"We call it life"

Joshua points out videos produced by the Competitive Enterprise Institute that are meant to answer the (surprisingly excellent and informative) Al Gore politico-documentary (and world's most fantabulous Powerpoint presentation) An Inconvenient Truth. [ I attended a late night showing of Gore's movie on Tuesday at the Palo Alto Square, and people loudly applauded at the end of it. ]

Click on the video called "Energy" at the CEI site, and enjoy its punchline:

"Carbon Dioxide: they call it a pollutant—we call it life."

I like the dark, Marshall Josip Broz Tito totalitarian music that comes in at the end of the CEI video. It made me think of Gulags, show-trials, and summary executions. How dare they, those politicians—carbon dioxide is meant to save us from all that bad stuff! Arbeit macht frei!

As highbrow reading on Global Warming, I like the ICESat project, which is closely monitoring land-based ice in Antarctica and Greenland. Is that ice going to melt like the ice shelfs and glaciers and raise sea levels 20 feet (or more)?

Dunno.

In the Gore movie, he suffers the indignities of security checks as he bears his cross, the schlepping of his luggage and hi-fi powerpoint through airports ("I've given this presentation in thousands of places," he says). But he comes off quite well in the movie, and the scientific parts of it were well done and well illustrated. I liked the "last 640,000 years of CO₂ and temperature" graph, which Gore says "Very few outside of the scientific community have ever seen." (I saw it in Nature magazine, and tore out the page for future reference, but I don't consider myself part of the scientific community, just a scientific sympathizer. When it comes to shooting the scientists, I want to be able to say, "Hey, not me!").