Now that the ice is broken...

I might as well start blogging again. Last night I went to see An Inconvenient Truth, which I've been meaning to see for a long time. Incidentally, it seems that people fall into one of two categories - either they don't even know this movie exists, or they've already seen it twice. If you're in the first, it's essentially Al Gore's global warming slideshow that he's been giving, apparently, for decades. It's good; you should see it, if for no other reason than who would have thought that Al Gore would be in a blockbuster (ok, used rather loosely)?! The whole message for me, though, is pretty well summed up in two graphs.

This one demonstrates pretty clearly to me both that there is some fairly direct relationship, in what way it is causal I do not presume to know, between carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and the temperature, and also that there are naturally recurring cycles of colder and warmer weather:


Given that, this next graph gives me serious pause, even without presuming that higher CO2 levels necessarily cause higher temperatures. You'll note that the current levels are far, far above anything in the last 650,000 years, and the projections of what they will be in the next 50 years (not on this graph, but in the movie) are downright spooky.


This just says to me that we have absolutely no idea what the effect of so much CO2 on temperatures will be, and that we pretty much can not count on the cyclical thing happening again like it did so many times before. This is an entirely new ball game; it's anyone's guess how it will all turn out long term, but it's enough to make me want to drive less, and maybe buy some land in Montana. And the footage of huge polar ice sheets breaking up completely in a matter of days a few years ago, to the shock of scientists, was not comforting either.