Due to my late notification, I ended up with one guest who, naturally, came by car. Not a bad thing, in the end, as I had the DVD on loan from a kind American phycologist visiting our lab, and the country code caused a lot of trouble reading the DVD. It wasn’t possible at all on the PlayStation 2 console, and as we played it on my laptop computer, the DVD player stopped suddenly (even twice) virtually for no reason at all.
Anyway, apart from the melodramatic scenes in between with rather soft reflections on key moments in Gore’s life (of no interest to the story at all, and typically American, if you ask me), he gives a really neat and convincing presentation on the undoubtedly anthropogenic rise in atmospheric CO2 beyond all natural limits, and the suspected link with a significant temperature rise including severe consequences for crowded coastal areas.
Yes, suspected link, in that it is still unclear what combination of factors explains global warming. This question has not yet been resolved qualitatively, let alone quantitatively. But IT IS BEYOND ANY DOUBT that CO2 is one of the factors, is strongly correlated with temperature, and that at least part of this correlation is of a causal nature. A 650000-year record of (ice-core) CO2 and oxygen isotope temperature measurements proves that. Atmospheric CO2 has already risen well above any historical peak, and is about to double that increase in 50 years, but the temperature hasn’t yet risen proportionally. Yes, it will rise, it is already rising, but no-one knows for sure to what extent it will continue. The thing is, by the time we will know for sure, it will be too late. So for now, the only thing we can do is to strongly limit the emission of the only demonstrable factor we can control: CO2. And a professor still doubting human influence and, most of all, looking at a geological timescale while human lives are involved, somewhat bothers me…
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