More Like "I Need to Shut Up"

About a year ago when I first saw ads for An Inconvenient Truth (which deemed it "The scariest movie [I'll] ever see!") I already knew that there was some false advertising going on. As soon as I realized it was not a horror movie but a documentary about global warming, I also knew that tons of people would go see it, accept everything in it at face value, and walk around self-righteously for months afterward acting as if watching the film reduced carbon dioxide emissions. I have to be honest, though: I never guessed that it would win the Academy Award for Best Original Song.

What? There's a song in that movie? After doing some intense research I found out that it's hidden as an easter egg during that part of the movie where words scroll up the screen. I also found out that the song even has a title: "I Need To Wake Up." Don't bother looking up the lyrics, though. I did, and regretted it-they actually rhyme "wake up" with "shake up" and then "break up." That's all you need to know.

No one cares about that academy award anyway, though. What's getting more attention is the fact that it won the Academy Award for Documentary Feature. I don't really see why, though. What competition was there? Two films about how we screwed up Iraq (like that needed an exposé), one about a Christian summer camp, and one about a Christian child molester.

Now some people are suggesting Gore run for president in 2008 just because his film won an Oscar. Who cares? March Of The Penguins won the best documentary award last year; which documented the long, annual journey emperor penguins make over the course of an entire year with a 24 twist: they made it feel like real-time.

The pair of awards that it won is indeed a strange one, especially compared to last year's winners in the same categories: An Inconvenient Truth's "I Need To Wake Up" vs. March Of The Penguin's "It's Hard Out Here For A Pimp."

All sarcasm aside, though, AIT isn't that bad. It just isn't that good, either. About half of it is interesting statistics, and half is boring sentimental stuff about the Earth crying; and a third, mathematically impossible half is Al Gore whining about losing the 2000 election.

The first half I mentioned is the half worth seeing. Not worth getting supercilious about, but worth seeing. Even that isn't without its issues, though. Namely, you have to realize that you're watching propaganda. Oh no! I called AIT propaganda! I must be a right-wing extremist! That's pretty hilarious, considering how much I hate Bill O'Reilly.

Everything, this article included, is propaganda, and people fail to realize that time and time again. That's really what bothers me most about the movie-the response it both sought and received. Go read customer reviews on Amazon.com and you'll see what I mean. ("They should be giving this out for free to everyone," "Inspiring and captivating," "Not a politically twisted message, a Moral one.")

That last one gets me in particular. Throughout the movie Gore keeps talking about how global warming is a worldwide problem and therefore it is the moral obligation of the human race to take action to reverse it. He supports this idea by showing all the different kinds of problems it causes both directly and indirectly around the world. One of them is the drying up of Lake Chad, around which he mentions Darfur by name. Then, referring to Darfur, he says that the lack of water is "vastly complicating the other problems that they also have." Other problems? Oh, you mean genocide? That's quite the euphemism. Speaking of moral obligations...

That's what it really comes down to with global warming: priority. You could argue that global warming should be a priority because we are theoretically reaching a point of no return, but we face more imminent dangers than scary graphs of temperature. Namely, ourselves.

The real problem with global warming is that few people look at it realistically. People either declare it as sacred truth or dismiss it as a hoax, and both are pretty ridiculous assertions to make. Human knowledge is extremely limited on long-term temperature cycles. It'd be pretty ignorant to act like we know we're right on this (just 40 years ago the world faced global cooling scares), but it's fairly easy to see that for the past thousands of years, humans have been ruining the planet. Maybe it's just time for the planet to ruin us back.

I'm not saying that working to fix global warming is a waste of time. I believe that even though our knowledge is limited, we should act according to the best of it. If this means making major changes, so be it. But the way people get up on soapboxes and treat environmentalism like a religion; preaching to everyone that if we don't repent now, the world will end...it's ridiculous, and what's worse is the way that the public has embraced this attitude and praised celebrities that become figureheads for it. Cut out the self-righteousness-if you want to make a change, stop talking about it and do it.