An Inconvenient Truth Page #8

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But the very same frog,

if it jumps into a pot of lukewarm water

that is slowly brought to a boil,

will just sit there and it won't move.

It'll just sit there, even as the

temperature continues to go up and up.

It'll stay there, until...

Until it's rescued.

It's important to rescue the frog.

But the point is this.

Our collective nervous system is like

that frog's nervous system.

It takes a sudden jolt sometimes

before we become aware of a danger.

If it seems gradual,

even if it really is happening quickly,

we're capable of just sitting there

and not responding.

And not reacting.

I don't remember a time

when I was a kid

when summertime didn't mean

working with tobacco.

It was just... I used to love it.

It was during that period

when working with the guys on the farm

seemed like fun to me.

Starting in 1964,

with the Surgeon General's report,

the evidence was laid out

on the connection

between smoking cigarettes

and lung cancer.

We kept growing tobacco.

Nancy was almost 10 years

older than me,

and there were only the two of us.

She was my protector

and my friend at the same time.

She started smoking

when she was a teenager

and never stopped.

She died of lung cancer.

That's one of the ways

you don't want to die.

The idea that we had been

part of that economic pattern

that produced the cigarettes,

that produced the cancer,

it was so...

It was so painful on so many levels.

My father, he had grown tobacco

all his life. He stopped.

Whatever explanation

had seemed to make sense in the past,

just didn't cut it anymore.

He stopped it.

It's just human nature to take time

to connect the dots. I know that.

But I also know that there can be

a day of reckoning

when you wish you had connected

the dots more quickly.

There are three misconceptions in

particular that bedevil our thinking.

First, isn't there a disagreement

among scientists

about whether the problem

is real or not?

Actually, not really.

There was a massive study

of every scientific article

in a peer-reviewed journal written

on global warming for the last 10 years.

And they took a big sample of 10%,

And you know the number of those that

disagreed with the scientific consensus

that we're causing global warming

and that it's a serious problem?

Out of the 928, zero.

The misconception that there's

disagreement about the science

has been deliberately created

by a relatively small group of people.

One of their internal memos leaked.

And here's what it said,

according to the press.

Their objective is to reposition

global warming

as theory rather than fact.

This has happened before.

After the Surgeon General's report.

One of their memos leaked

"Doubt is our product,

"since it is the best means of creating

a controversy in the public's mind."

But have they succeeded?

You'll remember that there were

Zero percent

disagreed with the consensus.

There was another study of all

the articles in the popular press.

Over the last 14 years,

they looked at a sample of 636.

More than half of them said,

"Well, we're not sure. It could be

a problem, may not be a problem."

So no wonder people are confused.

Hey.

What did you find out?

Working for who?

Chief of Staff?

I'm gonna...

That's the White House

environment office.

American Petroleum Institute. It's fair

to say that's the oil and gas lobby.

Is that fair?

Totally fair.

Do a little bit more and see

who his clients were.

So he was defending

the Exxon Valdez thing.

Uh, very. Thank you.

Scientists have

an independent obligation

to respect and present the truth

as they see it.

Why do you directly contradict yourself

in the testimony you're giving

about this scientific question?

The last paragraph in that section

was not a paragraph which I wrote.

That was added to my testimony.

If they force you to change

a scientific conclusion,

it's a form of science fraud by them.

You know, in the Soviet Union,

ordering scientists

to change their studies to conform

with the ideology...

I've seen scientists

who were persecuted,

ridiculed,

deprived of jobs, income,

simply because the facts

they discovered

led them to an inconvenient truth

that they insisted on telling.

He worked for

the American Petroleum Institute.

And in January of 2001,

he was put by the president in charge

of environmental policy.

He received a memo from the EPA

that warned about global warming

and he edited. He has no

scientific training whatsoever.

But he took it upon himself

to overrule the scientist.

I said, "I want to see

what this guy's handwriting looks like."

This is the memo from the EPA.

These are his actual pen strokes.

He says, "No, you can't say this.

This is just speculation."

This was embarrassing

to the White House,

so this fellow resigned a few days later.

And the day after he resigned,

he went to work for Exxon Mobil.

You know, more than 100 years ago,

Upton Sinclair wrote this.

That it's difficult to get a man

to understand something

if his salary depends upon

his not understanding it.

The second misconception.

Do we have to choose between

the economy and the environment?

This is a big one.

Lot of people say we do.

I was trying to convince

the previous administration,

the first Bush administration,

to go to the Earth Summit.

And they organized

a big White House conference

to say, "Oh, we're on top of this."

And one of these view graphs

caught my attention.

And I want to talk to you about it

for a minute.

Now here is the choice

that we have to make

according to this group.

We have here a scales that balances

two different things.

On one side, we have gold bars.

Don't they look good?

I'd just like to have

some of those gold bars.

On the other side of the scales,

the entire planet.

I think this is a false choice

for two reasons.

Number one, if we don't have a planet...

The other reason is that

if we do the right thing,

then we're gonna create a lot of wealth

- and we're gonna create a lot of jobs.

- Yes.

Because doing the right thing

moves us forward.

I've probably given this slide show

I would say, at least 1,000 times.

Nashville to Knoxville

to Aspen and Sundance.

Los Angeles and San Francisco.

Portland, Minneapolis.

Boston, New Haven, London, Brussels,

Stockholm, Helsinki,

Vienna, Munich, Italy and Spain

and China, South Korea, Japan.

Thank you.

I guess the thing I've spent more time

on than anything else in this slide show

is trying to identify

all those things in people's minds

that serve as obstacles

to them understanding this.

And whenever I feel like

I've identified an obstacle,

I try to take it apart, roll it away.

Move it.

Demolish it, blow it up.

I set myself a goal.

Communicate this real clearly.

The only way I know to do it

is city by city,

person by person,

family by family.

- Bye-bye. Thank you again.

- Bye.

And I have faith that pretty soon

enough minds are changed

that we cross a threshold.

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