An Inconvenient Truth Page #2

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Just like Daddy puts in his drink

every morning.

And then he gets mad.

Of course, since the greenhouse gases

are still building up,

it takes more and more ice each time.

Thus, solving the problem

once and for all.

- But...

- Once and for all!

This is the image that started me

in my interest in this issue.

And I saw it

when I was a college student

because I had a professor

named Roger Revelle

who was the first person to propose

measuring carbon dioxide

in the Earth's atmosphere.

He saw where the story was going

after the first few chapters.

After the first few years of data,

he intuited what it meant

for what was yet to come.

They designed the experiment in 1957.

He hired Charles David Keeling

who was very faithful and precise

in making these measurements

for decades.

They started sending

these weather balloons up every day

and they chose the middle of the Pacific

because it was the area

that was most remote.

And he was a very hard-nosed scientist.

He really emphasized the hard data.

It was a wonderful time for me

because, like a lot of young people,

I came into contact

with intellectual ferment,

ideas that I'd never considered

in my wildest dreams before.

And he showed our class

the results of his measurements

after only a few years.

It was startling to me.

Now he was startled

and made it clear to our class

what he felt the significance of it was.

And I just soaked it up like a sponge.

He drew the connections

between the larger changes

in our civilization

and this pattern that was now visible

in the atmosphere of the entire planet.

And then he projected into the future

where this was headed

unless we made some adjustments.

And it was just as clear as day.

After the first seven, eight, nine years,

you could see the pattern

that was developing.

But I asked a question.

Why is it that it goes up and down

once each year?

And he explained that if you look

at the land mass of the Earth,

very little of it is south of the equator.

The vast majority of it is

north of the equator,

and most of the vegetation is

north of the equator.

And so, when the Northern Hemisphere

is tilted toward the sun,

as it is in our spring and summer,

the leaves come out

and they breathe in carbon dioxide,

and the amount in the atmosphere

goes down.

But when the Northern Hemisphere is

tilted away from the sun,

as it is in our fall and winter,

the leaves fall

and exhale carbon dioxide,

and the amount in the atmosphere

goes back up again.

And so, it's as if the entire Earth

once each year breathes in and out.

So we started measuring

carbon dioxide in 1958.

And you can see

that by the middle '60s,

when he showed my class this image,

it was already clear that it was going up.

I respected him and learned from him

so much, I followed this.

And when I went to the Congress

in the middle 1970s,

I helped to organize the first hearings

on global warming

and asked my professor to come

and be the leadoff witness.

And I thought that would have

such a big impact,

we'd be on the way to solving

this problem, but it didn't work that way.

But I kept having hearings.

And in 1984 I went to the Senate

and really dug deeply into this issue

with science roundtables and the like.

I wrote a book about it,

ran for President in 1988,

partly to try to gain some visibility

for that issue.

And in 1992 went to the White House.

We passed a version of a carbon tax

and some other measures

to try to address this.

Went to Kyoto in 1997

to help get a treaty

that's so controversial,

in the US at least.

In 2000,

my opponent pledged to regulate CO2

and then...

That was not a pledge that was kept.

But the point of this is

all this time you can see

what I have seen all these years.

It just keeps going up. It is relentless.

And now we're beginning to see

the impact in the real world.

This is Mount Kilimanjaro

more than 30 years ago

and more recently.

And a friend of mine just came back

from Kilimanjaro

with a picture he took

a couple of months ago.

Another friend, Lonnie Thompson,

studies glaciers.

Here's Lonnie with a last sliver

of one of the once mighty glaciers.

Within the decade there will be

no more snows of Kilimanjaro.

This is happening

in Glacier National Park.

I climbed to the top of this in 1998

with one of my daughters.

Within 15 years, this will be the park

formerly known as Glacier.

Here is what's been happening

year by year to the Columbia Glacier.

It just retreats every single year.

And it's a shame

'cause these glaciers are so beautiful.

But those who go up to see them,

here's what they're seeing every day,

now.

In the Himalayas

there's a particular problem

because 40% of all the people

in the world

get their drinking water

from rivers and spring systems

that are fed more than half

by the melt water

coming off the glaciers.

And within this next half century

those 40% of the people on Earth

are gonna face a very serious shortage

because of this melting.

Italy, the Italian Alps.

Same sight today.

An old postcard from Switzerland.

Throughout the Alps,

we're seeing the same story.

It's also true in South America.

This is Peru 15 years ago.

And the same glacier today.

This is Argentina 20 years ago.

Same glacier today.

Seventy-five years ago in Patagonia

on the tip of South America.

This vast expanse of ice is now gone.

There's a message in this.

There's a message in this.

It is worldwide.

And the ice has stories to tell us.

My friend, Lonnie Thompson,

digs core drills in the ice.

They dig down

and they bring the core drills back up

and they look at the ice

and they study it.

When the snow falls,

it traps little bubbles of atmosphere

and they can go in and measure

how much CO2 was in the atmosphere

the year that that snow fell.

What's even more interesting, I think, is

they can measure

the different isotopes of oxygen

and figure out

a very precise thermometer

and tell you what the temperature was

the year that that bubble was trapped

in the snow as it fell.

When I was in Antarctica,

I saw cores like this.

And a guy looked at it. He said,

"Right here is where the US Congress

passed the Clean Air Act."

And I couldn't believe it.

But you can see the difference

with the naked eye.

Just a couple of years

after that law was passed,

it's very clearly distinguishable.

They can count back year by year

the same way a forester reads

tree rings.

And you can see each annual layer

from the melting and re-freezing,

so they can go back in a lot of these

mountain glaciers 1,000 years.

And they constructed a thermometer

of the temperature.

The blue is cold and the red is warm.

Now, I show this

for a couple of reasons.

Number one, the so-called skeptics

will sometimes say,

"Oh, this whole thing,

this is a cyclical phenomenon.

"There was a medieval warming period,

after all."

Well, yeah, there was.

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