An Inconvenient Truth Page #7

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this is what would happen

to the sea level in Florida.

This is what would happen

to San Francisco Bay.

A lot of people live in these areas.

The Netherlands,

one of the low countries.

Absolutely devastating.

The area around Beijing that's home

to tens of millions of people.

Even worse, in the area

around Shanghai,

there are 40 million people.

Worse still, Calcutta,

and to the east, Bangladesh,

the area covered includes

Think of the impact of a couple

hundred thousand refugees

when they're displaced

by an environmental event.

And then imagine the impact

of a hundred million or more.

Here's Manhattan.

This is the World Trade Center

memorial site.

And after the horrible events of 9/11,

we said, "Never again."

But this is what would happen

to Manhattan.

They can measure this precisely,

just as the scientists could

predict precisely

how much water would breach

the levees in New Orleans.

The area where the World Trade Center

Memorial is to be located

would be underwater.

Is it possible that we should prepare

against other threats besides terrorists?

Maybe we should be concerned

about other problems as well.

1.3 billion people.

An economy that's surging.

More and more energy needs.

Massive coal reserves.

The coal belt in Northern China,

- Inner Mongolia.

- Right.

Then there's Shaanxi province.

- And also biggest coal mine here.

- Up here.

- Yeah.

- Now, is that an open pit mine?

- Yes.

- Yes.

Every time I've visited China,

I've learned from their scientists.

They're right on the cutting edge.

Give me some sense of the numbers of

new coal fire generating plants.

Well, I have to say

that the number is enormous

because it's so profitable.

This issue is really the same for China

as it is for the US.

We are both using old technologies

that are dirty and polluting.

... more flooding and more drought

and stronger storms is going up,

and global warming is implicated

in the pattern.

And if you were to give some

suggestions to everybody here

about, like, what we can do

for the situation now.

Separating the truth from the fiction

and the accurate connections

from the misunderstandings

is part of what you learn here.

But when the warnings are accurate

and based on sound science,

then we as human beings,

whatever country we live in,

have to find a way to make sure

that the warnings are heard

and responded to.

We both have a hard time

shaking loose the familiar patterns

that we've relied on in the past.

We both face completely

unacceptable consequences.

And there are three factors

that are causing this collision,

and the first is population.

When my generation, the baby boom

generation, was born after World War II,

the population had just crossed

the two billion mark.

Now, I'm in my 50s,

and it's already gone

to almost six and a half billion.

And if I reach the demographic

expectation for the baby boomers,

it'll go over nine billion.

So if it takes 10,000 generations

to reach two billion

and then in one human lifetime, ours,

it goes from two billion to nine billion,

something profoundly different's

going on right now.

We're putting more pressure

on the Earth.

Most of it's in the poorer nations

of the world.

This puts pressure on food demand.

It puts pressure on water demand.

It puts pressure on vulnerable

natural resources,

and this pressure's one of the reasons

why we have seen all the devastation

of the forest,

not only tropical, but elsewhere.

It is a political issue.

This is the border between Haiti

and the Dominican Republic.

One set of policies here,

another set of policies here.

Much of it comes not only

because of cutting, but also burning.

Almost 30% of all the CO2 that goes up

each year into the atmosphere

comes from forest burning.

This is a time-lapse picture of the Earth

at night over a six-month period

showing the lights of the cities in white

and the burning forests

and brush fires in red.

The yellow areas are the gas flares,

like these in Siberia.

And that brings me to the second factor

that has transformed our relationship

to the Earth.

The scientific and technological

revolution is a great blessing

in that it has given us

tremendous benefits

in areas like medicine

and communications.

But this new power that we have

also brings a responsibility

to think about its consequences.

Here's a formula to think about.

Old habits plus old technology

have predictable consequences.

Old habits that are hard to change

plus new technology

can have dramatically

altered consequences.

Warfare with spears

and bows and arrows

and rifles and machine guns,

that's one thing.

But then a new technology came.

We have to think differently about war

because the new technologies

so completely transformed

the consequences of that old habit

that we can't just mindlessly continue

the patterns of the past.

In the same way, we have always

exploited the Earth for sustenance.

For most of our existence,

we used relatively simple tools.

The plow, the tractor.

But even tools like shovels

are different now.

Shovel used to be this.

Shovels have gotten bigger.

And every year, they get more powerful.

So our ability to have an effect,

in this case on the surface of the Earth,

is utterly transformed.

You can say the same thing

about irrigation, which is a great thing.

But when we divert rivers

without considering the consequences,

then sometimes rivers no longer

reach the sea.

There were two rivers in Central Asia

that were used

by the former Soviet Union

for irrigating cotton fields unwisely.

The Aral Sea was fed by them.

It used to be the fourth largest

inland sea in the world.

When I went there,

I saw this strange sight

of an enormous fishing fleet

resting in the sand.

This is the canal that the fishing

industry desperately tried to build

to get to the receding shoreline.

Making mistakes in our dealings

with nature can have

bigger consequences now

because our technologies are often

bigger than the human scale.

When you put them all together,

they've made us a force of nature.

And this is also a political issue.

This is a computer map of the world

that distorts to show the relative

contributions to global warming.

In our country, we are responsible

for more than all of South America,

all of Africa, all of the Middle East,

all of Asia, all combined.

The per capita average in Africa, India,

China, Japan, EU, Russia.

There's where we are.

Way, way above everyone else.

If you take population into account,

it's a little bit different.

China's playing a bigger role,

so is Europe.

But we are still by all odds

the largest contributor.

And so it is up to us to look

at how we think about it,

because our way of thinking

is the third and final factor

that transforms our relationship

to the Earth.

If a frog jumps into

a pot of boiling water,

it jumps right out again

because it senses the danger.

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