This afternoon we went to see Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth. I would not have expected any movie (least of all Al Gore's) to make a scientific presentation so interesting, compelling, even amusing.
From my travel point of view, one big sadness of global warming is the loss of many places that I could have gone to see before they disappeared. Or won't see as they were before. Coral reefs bleach from warmer waters. The fish die. Glaciers melt. Snow-capped peaks become bare rock. Lake beds in Asia turn to parched mud. Africa is more of a desert, resulting in disasters both human and ecological. Birds disappear: only half the usual number of migrating birds on the way back from Africa to Europe arrived this year, reported bird-counters in Eilat, Israel today. Worse things are coming.
Al Gore says: don't go from denial to despair without trying to do something about it. But there really isn't much I can do, I'm afraid. At the end there were little snippets of advice between the credits -- like "recycle." They seemed really pathetic compared to the point of the film.
We went to the film with our friends Elaine and Bob to celebrate her birthday. She's four years younger than I am. Four years ago, for my birthday, we were at Agrigento, Sicily, an ancient Greek city. It was one of our best trips. I'll have to find and post some photos from there.
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