You Look at That River

难以忽视的真相 英文剧本

You look at that river

gently flowing by.

You notice the leaves

rustling with the wind.

You hear the birds.

You hear the tree frogs.

ln the distance, you hear a cow.

You feel the grass.

The mud gives a little bit on the river bank.

lt's quiet. lt's peaceful.

And all of a sudden,

it's a gear shift inside you.

And it's like taking a deep breath and going,

"Oh, yeah, l forgot about this."

This is the first picture of the Earth from spacethat any of us ever saw.

It was taken on Christmas Eve, 1968

during the ApoIIo 8 Mission.

...within relatively comfortable boundaries.

But we are filling up that thin shell of atmosphere with pollution.

Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Al Gore.

I am AI Gore.

I used to be the next president of the United States of America.

I don't find that particularly funny.

I've been trying to tell this story for a long time,

and I feel as if I've failed to get the message across.

I was in politics for a long time and I'm proud of my service.

You gotta be kidding me. This is a national disaster.

Get every doggone Greyhound bus line in the country,

and get their...moving to New Orleans.

That's them thinking small, man,

and this is a major, major, major deal.

What do you need right now?

There are good people,

who are in politics in both parties

who hold this at arm's length

because if they acknowledge it and recognize it,

then the moral imperative to make big changesis inescapable.

...unless you fix the biggest damn crisis in the history of this country.

...scouted out Ianding spots and they Iost radio contact

when they went around the dark side of the moon.

And there was inevitabIy some suspense.

Then when they came back in radio contact,

they Iooked upand they snapped this picture, and it became known as Earth Rise.

And that one picture explodedin the consciousness of humankind.

It leads to dramatic changes.

Within 18 months of this picture,the modern environmentaI movement had begun.

The next picture was taken on the Iast of the ApoIIo missions,

ApoIIo 1 7.

This one was taken on December 11 , 1972,

and it is the most commonIy pubIished photograph in aII of history.

And it's the onIy picture of the Earth from space that we have

where the sun was directIy behind the spacecraft

so that the Earth is fuIIy Iit up and not partIy in darkness.

The next image I'm gonna show you has aImost never been seen.

It was taken by a spacecraft caIIed The Galileothat went out to expIore the soIar system.

And as it was Ieaving Earth's gravity, it turned its cameras around

and took a time Iapse picture of one day's worth of rotation,here compressed into 24 seconds.

Isn't that beautifuI?This image is a magical image in a way.

It was made by a friend of mine, Tom Van Sant.

He took 3,000 separate satellite pictures

taken over a three-year period, digitally stitched together.

And he chose images that wouId give a cIoud-free view

of every square inch of the Earth's surface.

AII of the Iand masses accurateIy portrayed.

When that's aII spread out, it becomes an iconic image.

I show this because I wanna teII you a story about two teachers I had.

One that I didn't Iike that much, the other who is a reaI hero to me.

I had a grade schooI teacher who taught geography

by puIIing a map of the worId down in front of the bIackboard.

I had a cIassmate in the sixth grade who raised his hand

and he pointed to the outIine of the east coast of South America

and he pointed to the west coast of Africa

and he asked, ''Did they ever fit together?''

and he asked, ''Did they ever fit together?''

And the teacher said,

''Of course not. That's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard.''

That student went on to become a drug addict and a ne'er-do-weII.

The teacher went on to become science advisorin the current administration.

But, you know, the teacher was actuaIIy refIecting

the conclusion of the scientific estabIishment of that time.

Continents are so big, obviousIy they don't move.

But, actually, as we now know, they did move.

They moved apart from one another.

But at one time they did, in fact, fit together.

But that assumption was a probIem.

It refIected the well-known wisdom

that what gets us into troubIe is not what we don't know,

it's what we know for sure that just ain't so.

This is actuaIIy an important point, beIieve it or not,

because there is another such assumption

that a Iot of peopIe have in their minds right now about gIobaI warming

that just ain't so.

The assumption is something Iike this. The Earth is so big

we can't possibIy have any Iasting harmfuI impact

on the Earth's environment.

And maybe that was true at one time, but it's not anymore.

And one of the reasons it's not true anymore

is that the most vuInerabIe part of the Earth's ecoIogicaI system

is the atmosphere.

VuInerabIe because it's so thin.

My friend, the Iate CarI Sagan, used to say,

''If you had a big gIobe with a coat of varnish on it,

''the thickness of that varnish reIative to that gIobe

''is pretty much the same

''as the thickness of the Earth's atmosphere

''compared to the Earth itseIf.''

And it's thin enough

that we are capabIe of changing its composition.

That brings up the basic science of gIobaI warming.

And I'm not gonna spend a Iot of time on this because you know it weII.

The sun's radiation comes in in the form of Iight waves

and that heats up the Earth.

And then some of the radiation that is absorbed and warms the Earth

is reradiated back into space

in the form of infrared radiation.

And some of the outgoing infrared radiation is trapped

by this Iayer of atmosphere and heId inside the atmosphere.

And that's a good thing because it keeps the temperature of the Earth

within certain boundaries,

keeps it reIativeIy constant and IivabIe.

But the probIem is this thin Iayer of atmosphere is being thickened

by aII of the gIobaI warming poIIution that's being put up there.

And what that does is it thickens this Iayer of atmosphere,

more of the outgoing infrared is trapped.

And so the atmosphere heats up worIdwide. That's gIobaI warming.

Now, that's the traditionaI expIanation.

Here's what I think is a better expIanation.

You're probabIy wondering why your ice cream went away.

WeII, Susie, the cuIprit isn't foreigners.

It's gIobaI warming.

#NAME?

Meet Mr. Sunbeam.

He comes all the way from the sun to visit Earth.

HeIIo, Earth. Just popping in to brighten your day.

And now I'II be on my way.

Not so fast, Sunbeam.

We're greenhouse gases. You ain't going nowhere.

Oh, God, it hurts.

Pretty soon, Earth is chock-full of Sunbeams.

Their rotting corpses heating our atmosphere.

How do we get rid of the greenhouse grasses?

FortunateIy, our handsomest poIiticians

came up with a cheap, Iast-minute way to combat gIobaI warming.

Ever since 2063,

we simply drop a giant ice cube into the ocean every now and then.

Just Iike Daddy puts in his drink every morning.

And then he gets mad.

Of course, since the greenhouse gases are still building up,

it takes more and more ice each time.

Thus, soIving the probIem once and for aII.

-But... -Once and for aII!

This is the image that started me

in my interest in this issue.

And I saw it when I was a coIIege student

because I had a professor named Roger ReveIIe

who was the first person to propose measuring carbon dioxide

in the Earth's atmosphere.

He saw where the story was going

after the first few chapters.

After the first few years of data,

he intuited what it meant

for what was yet to come.

They designed the experiment in 1957.

He hired Charles David Keeling

who was very faithful and precise

in making these measurements for decades.

They started sending these weather balloons up every day

and they chose the middle of the Pacific

because it was the area that was most remote.

And he was a very hard-nosed scientist.

He really emphasized the hard data.

lt was a wonderful time for me

because, like a lot of young people,

l came into contact with intellectual ferment,

ideas that l'd never considered

in my wildest dreams before.

And he showed our class

the results of his measurements after only a few years.

lt was startling to me.

Now he was startled

and made it clear to our class

what he felt the significance of it was.

And l just soaked it up like a sponge.

He drew the connections

between the larger changes in our civilization

and this pattern that was now visible

in the atmosphere of the entire planet.

And then he projected into the future where this was headed

unless we made some adjustments.

And it was just as clear as day.

After the first seven, eight, nine years,

you couId see the pattern that was deveIoping.

But I asked a question.

Why is it that it goes up and down once each year?

And he expIained that if you Iook at the Iand mass of the Earth,

very IittIe of it is south of the equator.

The vast majority of it is north of the equator,

and most of the vegetation is north of the equator.

And so, when the Northern Hemisphere is tiIted toward the sun,

as it is in our spring and summer,

the Ieaves come out and they breathe in carbon dioxide,

and the amount in the atmosphere goes down.

But when the Northern Hemisphere is tiIted away from the sun,

as it is in our faII and winter,

the Ieaves faII and exhaIe carbon dioxide,

and the amount in the atmosphere goes back up again.

And so, it's as if the entire Earth

once each year breathes in and out.

So we started measuring carbon dioxide in 1958.

And you can see

that by the middIe '60s, when he showed my cIass this image,

it was aIready cIear that it was going up.

I respected him and Iearned from him so much, I foIIowed this.

And when I went to the Congress in the middIe 1970s,

I heIped to organize the first hearings on gIobaI warming

and asked my professor to come and be the Ieadoff witness.

And I thought that wouId have such a big impact,

we'd be on the way to soIving this probIem, but it didn't work that way.

But I kept having hearings. And in 1984 I went to the Senate

and reaIIy dug deepIy into this issue

with science roundtabIes and the Iike.

I wrote a book about it, ran for President in 1988,

partIy to try to gain some visibiIity for that issue.

And in 1992 went to the White House. We passed a version of a carbon tax

and some other measures to try to address this.

Went to Kyoto in 1997 to heIp get a treaty

that's so controversiaI, in the US at Ieast.

In 2000,

my opponent pIedged to reguIate CO2 and then...

That was not a pIedge that was kept.

But the point of this is

aII this time you can see

what I have seen aII these years.

It just keeps going up. It is reIentIess.

And now we're beginning to see the impact in the reaI worId.

This is MountKiIimanjaro more than 30 years ago

and more recentIy.

And a friend of mine just came back from KiIimanjaro

with a picture he took a coupIe of months ago.

Another friend, Lonnie Thompson, studies gIaciers.

Here's Lonnie with a Iast sIiver of one of the once mighty gIaciers.

Within the decade there wiII be no more snows of KiIimanjaro.

This is happening in GIacierNationaIPark.

I cIimbed to the top of this in 1998 with one of my daughters.

Within 15 years, this wiII be the park formerIy known as GIacier.

Here is what's been happening year by year to the CoIumbia GIacier.

It just retreats every singIe year.

And it's a shame 'cause these gIaciers are so beautifuI.

But those who go up to see them,

here's what they're seeing every day, now.

In the HimaIayas there's a particuIar probIem

because 40% of aII the peopIe in the worId

get their drinking water from rivers and spring systems

that are fed more than haIf by the meIt water

coming off the gIaciers.

And within this next haIf century those 40% of the peopIe on Earth

are gonna face a very serious shortage

because of this meIting.

ItaIy, the ItaIian AIps.

Same sight today.

An oId postcard from SwitzerIand.

Throughout the AIps, we're seeing the same story.

It's aIso true in South America.

This is Peru 15 years ago.

And the same gIacier today.

This is Argentina 20 years ago. Same gIacier today.

Seventy-five years ago in Patagonia on the tip of South America.

This vast expanse of ice is now gone.

There's a message in this.

There's a message in this.

It is worIdwide.

And the ice has stories to teII us.

My friend, Lonnie Thompson, digs core driIIs in the ice.

They dig down

and they bring the core driIIs back up and they Iook at the ice

and they study it.

When the snow faIIs, it traps IittIe bubbIes of atmosphere

and they can go in and measure

how much CO2 was in the atmosphere the year that that snow feII.

What's even more interesting, I think, is

they can measure the different isotopes of oxygen

and figure out a very precise thermometer

and teII you what the temperature was

the year that that bubbIe was trapped in the snow as it feII.

When I was in Antarctica, I saw cores Iike this.

And a guy Iooked at it. He said,

''Right here is where the US Congress passed the CIean Air Act.''

And I couIdn't beIieve it.

But you can see the difference with the naked eye.

Just a coupIe of years after that Iaw was passed,

it's very cIearIy distinguishabIe.

They can count back year by year

the same way a forester reads tree rings.

And you can see each annuaI Iayer from the meIting and re-freezing,

so they can go back in a Iot of these mountain gIaciers 1 ,000 years.

And they constructed a thermometer of the temperature.

The bIue is coId and the red is warm.

Now, I show this for a coupIe of reasons.

Number one, the so-caIIed skeptics wiII sometimes say,

''Oh, this whoIe thing, this is a cycIicaI phenomenon.

''There was a medievaI warming period, after aII.''

WeII, yeah, there was. There it is, right there.

There are two others.

But compared to what's going on now,

there's just no comparison.

So if you Iook at 1 ,000 years' worth of temperature

and compare it to 1 ,000 years of CO2,

you can see how cIoseIy they fit together.

Now, 1 ,000 years of CO2 in the mountain gIaciers,

that's one thing.

But in Antarctica, they can go back 650,000 years.

This incidentaIIy is the first time

anybody outside of a smaII group of scientists has seen this image.

This is the present day era,

and that's the Iast ice age.

Then it goes up. We're going back in time now 650,000 years.

That's the period of warming between the Iast two ice ages.

That's the second and third ice age back.

Fourth, fifth, sixth

and seventh ice age back.

Now, an important point.

In aII of this time, 650,000 years,

the CO2 IeveI has never gone above

300 parts per miIIion.

Now, as I said, they can aIso measure temperature.

Here's what the temperature has been on our Earth.

Now, one thing that kind of jumps out at you is...

WeII, Iet me put it this way. If my cIassmate from the sixth grade

that taIked about Africa and South America were here,

he wouId say, ''Did they ever fit together?''

''Most ridicuIous thing I've ever heard.''

But they did, of course.

And the reIationship is actuaIIy very compIicated.

But there is one reIationship that is far more powerfuI

than aII the others and it is this.

When there is more carbon dioxide, the temperature gets warmer

because it traps more heat from the sun inside.

In the parts of the United States that contain the modern cities

of CIeveIand, Detroit, New York, in the northern tier,

this is the difference between a nice day

and having a miIe of ice over your head.

Keep that in mind when you Iook at this fact.

Carbon dioxide,

having never gone above 300 parts per miIIion,

here is where CO2 is now.

Way above where it's ever been

as far back as this record wiII measure.

Now, if you'II bear with me, I wanna reaIIy emphasize this point.

The crew here

has tried to teach me how to use this contraption here.

So, if I don't kiII myseIf, I'II...

It's aIready right here.