Feeling: aggravated
Listening to: nothing
Reading/Watching:

The other night mon coeur and I went to a party for all the people from my restaurant, because the owner had sold the place and was having a farewell dinner.

It was good times, fun, a little bittersweet that I was getting to know my former boss just as she was leaving. But the part of the evening that sticks in my mind is when something about the climate crisis and carbon emissions came up, and the woman sitting next to me immediately started shrugging it off as a complete hoax.

I asked her if she'd read any of the literature on the subject, or seen the movie version of An Inconvenient Truth, and she scornfully said "Al Gore" as if that settled the argument.

I held my tongue, because people that brainwashed to the political side of actual scientific problems aren't going to be persuaded by the 25-year-old waitress in the butterfly shirt with mustard on her pants.

But the movie The 11th Hour has been released in limited theaters around the country, and I know it's due to arrive in Schoolville in a week or two. My husband and I already plan to see it, because the things we've been reading on the subject are alarming and we're hoping to get more information on what we can do individually.

I know that people ignored Al Gore's message just because he's Al Gore. They didn't vote for him, they don't like him, whatever. You can discredit a politician's word, because it's too easy to believe that they're spouting off on an issue for personal gain. But I'm hoping that when this second documentary comes out, people will find it harder to argue with Stephen Hawking, Mikhail Gorbachev, and R. James Woolsey, the former head of the CIA (and those are just the names I recognized off the top of my head; the long list following it is probably scientists I'm not familiar with).

If you haven't read up on the issue, please do. It's not a hoax. We're not all going to go up in flames in the next five years, but it's going to get quite sucky for quite a lot of people if the climate doesn't calm down a bit, because hurricanes are just one of the things cooked up by the rise in temperature.

And if you think it's all in the hands of the big companies, you'd be wrong. There are 280 million people in this country, and if all of them made even a small change in their personal lifestyle, it would make a big difference.

Of course, if you're the type of person who believes it's all a big hoax, you probably don't believe me anyway, but whatever. Go see the movie (or steal the DVD, if you don't want to contribute to its profits), and if you're still skeptical, then you can mock me for being easily alarmed by the whiny liberal machine.

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