PLEASE NOTE: This transcript is being provided for educational purposes only to be used in conjunction with a university course designed to raise awareness of the serious environmental issues that the documentary film An Inconvenient Truth addresses. The kind understanding of the filmmakers will be appreciated with respect to any copyright issues which may arise, and it is hoped that permission to use this material will be granted so that the message Mr. Al Gore puts forth may be disseminated among the students participating in this course.
Students are encouraged to purchase their own copies of this important documentary on DVD.
Thank you.
Tony Del Vecchio, M.Ed.
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Part III
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Civilization and Earth
1.3 billion people. An economy that’s surging. More and more energy needs. Massive coal reserves.
(Gore and Chinese scientists discussing coal reserves in China.)
Every time I’ve visited China, I’ve learned from their scientists. They’re right on the cutting edge.
This issue is really the same for China as it is for the US. We are both using old technologies that are dirty and polluting.
Gore speaking on global warming at a seminar in China: Separating the truth from the fiction and the accurate connection from the misunderstandings is part of what you learn here. When the warnings are accurate and based on sound science, then we as human beings, whatever country we live in, have to find a way to make sure that the warnings are heard and responded to.
We both have a hard time shaking loose the familiar patterns that we relied on in the past. We both face completely unacceptable consequences.
We are witnessing a collision between our civilization and the Earth. There are three factors that are causing this collision.
1) Population – When my generation, the baby boom generation, was born after WW II, the population had just crossed the 2 billion mark. I’m in my 50s and it’s already gone to almost 6 and a half billion. If I reach the demographic expectation for the baby boomers, it will go over 9 billion. If it takes 10,000 generations to reach 2 billion and then, in one human lifetime, ours, it goes from 2 billion to 9 billion, something profoundly different is going on right now. We’re putting more pressure on the Earth. Most of it’s in the poorer nations of the world. It puts pressure on food demand. It puts pressure on water demand. It puts pressure on vulnerable natural resources, and this pressure is one of the reasons we have seen such devastation of the forest, not only tropical but elsewhere. It is a political issue. This is the border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic. One set of policies here. Another set of policies here. Much of it comes not only from cutting, but also burning. Almost 30% of the CO2 that goes up into the atmosphere each year is from forest burning. This is a time-lapse picture of the Earth at night over a six month period showing the lights of the cities in white and the burning forests and brush fires in red. The yellow areas are the gas flares like these in Siberia.
2) Science – The scientific and technological revolution is a great blessing in that it has given us tremendous benefits in areas like medicine and communication. But this new power that we have also brings a responsibility to think about its consequences. Here’s a formula to think about. Old habits plus old technology have predictable consequences. Old habits plus new technology can have dramatically altered consequences. Warfare with spears and bows and arrows and rifles and machine guns, that’s one thing. But then a new technology came. (Atomic bomb blast.) We have to think differently about war because the new technologies so completely transformed the consequences of that old habit that we can’t just mindlessly continue the patterns of the past. In the same way we have always exploited the Earth for sustenance. For most of our existence we used relatively simple tools: the plow, the tractor. But even tools like shovels are different now. A shovel used to be like this. Shovels have gotten bigger and every year they get more powerful. Our ability to have an effect on the surface of the Earth is utterly transformed. You can say the same thing about irrigation, which is a great thing, but when we divert rivers without considering the consequences, sometimes the rivers no longer reach the sea. There were two rivers in central Asia that were used by the former Soviet Union that were used for irrigating cotton fields unwisely. The Aral Sea was fed by them. It used to be the fourth largest inland sea in the world. When I went there I saw this strange sight of an enormous fishing fleet resting in the sand. This is the canal that the fishing industry desperately tried to build to get to the receding shoreline. Making mistakes in our dealings with nature can have bigger consequences now because our technologies are often bigger than the human scale. When you put them all together they made us a force of nature. This is also a political issue.
This is a computer map of the world that purports to show the relative contribution to global warming. In our country we are responsible for more than all of South America, all of Africa, all of the Middle East, all of Asia all combined. The per capita average in Africa, India, China, Japan, EU, Russia, here’s where we are way, way above everyone else. If you take population into account, it’s a little bit different. China’s playing a bigger role, so is Europe, but we are still, by all odds, the largest contributor. And so it is up to us to look at how we think about.
3) Way of Thinking – The way we think about it is the third and final factor that transforms our relationship to the Earth. If a frog jumps into a pot of boiling water, it jumps right out again, because it senses the danger. But the very same frog, if it jumps into a pot of lukewarm water that is slowly brought to a boil, will just sit there and it won’t move. It will just sit there even as the temperature continues to go up and up. It will stay there until.. until.. it is rescued. It is important to rescue the frog. The point is this: Our collective nervous system is like that frog’s nervous system. It takes a sudden jolt sometimes before we become aware of a danger. If it seems gradual, even it really is happening quickly, we are capable of just sitting there and not responding and not reacting.
The Tobacco Industry
I don’t remember a time when I was a kid when summertime didn’t mean working with tobacco. I used to love it. It was during that period when working with the guys on the farm seemed like fun to me.
Starting in 1964 with the Surgeon General’s report, the evidence was laid out on the connection between smoking cigarettes and lung cancer. We kept growing tobacco.
Nancy was almost 10 years older than me, and there were only two of us. She was my protector and my friend at the same time. She started smoking when she was a teenager and never stopped. She died of lung cancer. That’s one of the ways you don’t want to die. The idea that we had been part of that economic pattern that produced the cigarettes that produced the cancer, it was so painful at so many levels. My father, he had grown tobacco all his life. He stopped it. Whatever explanation that seemed to make sense in the past, just didn’t cut it anymore. He stopped it. It’s just human nature to take time to connect the dots. I know that. But I also know that there can be a day of reckoning when you wished you had connected the dots more quickly.
Three Misconceptions
There are three misconceptions that bedevil our thinking.
1) First, isn’t there a disagreement among scientists about whether the problem is real or not? Actually, not really. There was a massive study of every scientific article in a peer-reviewed article written on global warming for the last ten years. They took a big sample of 10 percent, 928 articles. And you know the number of those that disagreed with the scientific consensus that we’re causing global warming and that is a serious problem out of the 928: Zero. The misconception that there is disagreement about the science has been deliberately created by a relatively small group of people. One of their internal memos leaked and here is what it said according to the press. Their objective is to reposition global warming as a theory rather than fact. This has happened before. After the Surgeon General’s report. One of their memos, leaked 40 years ago. They said, “Doubt is our product, since it is the best means of creating a controversy in the public’s mind.” But have they succeeded? You’ll remember that there were 928 peer-reviewed articles. Zero percent disagreed with the consensus. There was another study of all the articles in the popular press. Over the last fourteen years they looked at a sample of 636. More than half of them said, “Well, we are not sure. It could be a problem, may not be a problem.” So no wonder people are confused. Scientists have an independent obligation to respect and present the truth as they see it. I’ve seen scientists who were persecuted, ridiculed, deprived of jobs, income simply because the facts they discovered led them to an inconvenient truth that they insisted on telling.. You know more than a hundred years ago, Upton Sinclair wrote this: “It’s difficult to get a man to understand something if his salary depends upon him not understanding it.”
2) The second misconception: Do we have to choose between the economy and the environment? This is a big one. A lot of people say we do. I was trying to convince the first Bush administration to go to the Earth Summit. They organized a big White House conference to say, “We’re on top of this.” One of these viewgraphs caught my attention and I want to talk about it for a minute. Here is the choice we have to make according to this group. We have here a scale that balances two different things. On one side, we have gold bars. Mmmmm. Don’t they look good! I’d just like to have some of those gold bars. On the other side of the scale we have. The Entire Planet! Hmm? I think this is a false choice for two reasons. Number one, if we don’t have a planet. The other reason is that if we do the right thing, then we are going to create a lot of wealth and we are going to create a lot of jobs, because doing the right thing moves us forward. I’ve probably given this slide show a thousand times. I’ve tried to identify all those things in people’s minds that serve as obstacles to them understanding this. Whenever I feel like I’ve identified an obstacle, I try to take it apart, roll it away, remove it, blow it up. I set myself a goal: communicate this real clearly. The only way I know to do it is city by city, person by person, family by family. And I have faith that pretty soon enough minds are changed that we cross a threshold. Let me give you an example of the wrong way to balance the economy and the environment. One part of this issue involves automobiles. Japan has mileage standards up here. Europe plans to pass Japan. Our allies in Australia and Canada are leaving us behind. Here’s where we are. There is a reason for it. They say that we can’t protect the environment too much without threatening the economy and threatening the automakers, because automakers in China might come in and just steal all our markets. Well, here is where China’s auto mileage standards are now. We can’t sell our cars in China today because we don’t meet China’s environmental standards. California has taken an initiative to have higher mileage cars sold in California. The auto companies have sued California to prevent this law from taking effect because, as they point out, eleven years from now this would mean California would have to have cars for sale that are as efficient eleven years from now as China’s are today: clearly too onerous a provision to comply with. Is this helping our companies to succeed? Actually, if you look at who’s doing well in the world it’s the companies that are building more efficient cars. Our companies are in deep trouble.
3) Final misconception: If we accept that this problem is real, maybe it is just too big to do anything about. There are a lot of people who go straight from denial to despair without pausing on the intermediate step of actually doing something about the problem. That’s what I would like to finish with: the fact that we already know everything we need to know to effectively address this problem. We’ve got to do a lot of things, not just one. Increasing end use efficiency we can remove global warming pollution that would other wise be put into the atmosphere.
* More efficient electrical appliances
* Higher mileage cars
* Other transport efficiency
* Renewable technology
* Carbon capture sequestration
They all add up and pretty soon we are below our 1970 emissions. We have everything we need, save perhaps political will. In America, political will is a renewable resource. We have the ability to do this. Each one of us is a cause of global warming, but each of us can make choices to change that with the things we buy, with the electricity we use, the cars we drive. We can make choices to bring our individual carbon emissions to zero. The solutions are in our hands. We just have to have the determination to make them happen.
States and Cities
Are we going to be left behind as the rest of the world moves forward? All of these nations have ratified Kyoto. There are only two advanced nations in the world that have not ratified Kyoto, and we are one of them. The other is Australia. Luckily several states are taking the initiative. The nine northeastern states have banded together on reducing CO2. California and Oregon are taking the initiative. Pennsylvania is exercising leadership on solar power and wind power. US cities are stepping up to the plate. One after the other, we have seen all these cities pledge to take on global warming.
Rising to the Occasion
What about the rest of us? Ultimately this question comes down to this: Are we, as Americans, capable of doing great things even though they are difficult? Are we capable of rising above ourselves and above history? The record indicates that we do have that capacity. We formed a nation. We fought a revolution and brought something new to this Earth, a free nation guaranteeing individual liberty. America made a moral decision that slavery was wrong and that we could not be half free and half slave. We as Americans decided that of course women should have the right vote. We defeated totalitarianism and won a war in the Pacific and the Atlantic simultaneously. We desegregated our schools and cured fearsome diseases like polio. We landed on the moon, the very example of what’s possible when we are at our best. We worked together in a completely bipartisan way to bring down communism. We have even solved a global environmental crisis before, the hole in the stratospheric ozone layer. This was said to be an impossible problem to solve because it’s a global environmental challenge requiring cooperation from every nation in the world. But we took it on, and the United States took the lead in phasing out the chemicals that caused that problem. So now we have to use our political processes in our democracy and then decide to act together to solve those problems. But we have to have a different perspective on this one. It is different than any problem we have ever faced before.
Our Only Home
You remember that home movie of the Earth spinning in space. One of those spacecraft continuing on out into the universe, when it got 4 billion miles out in space, Carl Sagan said, “Let’s take another picture of the Earth.” See that pale blue dot. That’s us. Everything that has ever happened in all of human history has happened on that pixel. All the triumphs and all the tragedies, all the wars, all the famines, all the major advances: it’s our only home. And that is what is at stake: our ability to live on planet Earth, to have a future as a civilization.
I believe this is a moral issue. It is your time to seize this issue. It is our time to rise again to secure our future.
There’s nothing that unusual about what I’m doing. What is unusual is that I had the privilege to be shown it as a young man. It is almost as if a window was opened through which the future was very clearly visible. “See that”, he said. “That is the future in which you are going to live your life.”
Future generations may well have occasion to ask themselves. “What were our parents thinking? Why didn’t they wake up when they had a chance?”
We have to hear that question from them, now.
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End Credits
Are you ready to change the way you live?
The climate crisis can be solved.
Here’s how to start: go to www.climatecrisis.net.
You can reduce your carbon emissions. In fact, you can reduce your carbon emissions to zero.
• Buy energy efficient appliances and light bulbs.
• Change your thermostat (and use clock thermostats) to reduce energy for heating and cooling.
• Weatherize your house, increase insulation, get an energy audit.
• Recycle.
• If you can, buy a hybrid car.
• When you can, walk or ride a bicycle.
• When you can, use light rail and mass transit.
• Tell your parents not to ruin the world that you will live in.
• If you are a parent, join with your children to save the world they will live in.
• Switch to renewable sources of energy.
• Call your power company to see if they offer green energy. If they don’t, ask why not?
• Vote for leaders who pledge to solve the crisis.
• Write to Congress. If they don’t listen, run for Congress.
• Plant trees. Lots of trees.
• Speak up in your community.
• Call radio shows and write newspapers.
• Insist that America freeze CO2 emissions and join international efforts to stop global warming.
• Reduce our dependence on foreign oil; help farmers grow alcohol fuels.
• Raise fuel economy standards; require lower emissions from automobiles.
• If you believe in prayer, pray that people will find the strength to change. In the words of the African proverb, “When you pray, move your feet.”
• Encourage everyone you know to see this movie.
• Learn as much as you can about the climate crisis. Then put your knowledge into action.
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Song: I Need to Wake Up
Recorded by: Melissa Etheridge
Album: Greatest Hits: The Road Less Traveled (2005)
Academy Award Winning Song for film: “An Inconvenient Truth” (2006)
Have I been sleeping?
I’ve been so still
Afraid of crumbling
Have I been careless?
Dismissing all the distant rumblings
Take me where I am supposed to be
To comprehend the things that I can’t see
Cause I need to move
I need to wake up
I need to change
I need to shake up
I need to speak out
Something’s got to break up
I’ve been asleep
And I need to wake up
Now
And as a child
I danced like it was 1999
My dreams were wild
The promise of this new world
Would be mine
Now I am throwing off the carelessness of youth
To listen to an inconvenient truth
That I need to move
I need to wake up
I need to change
I need to shake up
I need to speak out
Something’s got to break up
I’ve been asleep
And I need to wake up
Now
I am not an island
I am not alone
I am my intentions
Trapped here in this flesh and bone
And I need to move
I need to wake up
I need to change
I need to shake up
I need to speak out
Something’s got to break up
I’ve been asleep
And I need to wake up
Now
I want to change
I need to shake up
I need to speak out
Oh, Something’s got to break up
I’ve been asleep
And I need to wake up
Now
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DOWNLOAD A PDF VERSION OF THE ENTIRE AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH TRANSCRIPT HERE
An Inconvenient Truth Transcript
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In Part 3, I was able to get a concrete understanding of the impact of our civilization on the global environment. However, I was surprised and disappointed one by one when I knew the fact. First, what surprised me was the rapid population growth. It used to be said that it took 10,000 generations to reach the population of 2 billion, but I was very surprised that the population of 2 to 9 billion people reached in one generation today. This fact continues to increase demand for food, water and natural resources. Therefore, when I knew this fact, I became worried about the earth, which bears a heavy burden, and felt frustrated. Second, the unfortunate fact is that we have been able to innovate in science, medicine, and communication technology, but we have not been able to master the new technology. We are currently being ridiculed from the natural environment due to the effects that we have made on the natural environment with new technologies that are out of human hands. On the contrary to knowing these facts, we were able to know concretely what we can do and what we should do. First, I think we need to change the way we live in order to reduce carbon emissions. Even if it’s trivial, the cooperation of many people can make a big difference. Therefore, I want to live with awareness of recycling, garbage separation, and bicycle usage.
After reading part 3, I could know the effect of civilization for global warming. I surprised that the population puts such a pressure on the Earth. At first, I thought that carbon dioxide which a person spitted out increased because population increased. However, it is a not seriously problem than the problem which Gore talked. A place of residence is necessary to increase if population increases. Therefore, people cut down and burn forest to making their place of residence. “What were our parents thinking? Why didn’t they wake up when they had a chance?” I was made to be startled by the sentence. Future generations will be placed in more severe situation than us. We have a lot of chances to change present situation. We should go into action for the global warming as soon as possible. I think that we must leave the beautiful earth for the generation of our children and grandchildren.
At first, I had thought that all human has responsibility for environment. It is almost true, but I changed my mind because as this film mentioned, there are a lot of histories which the advanced countries have promoting global warming. So, advanced countries have more important responsibility than other countries. In addition, as Greta Thunberg said on Ted, we have some solutions despite our situation does not change. So, I thought the advanced countries are required to just execute that solutions.
Next, I was really surprised at the way of thinking of flog. It clearly describes our situation which is like a “lukewarm water”. So, almost all the people still not be aware of our danger include me probably. I usually care about environment such a reducing some energies, but I realize that it is not completely enough to contribute to global warming. As a university student or a future generation, I would like to continue to do anything which I could do.
In this part, I can know that what the cause of global warming is. Increasing population is one of the reasons but it is called decreasing birthrate and aging population in Japan so controlling the population is so difficult issue. Before I watched this film, it is hard to improve both the economy and the environment. However, we can keep balance. We have to think that the way of developing science technology without emitting carbon dioxide. We tend to focus on the economy because it is easy to see the consequences. However, if we continue to ignore the worsening situation, our lives will be in danger. Before we realized that the environment is so serious, we have to decrease to emit carbon dioxide. Of course, I can do something to improve this situation. I will do recycle, use mass transit and switch to renewable sources of energy from now on.
When I finished reading this part, I was very surprised to know that there three misunderstanding about global warming. I suppose that all of us know that carbon dioxide is one of the cause of global warming, but we are inclined to be lazy about that. I think the reason why we are not interested in global warming is that we just want to be lazy. It is similar to the situation like that we prepare for the examination. I believe that the most biggest problem is whether we want to know the fact or not. If we were to realize how serious the problem is, we would cope with it immediately. As I mentioned above, it is good way to use SNS and the internet, because we can share the opinion with someone easily. Also, the internet makes it possible to collect the information much easier than before. Therefore, we must use the internet effectively in order to deal with this problem.
In this part, I can learn more about global warming.
Today, there are about 7.7 billion people in the world. It is a very large number. This large population has a great impact on global warming. More people not only increase carbon dioxide emissions, but also destroy the natural environment. Forests are destroyed to secure places for people to live, and electronic devices are used to make life easier for people. These things are putting a heavy burden on the earth.
As it stands, it is impossible to improve the future of our children. It is important to do as much as we can now to improve the future.
Until I learned about global warming in this part, I had never thought that increasing population affects the globe. Because if there are a lot of people in the world, it connects to labor force strength and the economy is revitalized. However, people who emit carbon dioxides that affect the world directly increase by population increases, so the more it increases, the more the global warming is progressing, but it is difficult for us to decease or stop increasing the population. Therefore, we need to reconsider our own life one by one. For example as the lecture mentioned, we should use more efficient electrical appliances, higher mileage cars, and renewable technology. I think it is not hard to do them. We must notice the problems before we are exposed to risk. As long as the time changes, we also have to change our life styles.
In this part, I was able to learn more about the impact of civilization on the global environment. But I was surprised to know that fact. The population is increasing rapidly. The population is growing faster than ever before. This continues to increase the demand for food, water and resources. Along with that, a great burden is being placed on the earth. And we were able to know specifically what we could and should do. In order to reduce carbon dioxide, I think it is necessary to change our lives because a few things have a big impact. The cooperation of many people makes a big difference. We take a loose look at the current situation. Most people are not aware of the danger. Finding out what you can do is also necessary to prevent global warming. It is necessary to think about the issue of global warming while being aware that danger will soon come to us.
In this part, I could consider seriously the global warming and our life like part 1 and 2. In particular, I was surprised that there are three misconceptions about global warming. Especially, I wondered third misconception that the global warming is too big problem. The problem is really serious problem, so we should manage to resolve. However, in third misconception, I think that some give up resolving before they try to work on. I hope that it’s not too late to work on the global warming, although the circumstance is really bad. In fact, some leaders like Gore have started to call out to us. Therefore, we all should support them and change our own earth. In the end credits of this movie, there are many things that each of us can do right now. It’s meaningful that everyone do them, even if it’s simple and small works. I will keep these things I can do for our earth in my mind, and I try to do that.
Shunsuke Miwa
This part shows us how humans bring destruction to the earth. I realized that we are witnessing this collision between humans and nature. As Gore indicated in the beginning, there are many factors that are causing it. The first one is population growth. It’s increasing demand for food, water and natural resourses. I was surprized that the rapid population growth has a great adverse effect on our planet. Second one is science. Our science and technology become bigger and powerful every year, which lead to destroy the earth easily. We have to consider this problem as this article warns that our technologies are often bigger than the humann scale.
We have to realize we are part of the natureal world, we depend on it, and as we destroy it we are actually stealing the future from our children.
Until I learned this part, I had never thought that population growth would affect global warming. When thinking about this, it could be expected that CO2 emissions would increase as the population increased due to various factors. I think deforestation is the biggest problem. This is because CO2 will inevitably increase if forests that have the role of converting CO2 to oxygen are cut down. So I thought that stopping deforestation would be effective in preventing global warming.
I again realized that civilization has a huge effect on the earth. Population growth and development of science technique are profitable for humankind, however, the Earth is suffering from these at the same time. I reacknowleged that we are witnesses of both. In this part, I convinced the example of a frog. I think that we do not realize danger of the earth. It is diffecult to resolve all at once. Therfore, we should start a small thing to preserve our planet. Also according to the end credits, we can do a lot of thing for the earth. I think that each person should do step by step through this movie.
In this part, I learned that there are some reasons why people do not try to solve the global warming. There are some misconceptions or misunderstanding about the global warming. I think that we have to clear up misunderstanding and face up to the problems with correct thought. For example, people think the change is very slow and there is no need to react about it rapidly. However, it is too late if we realize how horrible the problem is after it happen. I think Gore wanted to tell us that through the story of his sister dying of lung cancer in this film. Some people think that we cannot anything because of the thought that the problem is too big to deal with. However, I realize that there are many ways we can help reduce carbon emission to zero. And they include the ways we can do easily. Therefore, we should do something that we can do in daily life. I believe such little efforts will change our negative thought of global warming.
The first thing I read after reading Part 3 is that we should do whatever we can. It is much more convenient and comfortable than it used to be. But don’t forget the underlying problem. And this graph shows that the more we ignore the problem, the bigger the problem becomes.This sentence “Our collective nervous system is like that frog’s nervous system. It takes a sudden jolt sometimes before we become aware of a danger. If it seems gradual, even it really is happening quickly, we are capable of just sitting there and not responding and not reacting.” was very impressive for me. In fact,We’ve heard about the issue of global warming once. However, many people think that they cannot do anything by themselves. However, I believe that each person can do something. In order to protect and protect this planet, ourselves and our children, we have to find a little bit of what we can do.
In part 3 I leaned that there are three factors causing collision between civilization and earth. Population, science, way of thinking. Population growth is causing damages on nature as we are burning and cutting down the forest. I was surprised by the fact that almost 30% of the CO2 that goes up into the atmosphere each year is from forest burning. On the other hand, as the science and technology improve, there will be more factories that occurs CO2. America and China are the top two countries that emits CO2 the most. We have to ask corporation from them. Furthermore, we have to change the way of thinking. As the article says, our way of thinking and acting is too slow. We have act before it will be too late, before serious issues occur. I know solving this problem is not easy, and there will be some conflict. However, if we stop acting and give up, there will be no bright future.
After watching this video, I thought if human being doesn’t make any movement now, there will be a possibility that we will be used to the global warming and would not feel a sense of crisis about our current situation. The population is still growing these days, and we are cutting down the trees for our sources. This act is increasing the amount of CO2. However, human is cutting and burning down the forest to extend our residence. we have to stop being selfish and save the planet. Also, the revolution of science and technology is providing convenient life, but it is also damaging the earth. The CO2 discharged from the factories is causing the air pollution. In addition, the dirty water streamed from the factories is polluting the rivers and ocean. Many sea animals are by the water pollution. I think what we have to do now is notice how serious this problem is and face this problem even it is difficult to solve. I hope people will change the way of thinking this problem and make some little changes to make our planet better.
I learned that humans and the environment have a great relationship. Then, I deeply learned from the speech of Gore about the effects of global warming from the two aspects of world population and science. Compared to Gore’s childhood, the current population is increasing. And this situation is putting pressure on the earth. And it turns out to put pressure on food demand and water demand in particular. However, we thought that old behavior patterns could predict future situations. Humans are slowly seeing this situation, even though the Earth is changing rapidly. And in the movie, it was compared to the story of cigarettes. A Gore”s friend died of lung cancer as a result of continuing to grow tobacco. His friend died and he stopped growing. As with the issue of global warming, I think that humans will only notice when a disaster occurs. It’s too late then. That is why, we must understand this seriousness and protect the future.
I would like to discuss a misconception with respect to global warming, which is the problem is too big. I think about a lot of technologies that we, human beings have created. I admit that our power is tremendous in point of view of making a lot of things about technologies. However, as this article says “The solutions are in our hands. We just have to have the determination to make them happen.” For instance, there are some people who use higher mileage cars while some people do not use them. What if all people in the world use higher mileage cars? I surely expect we can decrease the emission of CO2. I hope that everyone’s choices reach to them.
I was so shocked that we are putting more pressure on the earth with respect to population. For example, they are pressures on food demand, water demand and vulnerable resources. Food, water and resources are necessary for people to live. Therefore, I strongly fee that we have to think about a collision between civilization and the Earth from the point of view of population.
I think the fable of the flog is very comprehensible. I thought global warming got worse so gradually and there was hardly any effect on our daily lives. However, it was completely wrong and we should take action for the earth immediately. Moreover, I was surprised by the fact of an unusual population. I didn’t care about it before watching this movie. Also, I was impressed by the fact that the development of science becomes the cause of global warming. I think these points are good for humans because they can prosper and live more comfortable. However, as the example of balance, if there is no earth, we cannot live. Therefore, it is good to think hoe to live comfortably but we should think about how to save the earth, too. I’m sure that there a way in which we can save our daily lives and the earth simultaneously.
To sum up, as I said before, I thought global warming is too big to consider and solve individually. However, according to part 3, it is wrong and there are a lot of things which we can do for global warming. So, I do
In part 3, I understood a whole inconvenient truth. I was surprised that politicians have sealed the truth, not take a strategy. I have known that China is really polluting the air, for example, yellow dust come to Japan from China. However, the U.S. produce more CO₂ than any other countries, so I was shocked. As I watching this movie, I felt uneasy about that Gore was using taxi and car every time at least in this film. I don’t blame it,nor criticize him because he may be an important person to be protected in the U.S., but the effect of his speech and persuasive power could be a little reduced. So, what I mean is that it is so difficult to change our lifestyle actually for even people who are eagerly trying to protect the environment, like Gore. I think convenience will not necessarily lead the earth better way, although it might bring us easiness. To get out of the easiness with our own will power is harder than we imagine. Like his sister’s story, we realize a mistake after loosing something precious. I realized we have to act before we loose our planet earth.
I feel our everyday lives are affecting the planet’s environment. We must do what we can for the earth at once.The population is increasing rapidly.This is abnormal. The population explosion in these days is putting a strain on the earth. It need more and more natural resources. And when we consume a lot of natural resources, a lot of Co2 is emitted. It is not just the population that is changed. Science and technology have evolved. They bring us much benefits but it also can bring harm to us. Do we understand the environment impact of these innovations? We do not understand everything. It is horrifying. These are the issue of the US and China alone. It is the big issue all over the world. Of course, Japan is also important for solving problem because Japan is one of the developed countries. This topic that Japanese should take seriously.
After reading part III, I was very shocked. I don’t know that civilization has negative impact on environment. Evolution of technology need many fuel and energy but, it promotes carbon dioxide emissions. not only science and technology but also increasing population. People use many plastic in our life for example, PET bottle, plastic bag and many more. So, we should change our life style for the earth. If world’s population continue to increase, the earth would has more big issue.