I Am Very Tall

Happy New Year everybody. Hope everyone did something exciting. More importantly, I hope people are still setting out their resolutions.

I don't really take to resolutions. It's a pretty arbitrary thing to do - completely changing one habit or another because it just happens to hit a certain day of the year. But sometimes, the need is such that any catalyst will do.

I just watched Al Gore's movie, An Inconvenient Truth. Going into the movie, I wasn't exactly a skeptic. I've been listening to people talk about global warming since I was in grade school. I never doubted that the Earth was gradually getting warmer, or that mankind was the reason for this effect.

I was, however, not particularly motivated to do anything about it. It seemed like yet another issue that would probably percolate for many years before actually being dealt with.

Perhaps one of the most important reasons to see this movie is that it presents you with stark images of what global warming has already done. Gigantic ice shelfs falling off of Antarctica. Mountains losing their snow caps. Lakes and rivers withering away. It may not sound like much. But it's frightening when you look at it.

This year, I would like to think that I'm going to do something that will help change the way that this story goes. Being cognizant of my weaknesses, I'm aware of the relatively high probability that I will stop thinking about this tomorrow, or next week, or the week after that. But at the least, I'll urge everyone to go see this movie. In fact, I'll go one better, and point you to a place where you can see it for free. Unless you are an asshole, I promise that you won't consider it to be a waste of time.

Alternately, you can go to www.climatecrisis.net and see all of the corporate plugging that's been legitimately set out for the movie.

Update: Apparently, boingboing logged the "liberation" of a gigantic ice shelf off the coast of Canada. The CNN source article states:

A giant ice shelf the size of 11,000 football fields has snapped free from Canada's Arctic. The mass of ice broke clear 16 months ago from the coast of Ellesmere Island, about 800 kilometers (497 miles) south of the North Pole, but no one was present to see it in Canada's remote north.

If you saw the movie, this will make you scared.