penultimate post of 2008

Before I post my year-end whine festival, I have to encourage everyone to see a recent episode of Frontline. I’m a big fan of that series on PBS (even if the narrator’s mellifluous voice makes me drowsy every time) and I finally got around to watching Heat, which we had recorded from its October airtime. It did not disappoint. At 2 hours it seems like a long haul but it was an extremely thorough look at the full range of causes of climate change. It drilled down deep—in a geothermal way, not a Giuliani way—into complexities that are rarely addressed, including even the carbon footprint of cement production weighed against the benefit of construction of nuclear power plants. There was a clip from an astonishingly prescient film made in the 1950’s with two scientists warning of the clear evidence of human generated carbon and its impact on climate change. Somehow the satisfaction of wielding the world’s largest “I told you so” doesn’t quite compensate for being dismissed for half a century. You can download the whole thing and follow all sorts of useful links at:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/heat/