Inconvenient Global Warming

June 12

I finally read a Christmas gift from Joel, I think-- Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth. It was very short, like an article in the New York Review of Books but with nicer pictures) I had avoided and dreaded this, but it is actually such a pretty book, and I think a lot of what I read is going to make more sense to me now– the temperature of water, the relative fragility of the arctic ice, how the drowning of coastal cities is maybe less crucial than weather patterns (and this month we've had a lot of severe weather). Why didn’t Gore get elected president? There would be no war in Iraq, we would have signed on to the Kyoto treaty, there would be two more reasonable people on the Supremes. Some of his sidebars were a bit much about his family, but he two interesting analogies: his sister dying of lung cancer apparently in her late forties or early fifties and the misinformation from the tobacco companies, and the relative success of the ozone layer crisis: governments CAN work together etc. etc.