An Inconvenient Truth

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You look at that river

gently flowing by.

You notice the leaves

rustling with the wind.

You hear the birds.

You hear the tree frogs.

In the distance, you hear a cow.

You feel the grass.

The mud gives a little bit

on the river bank.

It's quiet. It's peaceful.

And all of a sudden,

it's a gear shift inside you.

And it's like taking a deep breath

and going,

"Oh, yeah, I forgot about this."

This is the first picture of the Earth

from space

that any of us ever saw.

It was taken on Christmas Eve, 1968

during the Apollo 8 Mission.

...within relatively comfortable

boundaries.

But we are filling up that thin shell

of atmosphere with pollution.

Ladies and gentlemen,

Mr. Al Gore.

I am Al Gore.

I used to be the next president

of the United States Of America.

I don't find that particularly funny.

I've been trying to tell this story

for a long time,

and I feel as if I've failed to get

the message across.

I was in politics for a long time

and I'm proud of my service.

You gotta be kidding me.

This is a national disaster.

Get every doggone Greyhound bus line

in the country,

and get their... moving to

New Orleans.

That's them thinking small, man,

and this is a major, major, major deal.

What do you need right now?

There are good people,

who are in politics in both parties

who hold this at arm's length

because if they acknowledge it

and recognize it,

then the moral imperative to make

big changes

is inescapable.

... unless you fix the biggest damn crisis

in the history of this country.

...scouted out landing spots

and they lost radio contact

when they went around

the dark side of the moon.

And there was inevitably

some suspense.

Then when they came back

in radio contact,

they looked up

and they snapped this picture,

and it became known as Earth Rise.

And that one picture exploded

in the consciousness of humankind.

It lead to dramatic changes.

Within 18 months of this picture,

the modern environmental movement

had begun.

The next picture was taken on the last

of the Apollo missions,

Apollo 17.

This one was taken

on December 11, 1972,

and it is the most commonly published

photograph in all of history.

And it's the only picture of the Earth

from space that we have

where the sun was directly

behind the spacecraft

so that the Earth is fully lit up

and not partly in darkness.

The next image I'm gonna show you

has almost never been seen.

It was taken by a spacecraft

called The Galileo

that went out to explore

the solar system.

And as it was leaving Earth's gravity,

it turned its cameras around

and took a time lapse picture

of one day's worth of rotation,

here compressed into 24 seconds.

Isn't that beautiful?

This image is a magical image in a way.

It was made by a friend of mine,

Tom Van Sant.

He took 3,000 separate

satellite pictures

taken over a three-year period,

digitally stitched together.

And he chose images

that would give a cloud-free view

of every square inch

of the Earth's surface.

All of the land masses

accurately portrayed.

When that's all spread out,

it becomes an iconic image.

I show this because I wanna tell you

a story about two teachers I had.

One that I didn't like that much,

the other who is a real hero to me.

I had a grade school teacher

who taught geography

by pulling a map of the world down

in front of the blackboard.

I had a classmate in the sixth grade

who raised his hand

and he pointed to the outline

of the east coast of South America

and he pointed

to the west coast of Africa

and he asked,

"Did they ever fit together?"

And he asked,

"Did they ever fit together?"

And the teacher said,

"Of course not. That's the most

ridiculous thing I've ever heard."

That student went on to become

a drug addict and a ne'er-do-well.

The teacher went on to become

science advisor

in the current administration.

But, you know,

the teacher was actually reflecting

the conclusion of the scientific

establishment of that time.

Continents are so big,

obviously they don't move.

But, actually, as we now know,

they did move.

They moved apart from one another.

But at one time they did,

in fact, fit together.

But that assumption was a problem.

It reflected the well-known wisdom

that what gets us into trouble

is not what we don't know,

it's what we know for sure

that just ain't so.

This is actually an important point,

believe it or not,

because there is another

such assumption

that a lot of people have in their minds

right now about global warming

that just ain't so.

The assumption is something like this.

The Earth is so big

we can't possibly have

any lasting harmful impact

on the Earth's environment.

And maybe that was true at one time,

but it's not anymore.

And one of the reasons

it's not true anymore

is that the most vulnerable part

of the Earth's ecological system

is the atmosphere.

Vulnerable because it's so thin.

My friend, the late Carl Sagan,

used to say,

"If you had a big globe

with a coat of varnish on it,

"the thickness of that varnish

relative to that globe

"is pretty much the same

"as the thickness

of the Earth's atmosphere

"compared to the Earth itself."

And it's thin enough

that we are capable

of changing its composition.

That brings up the basic science

of global warming.

And I'm not gonna spend a lot of time

on this because you know it well.

The sun's radiation comes in

in the form of light waves

and that heats up the Earth.

And then some of the radiation

that is absorbed and warms the Earth

is reradiated back into space

in the form of infrared radiation.

And some of the outgoing

infrared radiation is trapped

by this layer of atmosphere

and held inside the atmosphere.

And that's a good thing because

it keeps the temperature of the Earth

within certain boundaries,

keeps it relatively constant and livable.

But the problem is this thin layer

of atmosphere is being thickened

by all of the global warming pollution

that's being put up there.

And what that does is

it thickens this layer of atmosphere,

more of the outgoing infrared is trapped.

And so the atmosphere heats up

worldwide. That's global warming.

Now, that's the traditional explanation.

Here's what I think is

a better explanation.

You're probably wondering

why your ice cream went away.

Well, Susie, the culprit isn't foreigners.

It's global warming.

- Global...

- Yeah.

Meet Mr. Sunbeam.

He comes all the way from the sun

to visit Earth.

Hello, Earth.

Just popping in to brighten your day.

And now I'll be on my way.

Not so fast, Sunbeam.

We're greenhouse gases.

You ain't going nowhere.

Oh, God, it hurts.

Pretty soon, Earth is chock-full

of Sunbeams.

Their rotting corpses heating

our atmosphere.

How do we get rid

of the greenhouse grasses?

Fortunately, our handsomest politicians

came up with a cheap, last-minute way

to combat global warming.

Ever since 2063,

we simply drop a giant ice cube

into the ocean every now and then.

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