteen years ago, a wealthy inventor read his own obituary, mistakenly published years before his death. Wrongly believing the inventor had just died, a newspaper printed a harsh judgment of his life's work, unfairly labeling him "The Merchant of Death" because of his invention -- dynamite. Shaken by this condemnation, the inventor made a fateful choice to serve the cause of peace.

Seven years later, Alfred Nobel created this prize and the others that bear his name.

Seven years ago tomorrow, I read my own political obituary in a judgment that seemed to me harsh and mistaken -- if not premature. But that unwelcome verdict also brought a precious if painful gift: an opportunity to search for fresh new ways to serve my purpose.

Unexpectedly, that quest has brought me here. Even though I fear my words cannot match this moment, I pray what I am feeling in my heart will be communicated clearly enough that those who hear me will say, "We must act."

The distinguished scientists with whom it is the greatest honor of my life to share this award have laid before us a choice between two different futures -- a choice that to my ears echoes the words of an ancient prophet: "Life or death, blessings or curses. Therefore, choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live."

We, the human species, are confronting a planetary emergency -- a threat to the survival of our civilization that is gathering ominous and destructive potential even as we gather here. But there is hopeful news as well: we have the ability to solve this crisis and avoid the worst -- though not all -- of its consequences, if we act boldly, decisively and quickly.

However, despite a growing number of honorable exceptions, too many of the world's leaders are still best described in the words Winston Churchill applied to those who ignored Adolf Hitler's threat: "They go on in strange paradox, decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all powerful to be impotent."

So today, we dumped another 70 million tons of global-warming pollution into the thin shell of atmosphere surrounding our planet, as if it were an open sewer. And tomorrow, we will dump a slightly larger amount, with the cumulative concentrations now trapping more and more heat from the sun.

As a result, the earth has a fever. And the fever is rising. The experts have told us it is not a passing affliction that will heal by itself. We asked for a second opinion. And a third. And a fourth. And the consistent conclusion, restated with increasing alarm, is that something basic is wrong.

We are what is wrong, and we must make it right.

Last September 21, as the Northern Hemisphere tilted away from the sun, scientists reported with unprecedented distress that the North Polar ice cap is "falling off a cliff." One study estimated that it could be completely gone during summer in less than 22 years. Another new study, to be presented by U.S. Navy researchers later this week, warns it could happen in as little as 7 years.

Seven years from now.

In the last few months, it has been harder and harder to misinterpret the signs that our world is spinning out of kilter. Major cities in North and South America, Asia and Australia are nearly out of water due to massive droughts and melting glaciers. Desperate farmers are losing their livelihoods. Peoples in the frozen Arctic and on low-lying Pacific islands are planning evacuations of places they have long called home. Unprecedented wildfires have forced a half million people from their homes in one country and caused a national emergency that almost brought down the government in another. Climate refugees have migrated into areas already inhabited by people with different cultures, religions, and traditions, increasing the potential for conflict. Stronger storms in the Pacific and Atlantic have threatened whole cities. Millions have been displaced by massive flooding in South Asia, Mexico, and 18 countries in Africa. As temperature extremes have increased, tens of thousands have lost their lives. We are recklessly burning and clearing our forests and driving more and more species into extinction. The very web of life on which we depend is being ripped and frayed.

We never intended to cause all this destruction, just as Alfred Nobel never intended that dynamite be used for waging war. He had hoped his invention would promote human progress. We shared that same worthy goal when we began burning massive quantities of coal, then oil and methane.

Even in Nobel's time, there were a few warnings of the likely consequences. One of the very first winners of the Prize in chemistry worried that, "We are evaporating our coal mines into the air." After performing 10,000 equations by hand, Svante Arrhenius calculated that the earth's average temperature would increase by many degrees if we doubled the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.

Seventy years later, my teacher, Roger Revelle, and his colleague, Dave Keeling, began to precisely document the increasing CO2 levels day by day.

But unlike most other forms of pollution, CO2 is invisible, tasteless, and odorless -- which has helped keep the truth about what it is doing to our climate out of sight and out of mind. Moreover, the catastrophe now threatening us is unprecedented -- and we often confuse the unprecedented with the improbable.

We also find it hard to imagine making the massive changes that are now necessary to solve the crisis. And when large truths are genuinely inconvenient, whole societies can, at least for a time, ignore them. Yet as George Orwell reminds us: "Sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield."

In the years since this prize was first awarded, the entire relationship between humankind and the earth has been radically transformed. And still, we have remained largely oblivious to the impact of our cumulative actions.

Indeed, without realizing it, we have begun to wage war on the earth itself. Now, we and the earth's climate are locked in a relationship familiar to war planners: "Mutually assured destruction."

More than two decades ago, scientists calculated that nuclear war could throw so much debris and smoke into the air that it would block life-giving sunlight from our atmosphere, causing a "nuclear winter." Their eloquent warnings here in Oslo helped galvanize the world's resolve to halt the nuclear arms race.

Now science is warning us that if we do not quickly reduce the global warming pollution that is trapping so much of the heat our planet normally radiates back out of the atmosphere, we are in danger of creating a permanent "carbon summer."

As the American poet Robert Frost wrote, "Some say the world will end in fire; some say in ice."
Either, he notes, "would suffice."

But neither need be our fate. It is time to make peace with the planet.

We must quickly mobilize our civilization with the urgency and resolve that has previously been seen only when nations mobilized for war. These prior struggles for survival were won when leaders found words at the 11th hour that released a mighty surge of courage, hope and readiness to sacrifice for a protracted and mortal challenge.

These were not comforting and misleading assurances that the threat was not real or imminent; that it would affect others but not ourselves; that ordinary life might be lived even in the presence of extraordinary threat; that Providence could be trusted to do for us what we would not do for ourselves.

No, these were calls to come to the defense of the common future. They were calls upon the courage, generosity and strength of entire peoples, citizens of every class and condition who were ready to stand against the threat once asked to do so. Our enemies in those times calculated that free people would not rise to the challenge; they were, of course, catastrophically wrong.

Now comes the threat of climate crisis -- a threat that is real, rising, imminent, and universal. Once again, it is the 11th hour. The penalties for ignoring this challenge are immense and growing, and at some near point would be unsustainable and unrecoverable. For now we still have the power to choose our fate, and the remaining question is only this: Have we the will to act vigorously and in time, or will we remain imprisoned by a dangerous illusion?

Mahatma Gandhi awakened the largest democracy on earth and forged a shared resolve with what he called "Satyagraha" -- or "truth force."

In every land, the truth -- once known -- has the power to set us free.

Truth also has the power to unite us and bridge the distance between "me" and "we," creating the basis for common effort and shared responsibility.

There is an African proverb that says, "If you want to go quickly, go alone. If you want to go far, go together." We need to go far, quickly.

We must abandon the conceit that individual, isolated, private actions are the answer. They can and do help. But they will not take us far enough without collective action. At the same time, we must ensure that in mobilizing globally, we do not invite the establishment of ideological conformity and a new lock-step 'ism.'

That means adopting principles, values, laws, and treaties that release creativity and initiative at every level of society in multifold responses originating concurrently and spontaneously.

This new consciousness requires expanding the possibilities inherent in all humanity. The innovators who will devise a new way to harness the sun's energy for pennies or invent an engine that's carbon negative may live in Lagos or Mumbai or Montevideo. We must ensure that entrepreneurs and inventors everywhere on the globe have the chance to change the world.

When we unite for a moral purpose that is manifestly good and true, the spiritual energy unleashed can transform us. The generation that defeated fascism throughout the world in the 1940s found, in rising to meet their awesome challenge, that they had gained the moral authority and long-term vision to launch the Marshall Plan, the United Nations, and a new level of global cooperation and foresight that unified Europe and facilitated the emergence of democracy and prosperity in Germany, Japan, Italy and much of the world. One of their visionary leaders said, "It is time we steered by the stars and not by the lights of every passing ship."

In the last year of that war, you gave the Peace Prize to a man from my hometown of 2000 people, Carthage, Tennessee. Cordell Hull was described by Franklin Roosevelt as the "Father of the United Nations." He was an inspiration and hero to my own father, who followed Hull in the Congress and the U.S. Senate and in his commitment to world peace and global cooperation.

My parents spoke often of Hull, always in tones of reverence and admiration. Eight weeks ago, when you announced this prize, the deepest emotion I felt was when I saw the headline in my hometown paper that simply noted I had won the same prize that Cordell Hull had won. In that moment, I knew what my father and mother would have felt were they alive.

Just as Hull's generation found moral authority in rising to solve the world crisis caused by fascism, so too can we find our greatest opportunity in rising to solve the climate crisis. In the Kanji characters used in both Chinese and Japanese, "crisis" is written with two symbols, the first meaning "danger," the second "opportunity." By facing and removing the danger of the climate crisis, we have the opportunity to gain the moral authority and vision to vastly increase our own capacity to solve other crises that have been too long ignored.

We must understand the connections between the climate crisis and the afflictions of poverty, hunger, HIV-Aids and other pandemics. As these problems are linked, so too must be their solutions. We must begin by making the common rescue of the global environment the central organizing principle of the world community.

Fifteen years ago, I made that case at the "Earth Summit" in Rio de Janeiro. Ten years ago, I presented it in Kyoto. This week, I will urge the delegates in Bali to adopt a bold mandate for a treaty that establishes a universal global cap on emissions and uses the market in emissions trading to efficiently allocate resources to the most effective opportunities for speedy reductions.

This treaty should be ratified and brought into effect everywhere in the world by the beginning of 2010 -- two years sooner than presently contemplated. The pace of our response must be accelerated to match the accelerating pace of the crisis itself.

Heads of state should meet early next year to review what was accomplished in Bali and take personal responsibility for addressing this crisis. It is not unreasonable to ask, given the gravity of our circumstances, that these heads of state meet every three months until the treaty is completed.

We also need a moratorium on the construction of any new generating facility that burns coal without the capacity to safely trap and store carbon dioxide.

And most important of all, we need to put a price on carbon -- with a CO2 tax that is then rebated back to the people, progressively, according to the laws of each nation, in ways that shift the burden of taxation from employment to pollution. This is by far the most effective and simplest way to accelerate solutions to this crisis.

The world needs an alliance -- especially of those nations that weigh heaviest in the scales where earth is in the balance. I salute Europe and Japan for the steps they've taken in recent years to meet the challenge, and the new government in Australia, which has made solving the climate crisis its first priority.

But the outcome will be decisively influenced by two nations that are now failing to do enough: the United States and China. While India is also growing fast in importance, it should be absolutely clear that it is the two largest CO2 emitters -- most of all, my own country -- that will need to make the boldest moves, or stand accountable before history for their failure to act.

Both countries should stop using the other's behavior as an excuse for stalemate and instead develop an agenda for mutual survival in a shared global environment.

These are the last few years of decision, but they can be the first years of a bright and hopeful future if we do what we must. No one should believe a solution will be found without effort, without cost, without change. Let us acknowledge that if we wish to redeem squandered time and speak again with moral authority, then these are the hard truths:

The way ahead is difficult. The outer boundary of what we currently believe is feasible is still far short of what we actually must do. Moreover, between here and there, across the unknown, falls the shadow.

That is just another way of saying that we have to expand the boundaries of what is possible. In the words of the Spanish poet, Antonio Machado, "Pathwalker, there is no path. You must make the path as you walk."

We are standing at the most fateful fork in that path. So I want to end as I began, with a vision of two futures -- each a palpable possibility -- and with a prayer that we will see with vivid clarity the necessity of choosing between those two futures, and the urgency of making the right choice now.

The great Norwegian playwright, Henrik Ibsen, wrote, "One of these days, the younger generation will come knocking at my door."

The future is knocking at our door right now. Make no mistake, the next generation will ask us one of two questions. Either they will ask: "What were you thinking; why didn't you act?"

Or they will ask instead: "How did you find the moral courage to rise and successfully resolve a crisis that so many said was impossible to solve?"

We have everything we need to get started, save perhaps political will, but political will is a renewable resource.

So let us renew it, and say together: "We have a purpose. We are many. For this purpose we will rise, and we will act."

So, How Did That New Hire Work Out?

So, America, how did that new hire we made for you work out?

-- 5 member majority of the U.S. Supreme Court

------------------------------

Job Candidates:
George Bush
versus
Al Gore, Jr.

Al Gore, Jr. (not hired):

• Won Nobel Peace Prize for three decades of work on the climate crisis
• Won Spain's 2007 Prince of Asturias Award for International Cooperation
  
• Won an Oscar for the film "An Inconvenient Truth"
• Won an Emmy for co-founding innovative cable channel "Current"
• Wrote the best seller, "The Assault on Reason" (2007)
• Wrote and starred in the documentary film, "An Inconvenient Truth"(2006)
• Co-authored with Tipper Gore the best-selling book, "Joined at the Heart" (2002)
  
• Wrote the best selling book, "Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit" (2000)

George Bush (appointed):

• Invaded Iraq on false pretenses
• Presided over the worst security failure in US history
• Spent the largest U.S. surplus in history and shattered the record for the biggest annual deficit in history
• Set the all-time record for 15 million people worldwide simultaneously protesting against any person in the history of mankind
• Dissolved more international treaties than any president in US history
• Obliterated more freedoms and civil liberties for Americans than any other president in US history.
• See complete list of his accomplishments and supporting links here.
  
• See complete resume of George W. Bush and supporting links here.

Letter to Al Gore

Tennessee Guerilla Women have excerpts, as well as the full page ad (in pdf format) that appears in today's New York Times. It's a letter addressed to, not from, Al Gore:

"You say you have fallen out of love with politics, and you have every reason to feel that way. But we know you have not fallen out of love with your country. And your country needs you now--as do your party and the planet you are fighting to save."

"There are times for politicians and times for heroes. America and the Earth need a hero right now. Please rise to this challenge, or you and millions of us will live forever wondering what might have been."

Let's hope it's enough.

Al Gore's Fall

This Fall promises to be a busy time for Al Gore. Among a long string of other prestigious awards, he's an official nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize. The winner will be officially announced on October 12.

Even dyspeptic Christopher Hitchens thinks Gore is a shoo-in:

So, and if I am right, the former vice president will then complete a year in which An Inconvenient Truth has been awarded an Oscar and he has authored a best seller. Roll it round your tongue again: an Oscar, a best seller, and a Nobel Prize in the space of 12 months or so. Not bad.

Hitchens also might have mentioned, had he been sober enough to notice, that earlier this year Gore was awarded Spain's "Prince of Asturias Award" for "international cooperation" -- that nation's equivalent of the Nobel Peace Prize. And, just this month the Sierra Club gave Gore its John Muir Award, the most prestigious honor bestowed by that venerable organization. And we haven't even mentioned the Emmy Award Gore collected for his Current TV venture.

All of this has inspired a number of commentators, Hitchens among them, to speculate that if Gore does win the Nobel he'll announce whether he will be a candidate for U.S. president within a few days after that. Writes Hitchens:

Several people, some of them well-informed, have been saying to me that Gore will wait until the Nobel committee's announcement before he makes up his mind. Should he make up his mind to run, he could alter the entire equation

Note: Hitchens' sources haven't said he'll run if he wins the Nobel; just that he'll make an announcement one way or another. Brent Budowsky, writing for the Huffington Post, says either way "it will be a powerful transforming event in American politics that will bring a surge of patriotism and pride to a nation that has been torn by war, divided by partisanship, trapped in a quagmire and alienated from what Jefferson called the decent opinion of mankind."

Let's set aside for now the question of whether Al Gore runs for President, which is unlikely though world events can change our politics in a heartbeat.

The more important matter is what happens to our national dialogue and our democracy if indeed the Nobel Prize is awarded to Gore.

From the moment his award is announced through his speech in December accepting the prize, Al Gore will be the most influential living American in defining the terms of our national debate.

Maybe so, but that isn't enough for the millions of Gore supporters. They want more than "influence" for Al Gore; they want him to have the power of the presidency.

With that fervent hope in mind, almost entirely unnoticed by the mainstream media, the effort to "draft" Al Gore suddenly has picked up the pace. As Daily Green reported earlier this week --

Several groups have coalesced around the idea of drafting Al Gore to run for president of the United States. The new group, America for Gore, now includes some smaller groups that had made waves in political circles — including DraftGore.com, AlGore.org, Netroots for Gore, GoreHub.com, Goreganic.com and RunGoreRun.com.

The evidence is now visible on the front page of the new America For Gore web site. It can also be seen in the effort now underway in Michigan, as the Detroit News reported Monday, "to deliver 12,396 valid signatures to the Michigan secretary of State by Oct. 23" along with a sworn affidavit from the candidate himself.

Daily Kos diary writer "fink" has the details of Al Gore's appointment schedule. What it shows is that a normally whirlwind calendar filled with international appearances, speeches, interviews, and other commitments goes suddenly near-dark the last two weeks in October.

Has Al Gore stopped booking new events? Are his booking agents on hold? Will he simply be working on his new book? We can not say of course.

But either way you look at it, he is underbooked after the Nobel Peace Prize announcement. And that is when most people agree has to shit or get off the pot. Looking at his calendar, Al Gore HAS THE OPTION of announcing his candidacy for the Democratic nomination and running for President. He would have a couple international events to cancel but he would ample time to give notice.

Not to force fuel onto this fire, but we noticed the other day that for the last eleven months no less a luminary than Howard Metzenbaum -- former U.S. senator from Ohio, current D.C. lobbyist, and father of Al Gore's partner in the Current TV channel venture -- has had reserved the internet domain name of "Gore-Obama.com". The registration expires on October 15, 2007 (though it can be renewed). You can see it right here after entering the random security code.

Or, take a look at this screen-shot:

Not that we are predicting Al Gore will announce his candidacy by then. We're not at all sure he would have much chance of winning the next presidential election, assuming Cheney lets us have one. He may know it, too.

The more international awards and intellectual prizes Al Gore wins, the slimmer grow his chances of winning an election. By now, American voters have been thoroughly conditioned by cable news and political beauty contest reporters to judge their candidates by which one they'd rather have a beer with, rather than which one is smarter, works harder, or has better ideas.

The last guy they want to rub elbows with at a bar is some smarty-pants who not only reads books but actually writes them, too. And when they find out he's won an Oscar, an Emmy, and the Nobel Peace Prize, they'll just want to take him into an alley and punch him out.

CLICK HERE FOR UPDATE # 1

CLICK HERE FOR UPDATE 2

Quote of the Week

"What politics has become requires a level of tolerance for triviality and artifice and nonsense that I find I have in short supply."

-- Al Gore, Framingham (MA) Metro Daily News

Reason and Reaction

WaPo columnist Eugene Robinson reports on the prevailing Beltway wisdom about Al Gore's new book, The Assault on Reason. Digby uses the smarmy, smug, ever-superficial Gwen Ifill as an outstanding example:

If you missed Gwen Ifill interviewing Gore about his book last night, you missed the latest in a series of obtuse, eye-rolling interviews by the high school cheerleading squad that calls itself the news media. Ifill was practically chewing gum and popping bubbles in Gore's face as she asks him about his, like, totally boring book.

As Robinson says --

One thing that should be clear to anyone who's been paying attention these past few years is that we need to go out and get ourselves the smartest president we can find. We need a brainiac president, a regular Mister or Miss Smarty-Pants. We need to elect the kid you hated in high school, the teacher's pet with perfect grades

It wouldn't hurt to have a few more like Robinson and Digby, and many fewer Gwen Ifills, in the national media, too.

Convenient Meet-up Saturday

We've mentioned it before. In fact, we've raved about David Guggenheim's documentary -- often mistakenly called the 'Al Gore documentary' -- titled "An Inconvenient Truth."

Saturday, nearly 50 local residents -- one of them could be you -- have the chance to see the film for free by accepting one of three invitations to a Moveon.org meet-up in a private home of volunteer hosts here in Northwest Florida: Deborah Moore (Gulf Breeze), Robert N. Suberi (Orange Beach), or Susan (Destin).

The local "meet ups" are part of nearly 1,700 simultaneous showings in private homes taking place this weekend across the nation. Not only does it give you the chance to see a riveting, informative, and entertaining presentation about global warming, but you'll have the opportunity to make new friends who share similar concerns and values.

If you live somewhere other than Northwest Florida, you can cadge an invitation to a Saturday showing nearest your zip code by clicking here.

Climate Crisis: Seeing Is Believing

"Our children, grandchildren, and many more generations will bear the consequences of choices that we make in the next few years."

-- Dr. James E. Hansen, Goddard Space Institute

Jim Hansen, Columbia University professor and Director of NASA's Goddard Space Institute, has written a compellingly personal article in the current on-line version of the New York Review of Books.

He begins his review of two new books and the film, An Inconvenient Truth, by using easy-to-understand examples from what ordinary people see every day to explain why, when it comes to the climate crisis, "Our children, grandchildren, and many more generations will bear the consequences of choices that we make in the next few years."

Below is just a small taste. The full article is worth the read if you happen to be living on planet Earth.

Animals and plants are adapted to specific climate zones, and they can survive only when they are in those zones. Indeed, scientists often define climate zones by the vegetation and animal life that they support. Gardeners and bird watchers are well aware of this, and their handbooks contain maps of the zones in which a tree or flower can survive and the range of each bird species.

Those maps will have to be redrawn.

* * *
Recently after appearing on television to discuss climate change, I received an e-mail from a man in northeast Arkansas: "I enjoyed your report on Sixty Minutes and commend your strength. I would like to tell you of an observation I have made. It is the armadillo. I had not seen one of these animals my entire life, until the last ten years. I drive the same forty-mile trip on the same road every day and have slowly watched these critters advance further north every year and they are not stopping. Every year they move several miles."

* * *
Studies of more than one thousand species of plants, animals, and insects, including butterfly ranges charted by members of the public, found an average migration rate toward the North and South Poles of about four miles per decade in the second half of the twentieth century. That is not fast enough. During the past thirty years the lines marking the regions in which a given average temperature prevails ("isotherms") have been moving poleward at a rate of about thirty-five miles per decade. That is the size of a county in Iowa. Each decade the range of a given species is moving one row of counties northward.

* * * But now the movement is inexorably toward the poles and totals more than a hundred miles over the past several decades. If emissions of greenhouse gases continue to increase at the current rate—"business as usual"—then the rate of isotherm movement will double in this century to at least seventy miles per decade. If we continue on this path, a large fraction of the species on Earth, as many as 50 percent or more, may become extinct.

There's much more to Dr. Hansen's article than a persuasive description of the crisis we face and the dire consequences if we keep ignoring it. As Digby points out, Hansen is one of the scientists the Bush administration has been trying to muzzle. In the case of NASA, the administration appointed a callow, right-wing whacko college dropout to censor public papers and statements, including those of Dr. Hansen.

That whacko is gone now, but not the administration's blatant bowdlerizing of science. So it should be no surprise that in introducing Dr. Hansen's article the New York Review felt compelled to carry the article over the byline of "Jim Hansen" rather than the more formal, and correct, "Dr. James E. Hansen." And, it adds an author's note which to our recollection is unprecedented for this most worthy of forums for the discussion of serious ideas:

"His opinions are expressed here, he writes, 'as personal views under the protection of the First Amendment of the United States Constitution.'"

One of those "personal views" in the latter half of Hansen's article happens to be about the scandalous failure of American journalists to cover the climate crisis with intellectual honesty. Again, the lesson is 'seeing is believing.'

About climate change, he writes --

The public is understandably confused or uninterested.

I used to spread the blame uniformly until, when I was about to appear on public television, the producer informed me that the program "must" also include a "contrarian" who would take issue with claims of global warming. Presenting such a view, he told me, was a common practice in commercial television as well as radio and newspapers.

Supporters of public TV or advertisers, with their own special interests, require "balance" as a price for their continued financial support. * * * As a result, even when the scientific evidence is clear, technical nit-picking by contrarians leaves the public with the false impression that there is still great scientific uncertainty about the reality and causes of climate change.

In Hansen's view the integrity (or lack of it) in press coverage, like elections, does have consequences. Speaking of his own despair over whether we have the capacity to elect "politicians with the courage to explain to the public what is needed," he recites his own long, and at times wary, relationship with Al Gore going back nearly two decades.

The short of it, Hansen confesses, is that he was a doubter and Gore turned out to "prescient" about the climate crisis. "For decades he has maintained that the Earth was teetering in the balance, even when doing so subjected him to ridicule from other politicians and cost him votes."

With hindsight, Hansen now realizes, "the man that I met in the 1980s at scientific roundtable discussions [is] passionate and knowledgeable, true to the message he has delivered for years."

He shares this insight as much to indict the media for its part in perpetuating untruths as to give Gore a clap on the back. In the professer's words --

It makes one wonder whether the American public has not been deceived by the distorted images of him that have been presented by the press and television. Perhaps the country came close to having the leadership it needed to deal with a grave threat to the planet, but did not realize it.

That's a discouraging thought. But, as with the climate crisis itself, we may yet forge for ourselves a second chance -- and this time get it right.

Opening: An Inconvenient Truth

"An Inconvenient Truth, based on a slide show Gore developed and has given for years, is part documentary, part dark comedy and part horror thriller."

-- USA Today

---

"The temptation to reject the truth and try to manufacture your own reality is what got us into Iraq—it’s what got us into these deficits. At some point, reality has its day."

-- Al Gore, Newsweek, Apr. 28, 2006

It isn't happening here in Pensacola. Not yet, anyway.

But the David Guggenheim documentary An Inconvenient Truth, opens today in major cities across the nation. Here are some comments among the multitude who have seen the film in previews and at Cannes this past week:

Andrew O'Hehir in Salon, Tuesday, May 23: "'An Inconvenient Truth,' the striking and surprisingly endearing film about Gore's global-warming crusade made by director Davis Guggenheim, in a day or two."

A. O. Scott, New York Times movie review:

"[T]he movie is not about [Al Gore]. He is, rather, the surprisingly engaging vehicle for some very disturbing information. His explanations of complex environmental phenomena — the jet stream has always been a particularly tough one for me to grasp — are clear, and while some of the visual aids are a little corny, most of the images are stark, illuminating and powerful.

"I can't think of another movie in which the display of a graph elicited gasps of horror, but when the red lines showing the increasing rates of carbon-dioxide emissions and the corresponding rise in temperatures come on screen, the effect is jolting and chilling. Photographs of receding ice fields and glaciers — consequences of climate change that have already taken place — are as disturbing as speculative maps of submerged coastlines. The news of increased hurricane activity and warming oceans is all the more alarming for being delivered in Mr. Gore's matter-of-fact, scholarly tone."

Margaret Carlson of Bloomberg News Service:

"[M]uch of what Gore said in his 1993 book, 'Earth in the Balance,' has proven prophetic. His prescriptions -- increased mileage standards, wind power, appliances rated by the energy efficiency, hybrid cars -- are more practical than anything the government has done lately and are now widely accepted, even by the industries that fought them.

* * *
"Translated to film, 'An Inconvenient Truth'' -- part slide show, part home movie, part freshmen lecture hall -- is never going to be confused with 'The DaVinci Code' with which it shared billing at the 59th Cannes Film Festival this weekend. But it is important, if not always entertaining. It doesn't have the polemics or histrionics of Michael Moore's 'Fahrenheit 911.'' It's NPR, not 'CSI Miami.'

* * *
"It's short and pithy, what Gore's speeches often weren't. The visuals are simple. He drives home the point that there's no factual dispute over global warning. A Science magazine survey of all peer-reviewed studies on climate change showed that of the 928 independent studies done to date, (those not paid for by industry) all concluded that global warming is a real and growing threat.

"There are no independent studies saying otherwise. Yet stories sampled from newspapers, television and magazines, show that 53 percent suggest global warming is unproven.

"In that way, global warming is much like the evidence that tobacco caused lung cancer. For decades it was greeted by the industry, politicians, doctors paid to do ads and the media with unwarranted skepticism -- until everyone accepted that smoking makes you deathly ill.

* * *
"The movie comes at a time when some pundits (including me) might wonder if we should give a rest to that old saw about likeability. Maybe Americans prefer to have a beer and burger with the charming frat boy to the student who always does his homework. But is that a wise basis for choosing a president?

"With all the needless death from a ill-conceived war, the wasteful corruption of sweetheart contracts in Iraq and New Orleans, debt and deficits as far as the eye can see, gas prices through the roof with no energy policy in sight, and with a president who delegates to incompetents and cronies, I'm ready to give the class nerd his due and raise a glass to a serious man. Here's to you, Al and a huge box-office gross."

Related Links

Eleanor Clift's Interview with Al Gore

Post-Ivan Civic Recovery

The Alliance for Climate Protection

The Speech

News Hounds has links to the video and the full text of Al Gore's stunning speech at Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C.

Former vice-president Al Gore asserted Monday that President George W. Bush "repeatedly and persistently" broke the law by eavesdropping on Americans without a court warrant and called for a federal investigation of the practice.

Gore, the Democrat who lost the 2000 presidential election to Bush only after a ruling by the Supreme Court on a recount in Florida, called Bush's warrantless surveillance program "a threat to the very structure of our government."

-- Associated Press

And, as this ground-breaking speech was being made, Peter Daou asks, "What do all three cable news nets cover under the "Breaking News" banner? An overturned tanker truck on a New York highway."

How To Celebrate MLK Day

"King's widow, Coretta Scott King, says that the day was always intended as a one of activism that mirrored her husband's life during the Civil Rights movement, rather than just an empty celebration."

-- News Hour

There is no well settled national custom for how to celebrate Martin Luther King Day, other than not delivering the mail. Some devote the day to public service. Most probably don't. Some take the day off. Others go to work as usual. Some parade. Most don't.

This Monday, probably the best way to commemorate the life and courage of Rev. King is to exercise your brain by tuning in to C-Span at 11 am Central time (noon Eastern) to watch the live speech from Constitution Hall of former Vice-president Al Gore.

In a major address slated for delivery Monday in Washington, the former Vice President is expected to argue that the Bush administration has created a "Constitutional crisis" by acting without the authorization of the Congress and the courts to spy on Americans and otherwise abuse basic liberties.

Georgia conservative Bob Barr, a former congressman, will introduce him. The event is sponsored by the non-partisan Liberty Coalition. The issue is the most important constitutional crisis confronting the nation since the Montgomery Bus Boycott.