A couple of weeks ago I blogged about Global warming, Gordon and Gore. I welcomed the news that the UK government had signed up former US vice-president Al Gore to advise on the environment see here.
Yesterday I went to see Al Gores film "An inconvenient truth" at the Corn Exchange in Newbury and attended the first part of the Liberal Democrat organised Green Tea afterwards in the town hall.
All the reviews I had seen before raved about this film and so in many ways I half expected to be disappointed - I was not. This film literally just blew the whole audience away - Gores film communicates simply and clearly the gravity of the situation we are facing and very convincingly addresses and debunks some of the myths that abound about global warming, whether or not it exists and whether or not we can tackle it.
The Green Tea was a great idea. It gave a forum for people to discuss the issues whether or not they were politically active. Two members of parliament attended along with representatives from West Berkshire Council and others from Town and Parish Councils throughout the district. There were two striking things about this meeting. Firstly the willingness of everyone to engage in the debate and to come up with ideas for what could be done locally to address the problem. Secondly this was a cross party meeting and there was no disagreement between the parties on the fundamental facts or the need to address this problem urgently. Common agreement was that the politicians needed to start leading on this issue and that to ensure that this happened the film needs to be seen by as wide an audience as possible. There was a suggestion to get the film shown in parliament and to request the TV companies to show this film as soon as a possible.
If you get a chance to see this film go.
The web site for the film is Climatecrisis.net
There is also a book - An Inconvenient Truth by Al Gore
The DVD is released in the UK on the 26th December and can be found here on Amazon
One of the comments on Amazon sums this film up as follows "The verdict? Every school, every college and every university in every country.....should be making this compulsory viewing. I'm not a long-haired green, but the simplicity of this presentation leaves no doubt about the correlation between the growth of mankind, the industrial revolution and global temperature trends. Its an intelligent, amusing but very direct presentation of the choices facing us as a planet. If you don't watch this film and do something about it, you'll have to explain to your grandchildren why you didn't! "
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