We must all face an inconvenient truth

WE SAW An Inconvenient Truth, the Al Gore film on global warming, showing for five nights only at a cinema in Clonakilty, a trendy town with health food shops, gourmet shops, a country market, a holistic healing centre offering naturopathy, aquapuncture, homeopathy etc, a music school, bookshops and many well-educated people pursuing the good life in West Cork.

The area population is 5,000. There were just 10 people in the cinema. I’ve no doubt it will be packed to bursting for James Bond’s Casino Royale. So much for environmental awareness amongst my cutting-edge, alternative-therapy neighbours.

The film should be compulsory viewing. It may not be ‘entertainment’ but the madness of what we are doing keeps one’s eyes glued to the screen.

Gore is engaging, wryly ironic, and makes the best of the sorry tale. We missed it in Cork city. It played two weeks at The Kino cinema — which, to its credit, put on morning shows for schoolchildren — and one week at The Omniplex. Then, it went. Having read yards of glowing, must-see reviews in the national and international press, we naively assumed that it would stay for at least as long as say, Scooby- Doo or whatever. But it didn’t. Maybe there weren’t enough environmentally-concerned bums on seats.

Personally, I’m going to send a DVD copy to any of my family who haven’t yet seen it. The other day, I heard a friend say: “But isn’t there still doubt about global warming? I mean, some scientists argue...”

To my friend, I say, go and see Mr Gore. Not only does his film irrefutably prove the case, it suggests that you and I, small players, can, in our way, help the survival chances of this planet which daily edges closer to the tipping point and needs every one of us to add our half-ounce worth of positive action to the scales.

But more so, it emphasises that survival or extinction depends upon political will. Political will is the key. As Gore says, the politician wins his votes from acting on local issues: the big issues are for stump speeches, then soon forgotten — they entail introducing anti-pollution measures unpopular with industry and voters. What the voters want is small satisfactions. The issues threatening their children’s future are taking place in the Arctic and Antarctica, not down the street. And what can we do, what can our TD or councillor do, anyway? Well, first we must all watch this milestone film. We can take heart from it says; it is not too late. It’s the 11th hour but there’s still 60 minutes left before the bell tolls. And, my friend, do not ask for whom the bell tolls: it tolls for you, me and our children.

Once the tipping point is reached, huge areas of our planet will be subsumed beneath the rising seas, lost to us, with huge dislocations of population — those living in the Ganges Delta, 60 million, will have to move or be drowned, in China, 30 million, move or be drowned, in Florida up to 10 million will be displaced; all of Holland submerged, the people of Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Venice and parts of Cork city all on the move.

Everywhere, chaos, and ever increasing numbers of people to be fed on ever decreasing land.

It is clear what is happening. And clear that we cannot let it happen.

The graphs and charts, the data, are entirely real. They make chilling viewing. But — and this is the important part — it is not too late. Not too late to save our children from a desolate and desperate future.

This year, please, no houses with lit-up Santa Clauses on the chimney, or megawatt teams of reindeer on the lawn. Let the brightest thing in the Christmas sky be the hope that we can halt, and then reverse, the damage.

In burning profligate fuel for our fairy lights, we have created a ceiling of gases above the earth through which the good sun’s rays, having warmed us, cannot return to space but are bounced back, making our world a greenhouse where ice caps melt and vast rains flood one part while the other turns to dry dust, killing millions. Where our good Gulf Stream may, itself, drown overnight and be replaced by cold currents from melting Greenland glaciers, turning our fertile isle into a frozen tundra where our food plants, domestic animals, wild plants and fauna cannot survive.

Dismiss me as an alarmist, if you will — but before you do, tell me you have seen this film. Seek it out: An Inconvenient Truth is essential viewing. Now, RTÉ must bring it into every home. If they fail in this duty, rent it on video or DVD.