August 3

More than an inconvenient truth

Continuing my Health and Wellness streak, yesterday I somewhat unintentionally watched Al Gore's movie: The Inconvenient Truth. It turned out to be the most important movie I've ever seen.

Trailer is here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TUiP6dqPynE

In case you haven't heard of it, it's a documentary about global warming. How fast it's occuring, how we're causing it, what's at stake, and what we can do to prevent it. What is so shocking is that in less than 50 years, our lives as we know it could be dramatically changed by global warming. One example: if a significant portion of Greenland or the North Pole were to melt (after watching the movie, not an entirely unlikely situation by any means) then sea levels around the world would rise by 20 feet. Shanghai, Beijing, Bangladesh, the Netherlands, big chunks of Silicon Valley and New York would be underwater. It's terrifying that it's so real. 100 million people would become refugees.

But there is hope. Remember the Ozone Layer? 20 years ago when i was in primary school, that was a big deal and people were very worried that CFCs would cause it to disappear and we'd all get skin cancer. Well, today, the Ozone Layer has been restored because people around the world stopped using aerosol cans and CFCs. Global warming is a similar, but far bigger problem. What causes it is carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of fossil fuels. This includes oil, electricity, natural gas, cars (especially gas guzzlers!), etc... What we can do is reduce our consumption of energy.

Anyway, I hope I'm not giving the movie away. But please, watch it if you can. I swear you won't regret it. Here's a deal, if you do watch it and regret it, I'll buy you dinner! How's that? If you want to save gas, money and the environment by not going to the theater, here's a place to download a so-so version of the movie: http://www.mininova.org/tor/380594. It requires Bit Torrent, I hope you know what that is. If not, ask me.

Dazhi (bet you didn't know i'm a tree hugger) Chen