Friday, October 27, 2006

Climate Change

I finally got around to seeing Al Gore's movie "An Inconvenient Truth" tonight in Auckland. It is a chilling movie, as the site it points you to makes out. The single most chilling fact is the direct relationship between atmospheric CO2 and temperature over the years.

Unfortunately the full power of the film is destroyed by Gore using the analogy of the boiled frog. This is the one that goes "a frog dropped in boiling water will jump out, but one put in tepid water that is heated to boiling will boil to death." I know Karl Kruszelnicki wrote in his Sydney Morning Herald Good Weekend column "Myth Conceptions" that this was simply not true - indeed the frog dropped in hot water will have the protein in its muscles rendered useless, while the frog in rising temperature water will indeed react.

So it is a pity to see it being recycled in what is otherwise an intriguing movie - both about climate change and politics.

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