Global Warming

Al Gore Lecture on Global warming

Besides aspects that I easily remembered from the “An Inconvenient Truth” movie, the lecture had some new nuances for me: mentioning that CO2 is invisible and thus easily slips off of our mind, the adverse effect of technology, the long vs short term conflict or the fact that US become one of the countries that are slowing down the problem resolution instead of being the leader.

I would like to remind and critique on the Climate Crisis theme from his speech and what the impact of technology is. He mentioned that we entered a period of consequences for things done in the past and that even if that inaction is comfortable, it is not the answer. The polar layers are melting faster than predicted (over 1 million miles lost last year), floods are getting stronger, droughts stay around more and today alone, an additional 170 million tons of carbon dioxide has been dumped into the Earth's atmosphere. The number of hurricanes increased dramatically - there was one in south Pacific for the first time - and their intensity is higher. More and more cities are breaking all time records for consecutive days above 100 degrees.

Then Al Gore mentioned how technology, which used to be an ally for humans, is now becoming slowly an enemy. I agree with this as being the situation for now. Due to technologic advancement we can now produce more goods, pollute more, we need to travel further and consume more goods that are cheaper and thus easier to purchase then discard. Technologic advancement allows production of more cars that emit more CO2, requires more material goods to be transported and more energy used in production. Of course that technologic advancement has advantages too: as car engines emit less of the pollutants they used to emit, appliances need less energy and solar panels or wind turbines are more efficient now. However, the overall balance is detrimental