Having had no internet (nightmare!) for the past two weeks did give me a lot of time to think about how I wanted to approach the topic of global warming. To be honest, I think it's an enormous subject to approach that I'm probably not even all that informed about. So I won't and don't pretend to know or understand everything about it.
I don't know about you, but it feels like five years ago global warming was seldomly mentioned, perhaps only more so within the scientific and environmental communities but definitely not so much within the general population. Whereas now, "global warming" is a term tossed around daily as an explanation for negative changes of the environment. in 2001 a map was released by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Chance (IPCC) which highlighted areas in which various types of natural changes linked to global warming were occuring. Even then mother nature was no longer taking all the credit - or blame - for seemingly natural occurences like warm weather, sea rise, melted glaciers. Of course between then and today, we went from "likely" to "very likely" as the primary culprits for those bad changes.
If anything, this is an indication that we have known for some time that there was something wrong happening with our planet and that we were somewhat responsible for that. So why did it take years and a losing president candidate turning to filmmaking to finally get the word out that we were 'killing' the Earth? Because now, there is a sense of urgency and panic to rescue it, when it is possibly too late. Then again, one has to wonder if those years really would have mattered, especially as no one can fully determine the extent of the damage, not in an exact capacity.
The hype surrounding global warming for me really began of course with Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth . There's really no better way to inform mainstream audiences about what's happening to the Earth than through movie theatres with the Ex Vice President of the USA as its mastermind. Personally I have yet to see it. Let's just say I wasn't exactly keen to spend $10 just to feel depressed about all the harm we humans have done to the Earth's health and consequently feel very gloom about our future on this planet. But don't worry, I plan to catch it on cable.
2 comments:
hay this is carl yea my topic is on the olympic Games can u please comment on mine.
Hello Hk.c
This article you've posted is very interesting as it made me think hard and clear whether, if we were mentioned about this problem of global warming earlier could have we done anything to fix it or prevented it.
About the Inconvenient truth, is this a book or a movie? Well as you said this could've been the start of letting everyone know what global warming is really about.
People are now starting to panic and doing all they can to reduce global warming, when its impossible and too late.
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