Friday, October 12, 2007

Earth in the Balance


Quote of the day:
“Real pain can alone cure us of imaginary ills. We feel a thousand miseries till we are lucky enough to feel pain.”
--Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Monday is Blog Action Day, when all kinds of bloggers are going to be writing about the environment. I've signed on, too.

I imagine a lot of folks will be writing about Al Gore winning the Nobel Peace Prize. I think this prize is richly deserved, for Gore's courage in repeatedly bringing up this issue when it was spectacularly unpopular. Over the last 20 years he has patiently faced down global-warming deniers by carefully laying out the scientific data.

When "Earth in the Balance" was published in 1992, it was still common to dismiss those who talked about global warming as "hysterical chicken littles." In spite of the Rush Limbaughs of the world, those days are long behind us.

I had never read a book like this before--it clearly and carefully described the best environmental research at the time, and the conclusion was inescapable.

Many people and organizations are still working to try to market global-warming out of existence, but this will not happen. There is now a broad understanding of the kinds of changes happening around the planet. And we have Al Gore to thank for really pushing this understanding forward.

I was especially impressed with how "An Inconvenient Truth" methodically and meticulously put to rest any idea that the kind of warming we are seeing now is part of some long, historical cycle.

The work to understand and deal with global warming has really just begun. We can all be grateful to Al Gore for his work as environmental ambassador, and we can thank the Nobel committee for recognizing his work.

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