Catching up on Climate Change

Last night I watched Davis Guggenheim's "An Inconvenient Truth", fronted by Al Gore. Amidst opinions such as Gore not being quite as socially inept as an episode of South Park from last year suggested I, being the highly suggestible type found at least some of it making sense, although it's hard to become too convinced by what is essentially a set of graphs far more basic than those created daily in the workplace to describe far simpler scenarios than how warm a large rock is this year.

This evening I watched Martin Durkin's "Great Global Warming Swindle", a month after it lost its water cooler appeal. Side note - I don't care what anybody says, i've never seen anybody gather around one of these in the UK.

"Swindle" said a lot more than "Truth" and wrapped up 15 minutes earlier. Any discussion I might attempt on the deeper subject matter would centre around one of the buzz phrases from either side of the argument. If I had to pick one, the debunking of Gore linking temperature rises to CO2 emissions through explaining that the line showing CO2 in fact lags behind temperature, was quite compelling.

"Swindle" makes a bold and interesting point in closing, stating that the anti CO2 brigade wish to deny third world countries electricity, and call me sentimental, but "Truth" briefly caught me off-guard somewhere near the end with its lingering shot over a distant image of a little speck of light coupled with narration along the lines of "all we are, and all that ever happened, happened here".

The former may very well be true, and if everything else they pro CO2's claim is correct, I hope the antis see no success in their wish to stifle development. The latter may very well be true (though we're not sure), but it strikes me as far more of an exercise in audience manipulation than making a specific point on their claims.

So, you tell me, who is going to help me reconcile these two documentaries? Is there anything with about the level of detail of these two pieces with anything other than 100% bias in either direction?

Until you point me in the right direction, i'll go back and remind myself what Filmspotting thought of "Truth".

http://www.filmspotting.net - reviews - ep110 if you wish to join me.