The consequences are upon us

Consistently Gore scores at 9 out of 10 or better, or at high distinction level if you prefer, from the people who really count, given the strictures of the context and format. I’d say his science is mainstream, but in the front pelaton in cycling terms.

James Hansen certainly gives him a big tick in his New York Review of Books article ’The Threat to the Planet’. He says: “Gore has put together a coherent account of a complex topic that Americans desperately need to understand. The story is scientifically accurate and yet should be understandable to the public, a public that is less and less drawn to science.”

Hansen is Director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Adjunct Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University's Earth Institute. (He appeared in the film as the public servant who had had his words changed, as it turned out under Gore’s questioning in Senate briefings in 1989.) Hansen has been to the fore in warning that the implications of global warming for sea level are likely to much more severe than had been estimated by the IPCC in 2001. On the latest thinking the 20 feet or so sea level rise graphically illustrated in the film is not sensationalist or exaggerated. Hansen sees the business-as-usual scenario producing 3 degrees Celsius of warming this century. The “equilibrium sea level responses” for such warming implies, he says, 25 metres, plus or minus 10 metres, (or 80 feet.) This would not happen instantly, perhaps taking a few centuries for the effects to work their way through, but implies potential for a system out of our control.

Hansen reminds us that coming out of the last ice age the sea rose 5 metres per century for four centuries at one stage. With Greenland worth over 6 metres and West Antarctica worth about 5 metres the 20 foot scenario in the film does not look extraordinary. Hansen regards warming greater than one degree Celsius and a sea-level rise of two metres as “dangerous”. The one degree is in large part already in the system from climate forcings that have already happened. On sea levels, three quarters of a metre from each of Greenland and West Antarctica, plus half a metre from other glaciers and thermal expansion would do the trick. The ‘tipping point’ is now, he says. We are there right now.

Gore told us that the serious accident to his 6 year-old son led him to re-evaluate his life and his “way of being in the world”. His personal narrative was injected into the film at the initiative of the director who pointed out that there is a dramatic tension in a personal live presentation and this human connection had to be created on the screen. It works. Gore becomes human and draws us into his quest.

Gore has two objectives, I think. Firstly, he wants to create more than just a constituency for appropriate political action. He is trying to create a grass-roots demand that politicians ignore at their peril. Each slide presentation and the film itself are just steps along the way. Gore is now setting up a new politically bipartisan body The Alliance for Climate Protection to persuade the American people to demand that the major parties compete to offer solutions to climate change. Gore himself will take a back seat concentrating mainly on fund-raising.

Secondly, he wants us also to re-evaluate our way of being in the world so that we are more respectful of the planet itself and recognise the fragility of the earth system as we have come to know it.

This is deeply conservative. This conservatism requires, however, radical personal and large-scale political action with every hope of success if we act soon, according to Gore.

The conservatism is represented by the achingly beautiful but obviously fragile shot of a running river presumably close to Gore’s home that he wants to preserve.

So we need to mitigate climate change as well as adapt to it. He makes the telling point that the changes are too fast by far for the biosphere to adapt, with the extinction rate 1,000 times the background rate. These are among the consequences of our interference.

I wish him every success. He makes his case superbly for all but those with closed minds. Often we hear how the world would have been different if Gore had become president in 2000. Well, yes it would have, but without the patient leg-work Gore is now doing it is unlikely that he would have had any greater luck with a recalcitrant Congress than he did when he approached them to sign up to Kyoto in 1997. At that time only one senator was with him.

Everyone should see this movie including every school child from about Year Three. It might just help us to re-evaluate our way of being in the world with a focus that spans more than a mere generation or two. The consequences of not doing so could be severe.