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THE FIVE STAGES OF GLOBAL WARMING
Taking a cue from Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, Al Gore discusses the five stages of coming to terms with global warming in this long interview with Ray Pride (pictured with Gore) about the excellent documentary An Inconvenient Truth.
From the interview:
GORE: First of all, David Guggenheim, in my opinion, has done a spectacular job of making a really entertaining movie out of a slide show! [laughs] It was his idea to use the short biographical pieces, not mine. He convinced me that on film it’s important to provide a basis for the audience to connect personally to a character or characters…. And he said… “You’re it!” By then, he had gained my trust to an extent I knew anything he did would be done sensitively and well. In a live stage presentation, whoever it is, even if it’s me, you’re going to have a certain dramatic tension just because there’s a live human being talking to you. On film, that doesn’t automatically translate. You have to supply the narrative thread to enable the audience to make that connection. Now, on the point of avoiding this transition straight from denial to despair, there is a global scientific consensus now that’s as strong as it gets. It’s based on five points that are all interrelated. Number one, global warming is real. Number two; we are principally responsible for it. Number three, the results are catastrophic. And number four; we have to fix it now. And number five; it’s not too late.
PRIDE: The very important part—
GORE: Yeah. For some people, they’re still on point one. “It’s not real.” Now, President Bush has retreated from point one to point two. He now says it’s real but it’s not at all clear that human beings are largely responsible for it. The scientific community is not confused about that. It’s just him and ExxonMobil and Dick Cheney and a few others. But there are those who say, “The results won’t be bad.” There are those who say, “We shouldn’t try to fix it because it’ll mess up the economy.” But the most insidious of the trenches that people retreat to is when people say, “it’s too big, we can’t solve it, nahhhh. We might as well not even try. “ Well, that’s the moral equivalent of being a suicide bomber, really. “
