Quest Club of Arizona

I wanted to recommend a movie to everyone I know. I don’t think it’s gettin enough attention. I’ll admit it’s pretty scary, but I think we need to be scared. It’s not about the war, or gas prices, or the economy, or any of the rest of our substantial problems. It concerns global warming and it’s called An Inconvenient Truth. I think one of the reasons it’s not getting enough attention is it’s not a sexy subject, not everyone believes it, and Al Gore is the narrator and producer. We have long memories and remember his performance during the 2000 election and didn’t much like that Al Gore. But this Al Gore is different and quite convincing.

I think the weather in Phoenix has changed since I first moved here in 1951. Many of my friends say it’s because of the tremendous increase in population and the spread of the city. And maybe that’s true, but what I see is in the winter we used to get 3-4 months of freezes and now we may get 2 or 3 days of freeze. I can remember at practice while I was coaching of jumping up and down to stay warm. We never have days like that anymore. Maybe it’s my memory but it seems the summer is getting longer and longer and the number of days over 110 degrees seem to have increased. It just seems Phoenix is getting hotter.

Maybe I don’t know my history, but it seems like these forest fires are more prevalent and larger and are getting closer and closer to towns and cities. Recently in the newspaper there was a report that the forest fires all over the west were caused by global warming. Of course there seems to be more hurricanes in the gulf region and they seem more destructive. Weather experts say we are in a 20 year cycle. This of course effects the amount of gas and oil available because most of it comes from the gulf area.

Anyway these things are coming up and an election is on the horizon and we are going to be asked to make educated decisions on some of these issues and it isn’t too soon to educate ourselves, and Gore’s movie isn’t a bad place to start. His warning is we are 10-15 years from the tipping point, the point at which it will be too late to change things that will effect global warming.