An Inconvenient Truth

I finally managed to see Al Gore's film on the environment and global warming today and I give the film a big thumbs up. Yes, the film can definitely be viewed as the centerpiece of a Presidential election vehicle and yes, the film contains a few too many wistful scenes of Al gazing out windows, but I give him high marks for trying his best to not only understand the science of global warming but present it to a mass audience without dumbing things down too much. The film moves back and forth between scenes of Gore giving his now famous lecture on global warming and glimpses into his life story and the parts that are relevant to the environmental movement. In his lecture, he shows the actual data that so clearly proves how we have changed our atmosphere. He exposes some of the absolutely irresponsible moves that have come out of the Bush White House regarding global warming, including the editing of scientific findings by a non-expert. Gore places the burden of proof upon himself, spending 90% of the time simply trying to convince us that the evidence is real before switching gears to tell us what we can do. My favorite aspect of the film is the presentation of data: atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, global population growth, global temperature trends, sea ice reduction, all presented on visually impressive graphs with Gore's caring and involved narration of their meaning. This is an important film, I highly recommend it.

www.climatecrisis.net

astro-nuts

Today was one of those pleasant days in the news where all the misery of the planet is pushed aside for a particularly bizarre story. The astronaut love triangle that has resulted in kidnapping and attempted murder charges for a recent astronaut is the stuff of a saturday night live skit, not the real world. I don't particularly care about the details, what I care about is making sure people keep this incident and the state of the overall astronaut corps separate. Lisa Nowak is clearly a troubled person, but her actions are not indicative of some kind of pervasive rot within the astronaut corps or the culture of NASA. Astronauts are a culturally diverse, highly educated, and extraordinarily brave group of people, but they are also human beings and even the best of us blow a gasket from time to time. Does NASA need to review some of it's psychological testing procedures for astronauts? Absolutely. But the idea that the astronaut corps is an unstable powder keg of psychos is just wrong. Unfortunately, this incident will likely be used as a broad brush to paint the astronaut corps as a mental pressure cooker and NASA as a failed manager of it's most visible employees. We've been spared the awful news of the world for a day, let's get back to worrying about the truly crazy people out there.

Iraq wetlands on the mend

The enormous wetlands of the Tigris-Euphrates river basin, the home of the Mesopotamian civilizations of thousands of years ago, are making a comeback. The wetlands were systematically drained during the Hussein regime with little regard for the Iraqis who relied on the marshes for their livelihood and the wildlife that called them home. With the help of American forces, independent contractors, and ordinary Iraqis, 40% of the marshlands have been reflooded since 2003. Full ecological recovery is a long way off, but a clear sign of progress is the return of thousands of water birds to the region.