Drinking the Kool-Aid

I may not know art, but I know what I hate... and I don't hate this.
-- C. Montgomery Burns, The Simpsons

I found less to rant about than I thought I would. Broke down and went to see An Inconvenient Truth this afternoon. Bullet-point observations:

• Al Gore's speech patterns are a bit annoying and his delivery, to me, still sounds a bit pretentious.
  
• Some of the personal touches in the film were overblown, IMHO. I think I know what he was trying to do, but he overdid it.
  
• I was misinformed about his reference to the Aral Sea - I had seen somewhere he tried to pass it off as solely a result of global warming and not Russian diversion. Wrong. It was right there correctly.
  
• On the same token, I want to look into what I've heard about the snowcaps on Kilimanjaro - I've seen studies that blame their melting more on deforestation than global warming. Both are a problem, but the film and Gore make it seem like global warming is to blame.
  
• I broke down afterward and spent some allowance on the book because it does have his charts in it - I want to check the references. Some of the items still seemed (shockingly - not - considering the presenter) overly politically-oriented.
  
• Specific to the above, I need to look into the hockey-stick CO₂ and temperature projections. I've also heard those aren't quite playing out as predicted.
  
• For a film claiming also to offer solutions, I felt like he tried to cram a little bit of that info into the last five minutes.
  
• I did like his use of the Futurama clip.
  
• I can see how someone who either doesn't like Gore or isn't very educated or interested in the topic would be bored to tears by it since it's a live performance of his traveling slide show intercut with a few other things.

So, I'm not so ranty as I expected, but I think the Discovery Channel's Global Warming: What You Need to Know and a number of The Weather Channel's Dr. Heidi Cullen's recent blog entries were both a bit more objective.