I’ve seen the trailer for the movie, based on my viewing of the trailer, I would say the movie is blatant propaganda.

Propoganda? Probably, but I’d say it’s at least useful propoganda.

I totally agree with the message but I think they could do without making it so political.

“I used to be the next president lol”
“...other threats besides terrorists?”
“an inconvenient truth...”

Stuff like that is going to turn away potential viewers. I think they should have taken the high road and just had someone like Morgan Freeman host it… Of course people would still call it political but at least to the average no-stick-in-the-ass joe it would appear neutral.

Don’t get me wrong I love Gore as a speaker and could listen to him for hours but he’s just not the best choice for a film that everyone needs to see.

Yeah, that trailer was pretty pumped-up.  I just wish Gore had showed this much edge when he was running for president.  Maybe we could have been spared the entire Bush II administration.

Inconvenient is a very good word for this particular reality, though.  I have heard so many people say that doing something about greenhouse gasses would mess up the economy.  (shouting)What the heck do they think global warming is going to do?! (/shouting)

Oh shit! It’s getting WARMER! BFD.
We peed the bed and now we have to sleep in it.

There is nothing we can do about it. I, for one, will not be changing a single damn thing about my life. I don’t/won’t have kids so I don’t give a rats ass about the next generation.

Have a nice day.

I don’t give a rats ass about the next generation.

Ah Moloch, you prick!
For years I thought I was the most selfish, self-centred arsehole on the planet.
Here is my crown!

Just an additional thought -
I’ll be 60 in less than a year so I prob’ly won’t see the changes as much as those 20+ years younger than me.
Here I am sticking my neck out and guestimating that you’re not yet 40 only based on the fact you don’t ever want kids, in the future.
You see, at my age there’s fuckall future left.
Don’t forget that change is always forced upon us, whether we want it or not.
Have a nice life.

I *did* notice that it was very warm for winter. I live in metro Denver and I was kinda pissed that we only had 4 lasting snowfalls for all winter.

Where was the 30” of snow? Where were the blizards? Why was the average high over 45*f for the last 3 of months of the season?

Oh, well. Looks like alaska is in my future. If that gets too warm for comfort… We are truely in deep shit.

Sidestepping the actual topic for a moment…

The way things are structured in the US these days, I find myself questioning any scientific studies. Not just during this administration either, my distrust goes back a fairly long time.

The problem is in the way we choose to fund scientists. Since they need grant money to do their work, and grant money is given out by political whim, they have had to adopt a “sky is falling” method of communication in order to insure that the money continues to come in. So any results that come along are skewed by that need.

What’s the solution?

Seperate science from politics completely. Grant money for scientific research freely, possibly based on peer review and not the uneducated understanding of politicians.

Okay, now back to our regularly scheduled program, “Chicken Little: The Bush Years.”

It is all propaganda there is no science here.

Try this;

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0849333563/002-7499159-5960040?v=glance&n=283155

There is discussion of both the media and fear culture in this book that allows this meme to flourish as some kind of unsubstanciated folklore.  Movies, Television and even our “unbiased news” just continues to build on the fear.  Somehow this and the war helps justify the high cost of fuel while fuel companies enjoy record profits.  The manipulation continues.

Satellite Monitoring of Inland and Coastal Water Quality: Retrospection, Introspection, Future Directions reviews how aquatic optics models convert remote determinations of water color into accurate assessments of water quality. This book illustrates how this conversion generates products of value for the environmental monitoring of optically complex inland and coastal waters. The author emphasizes how terrestrial, aquatic, and wetland remote sensing are underutilized tools due to a lack of influential end-usership. He reviews this disinterest and examines why it exists, how it can be abated, and the synergies that need to be activated among technologists, scientists, entrepreneurs, policy-makers, and water quality professionals.

I wonder if he will show this movie on his current tv network after going around the theaters with it.

It is all propaganda there is no science here.

Global warming is all propaganda, Bruno?  I wish.  How fast it’s occurring, and what the results will be, is uncertain and debated; that we’ve altered the atmosphere, and that this alteration is warming the earth, no competent scientist doubts.  It looks bad, and I’m afraid it’s not just an ecoterrorist ploy, or an excuse to raise fuel prices- these are babies arguing in the sandbox when the flood hits.  There’s lots of information out there from scientists with no financial or political ax to grind, for instance New Scientist online.

Of course conservatives deny global warming, because a) it would mean more government regulation of industry (cuts into profits!), and b) it would mean the evil commie environmentalists were right all along.  Not that any of them will admit it- after all, how many admitted being wrong about the WMD’s they swore up and down that Saddam had?  I don’t know of a single one.

I was going to make a comment about how Al Gore invented the internet, but you guys depressed me with your doomsday talk.  I’m 19 fucking years old.  You sons of bitched have fucked things up good and proper, and the mess is being left to my generation to clean.  You know what the worst part is?  It’s the knowledge that my generation probably won’t have any more success than the last.
Humanity, as a whole, doesn’t do foresight very well.  Scientists can present all the evidence they want, but until the flood waters are lapping at our door, the majority of us don’t give a flying fuck, like Moloch there.

What can I tell you, MoP?  It isn’t a generational thing.  There will always be people who take it as a challenge to find innovative solutions.  Back in ‘71 when the new emissions standards for ‘75 were announced, Soichiro Honda (by then already well into geezerhood) invented the stratfied-charge engine, the only one to pass the tests without a catalytic converter.  That’s just one useless anecdote but if anything will save the day, it’s that hacker mentality, teasing out the threads of the problem and seeing how they’re related.

(Smiles and hums, eyes closed, imagining armies of robots planting trees in 50 years...)

My daughter and I spoke about this earlier this morning. I told her that it’s possible she could be witness to some major problems in her future (she’ll be 16 in August). Gas well over $5 or even $10 a gallon in her lifetime and the potential loss of millions of miles of shoreline to the rising coastal tides brought about by the melting ice caps. She was looking pretty down about it and said something along the same lines as MoP.

So I pointed out to here that previous generations have been making messes for future generations since we first started making tools and that after hitting a peak during the height of the industrial age we’ve been slowly moving towards not making as a big a mess for the folks growing up. Also that it’s entirely possible her generation will find a way to overcome these problems as previous generations have managed to do with the issues they faced. Perhaps someone will actually figure out how to do cold fusion or come up with a novel way of scrubbing the atmosphere to reduce the level of Greenhouse gasses. There may still be massive problems and pain to go through before you get there, but there’s no reason to assume it’s impossible for us to overcome the challenges.

Yes, we’ve got a looming problem with no obvious solutions that won’t require a lot of sacrifice to mitigate, but that’s often times when we’re at our best and that gives me reason to be hopeful.

That’s just one useless anecdote but if anything will save the day, it’s that hacker mentality, teasing out the threads of the problem and seeing how they’re related.

Not that you were talking about this, but I couldn’t resist ranting about a parallel idea:
That is, until ignoramous legal eagles outlaw activities and behaviours that tend to permit the growth of hackers within the boundaries of civilized countries (at the behest of large faceless corporations that - again - just don’t look at all the sides before buying a law or 50). Worry when being creative and working outside the boundaries are long lost traits for the inhabitants of countries which used to foster and demonstrate excellent technological leadership qualities, or we could have worried beforehand and defeated said “badly drafted laws” (DMCA & DMCA^2) while there still was time. Or maybe I’m just being excessively maudlin? Where’s the petition to repeal the latest slew of bad law?

Where’s the petition?  Here: Save The Internet, and here: and Electronic Frontier Foundation.  And lots of other places too. 

I have to believe that the clueless will eventually fall to the clever.  I hope.

Moloch: There is nothing we can do about it. I, for one, will not be changing a single damn thing about my life. I don’t/won’t have kids so I don’t give a rats ass about the next generation.

I am not having children, either, so my environmentalism does not stem from concern about future generations. I care deeply about global warming and the conditions of the Earth, however. This is because I passionately value our planet for its own sake.

Double-dipping: I just noticed that the film opens to the general public on my birthday. I know what I want as a gift--tickets!

Heres an expanded version of my thoughts on the whole situation.

Firstly, fuck oil.  That’s all everyone ever talks about.  Don’t get me wrong, I own a car and have to commute, so the price of gas does affect me directly, but seriously, fuck oil.
Water.  There will be the substance that matters.  The Political Geography class I took this year (in which I got an A+ w00t!oneone1!!) dealt a lot with the geo-politics of water,and many people will die of thirst or water wars unless something is done now to reverse the trends which include polluting, over using and tapping of non-renewable sources of water (Lybia, for one example).  Basically, the west are well positioned in terms of water, but even in the west there will have to be major changes in our water uses.  Specifically, a point may come where agriculture in the Mid-West of the US becomes unviable.  Short of walling off and draining James Bay (north of Ontario), of which there are rumors, agriculture takes up too much water in that region.  Consider that the Colorado river is dry when it reaches the sea.
As another example, let’s take Israel.  Apart from the huge dicrepancies in water use (Israelies use way more than Palestinians), Israel has already done some expansions to meet it’s water needs (the Golan Heights).  Or take Egypt, who’s only real water source is the Nile, which has no tributaries within Egypt itself.  Since the Nile has its source in Sudan and Ethiopia (and a few other countries), Egypt has made it known in no uncertain terms that it will take whatever action necessary to defend its hydraulic interests.

I know that there is hope, and I also know that blaming one generation is naive.  David Suzuki, who’s been warning us to smarten the fuck up for a long, long time, is one of my heroes.
So yes, its not hopeless, but Jesus Christ, if ever there were a whirlpool of shit…

if there was ever a whirlpool of shit…

Yeah, I hear you.  People need to wake the fuck up right the fuck NOW, which means we need to communicate as intelligently as we can.  To the extent that we sound as panicked as we are, the communication is weakend. 

I for one look to Europe and, to a lesser extent, Asia for progress. I know that it is futile to expect any kind of positive change from Republican-dominated America.

I know that it is futile to expect any kind of positive change from Republican-dominated America

The People’s Republic of Kalifornia least of all.

I for one look to Europe and, to a lesser extent, Asia for progress.

True, Sadie, Western Europe is more ecologically progressive than the US- smaller cars and better public transportation are part of the reason the per capita oil consumption in Europe is about half that of the States.  But Europe is part of the problem too.  We need concerted action by everyone to get this under control.

There are signs of change, as Les pointed out, and I share his optimism that we are capable of great things when necessary.  A big step in that direction would be to vote for politicians who are not puppets of industry.

Towards the end of knowing where your current - and possibly reelected - officials stand on issues of concern maybe we should require all members of Congress and the House to maintain a governmental web-site where the Senators and Representatives could be required - maybe as a “condition” of employment - to post essays on each and every piece of legislation on which they voted - or abstained. Perhaps clearly specifying - in their own words - why they chose to act on the behalf of their constituents in the way that they did. Not that any of us will probably wade through it and really read all of it to begin with. All they’d have to do is again dazzle the significant numbers of the easily dazzled, jerk-off the vast numbers of those easily confused and they can ignore the paltry numbers of those that can and would spot check them for intent. Sorry, I doubt that this would help, but it’s a “thought.”

Propoganda? Probably, but I’d say it’s at least useful propoganda.

I’m sure Hitler said the same thing.