AT THE MOVIES…

Last night we went as guests of our client to a movie premier for “The Age of Stupid”. The movie was (as you would expect) about the climate change, and was pretty good. It was, of course, a star studded affair (at least when it comes to the non-profit world). The president of the Philippine’s climate advisor, along with a couple of senators and zero presidential hopefuls (no surprise there) were in attendance. A couple of other honchos were also around (OxFam’s head of the U.K., etc)…they even had the customary red carpet (though, it was green in this case).

The movie was crowd funded, which in itself is a cool concept. I believe the first premier of the movie was in a tent, and the projectors were powered by solar energy. The real point of the movie was to raise awareness of the importance of the Copenhagen Climate conference this year on Dec 12. The conference is where world leaders will be given one more chance to reach an agreement on reducing carbon emissions by 30% - a number that all scientists agree on. A number of countries have already taken steps towards this figure, but major countries have failed to meet the standards set by science.

Another message that resonated with the movie is the need to act now. Climate change is a lagging indicator, and so the effects of polluting today won’t be realized for years to come. For that reason, it is imperative to act now and begin reducing emissions by 2015. The movie also stressed the generally accepted point that if the earth heats up 2 degrees more than the historic variance, the effects will compound and the earth will in essence have a self fulfilling prophecy (that is, if the earth heats up two degrees, more carbon is released from plant/animal life, which compounds the effects and things spiral out of control from there).

I will also mention how ridiculous some of the mainstream media (by some I mean the far right, and in particular Matt Drudge!) portrays climate change to be a hoax. On any given day, you’re likely to see articles on the drudgereport that talk about the coldest temperatures on record for a particular area, and he mocks the idea of “global warming” by citing those examples. What he does not realize is that the cold temperatures are a result of climate change, which is caused by… you guessed it, global warming. I could go on and on about this, but the point is simply that there is no longer a debate on whether humans are responsible for climate change. About 60% of the general population is doubtful as to whether climate change is caused by humans. In the scientific community, that percentage is about 1%. Pretty convincing.

The last thing I will say about the movie is that most people are genuinely concerned about the environment, but human nature is such that it’s impossible to act drastically for events that are seemingly years and years into the future… we’re just not built that way. Think fight or flight, etc. all those responses are geared towards acting immediately. Plenty of life forms have experienced extinction in the past. The thing that makes our current situation different is the irony that we are the ones who are responsible for our own extinction if this happens. We’ve come so far as a species only to almost commit suicide. Scary thought indeed – I think that was the point of the movie.