Global Warning: Al Gore's Inconvenient Jeremiad

Al Gore may have missed his calling: He would have made a fine science writer. The former vice president's new book -- a movie tie-in entitled An Inconvenient Truth (Rodale; paperback, $21.95), like the film hitting screens in New York and Los Angeles this week -- shows an impressive talent for explanatory journalism. Based on a slide show that Gore has been perfecting on his Mac laptop for years, this handsome volume doesn't pack quite the same punch as the celluloid version, but it's still very effective: a book on global warming that's downright chilling.

Before people started mucking with things, the sun's energy would enter the Earth's atmosphere as light waves and warm the planet, whereupon some of that energy would naturally be bounced back into space as infrared radiation. But human-made "greenhouse gases," especially carbon dioxide, are souping up the atmosphere and trapping more of those infrared waves in with us, driving global temperatures up.

As Gore convincingly shows, the trend lines are ominous. In the 650,000 years before the advent of industrialization, carbon dioxide levels in Earth's atmosphere never topped 300 parts per million. In 1958, an observatory recorded levels of about 310 parts per million; by 2005, that was up to 380. Within 45 years, carbon dioxide levels are projected to hit 600. These trends fit inside graphs of global temperature like a hand inside a glove, Gore warns. Ocean temperatures have leapt "way beyond the range of natural variability," he writes, and "if you look at the 21 hottest years measured" since the Civil War, "20 of the 21 have occurred within the last 25 years." The single hottest year since the Lincoln administration was 2005. And none of the 928 peer-reviewed articles in scientific journals over the past decade has doubted that greenhouse gases are to blame.

The results of this increase are dramatic. In the last 40 years, Lake Chad -- once the world's sixth-largest -- has vanished, causing droughts and worsening famines that threaten millions of lives. One particularly jarring set of photos here shows how glaciers from Kilimanjaro to Alaska have been slithering backward toward oblivion. As Gore notes, the glaciers on the Himalayas "contain 100 times as much ice as the Alps and provide more than half the drinking water for 40% of the world's population" via seven major Asian rivers, including the Ganges and the Indus. As the glaciers shrink, so will Asia's water supply. As the planet swelters, heat waves of the sort that killed 35,000 people in Europe during the summer of 2003 will become more common. And as the oceans warm up, according to a major MIT study released just weeks before Katrina hit, hurricanes will become more frequent and powerful. Since the 1970s, the MIT study concluded, major storms in both the Atlantic and Pacific "have increased in duration and intensity by about 50 percent."

Those aren't even the scariest scenarios. If Greenland melted, "sea levels worldwide would increase by between 18 and 20 feet" -- putting much of south Florida underwater, drowning large parts of the Netherlands, and displacing more than 40 million people around Shanghai and some 60 million more in Calcutta and Bangladesh.

Why should we care? Perhaps because we're causing it. The United States, Gore writes, is responsible for some 30 percent of greenhouse gas pollution, more "than South America, Africa, the Middle East, Australia, Japan, and Asia -- all put together." Embarrassingly, American cars' environmental standards lag behind China's.

Gore urges readers to save energy at home, recycle, use mass transit, don't even think of buying an SUV -- and vote out politicians who don't share his sense of urgency. In Washington, his new push has started the inevitable mindless chatter about whether he'll run for president again. The inconvenient truth is that Gore was never much of a politician, but he remains a very serious policy analyst -- and this frightening, galvanizing book will convince plenty of readers that Earth genuinely does hang in the balance.

-- Warren Bass