I finally saw An Inconvenient Truth. I thought it was very ably assembled, as though Al Gore and Davis Guggenheim were able to take the editing and polishing that Gore had developed after presenting his "slide show" a thousand times or more, and apply it directly to the film, which was essentially his presentation in a finished format, with some bits of biography and backstory added. He took his data and information and extended it out in all sorts of different directions; toward the end of the film, Gore reflected that he had spent the most time on identifying "obstacles" that would prevent people from grasping and accepting his message, and eliminating them.

Gore's message is that global warming is happening, it is a result of our actions, and that left unchecked, it could severely reduce or destroy the earth's capacity for supporting life, possibly within a very short period. In this, the year 2006, that is still a radical notion, and beyond that, one that acutely threatens our economy and way of life. Though my miniscule political leanings are distinctly to the left, I am still an iron-clad skeptic, and never took the idea of global warming too seriously. [I am, however, interested in protecting our planet: I've spent only one of the last six or seven years in possession of an automobile, for financial reasons that slowly transformed into environmental concerns.] Having seen the film, I am still skeptical [how far can you really trust a politician, of any platform?], but Gore presented some astounding data. What gave me pause more than anything was his graph displaying the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which is the base of the problem. The span of the graph was 650,000 years, terminating just prior to the onset of the Oil Age. At first, Gore did not reveal the current C0² levels, and I was expecting that when he did, they would be perhaps a small amount higher than normal. However, it turned out that there is twice as much C0² in our atmosphere, right now, than there ever has been over the past 650,000 years. More than that, if we continue our fossil fuel-rich diet, C0² levels could become four times the normal by 2050.

Gore's identity as a politician, of course, works for him and against him. Or, I should say, for global warming and against it. There simply is nobody other than a major politician that could draw such universal attention. However, it is hateful that an issue that affects all life should be reduced to exist primarily within the realm of politics. For it to be dismissed by anyone as liberal drama would be deeply regrettable. When asked whether he would see Gore's film, Dubya replied "Doubt it." What an asshole. It seems to me that the leader of earth's most powerful nation should, at the very least, be open to the efforts of his competitors, and not simply close the idea down, at least for the sake of the people who actually listen to him. How did he ever get elected? Oh, I remember: he didn't. But: how did he ever get elected again?

I spent a little time at ZRS Fossils tonight, and saw some fossilized stromatolites. They are little more than primitive living rocks, not unlike a prehistoric incarnation of corals, and so don't look like much, but you can still see a small colony of living stromatolites at Shark Bay in Australia, described in the venerable Bill Bryson's In A Sunburned Country. Stromatolites appeared on earth 3.5 billion years ago, and have given us a rare gift: until their near-extinction, they did nothing but sit in the water and slowly, slowly, slowly prepare the world for our arrival, by producing oxygen. I'll let Bryson explain:

The [oxygen] bubbles are produced by primitive algaelike microorganisms called cyanobacteria, which live on the surface of the rocks - about 3 billion of them to the square yard, to save you counting - each of them capturing a molecule of carbon dioxide and a tiny beat of energy from the sun and combining them to fuel its unimaginably modest ambitions to exist, to live. The by-product of this very simple process is the faintest puff of oxygen. But get enough stromatolites respiring away over a long enough period, and you can change the world. For 2 billion years this is all the like there was on earth, but in that time the stromatolites raised the oxygen level in the atmosphere to 20 percent - enough to allow the development of other, more complex life-forms: me, for instance. My gratitude is real.

If we manage to ignore what we seem to be doing to our only home and planet, and undo those billions of years worth of atmosphere-balancing work... man, those stromatolites are going to be pissed.