Soul FoodPray, and run, when it comes to global warming

While he was dying, a man named Philip Simmons wrote a book about living titled “Learning to Fall: The Blessings of an Imperfect Life.” Its prose is poetic, I’m tempted to say flawless. Read aloud, it rings with a clarity reminiscent of a note played on fine leaded crystal.

Days after seeing the Al Gore documentary “An Inconvenient Truth,” I came across a bit of wisdom Simmons’ borrowed from an Indian yogi and tacked to his office door. “Before speaking,” the reminder read, “consider whether it is an improvement upon silence.”

Although the former vice president’s treatise on global warming is hardly a match for the poetry of Simmons prose, it does nevertheless improve upon silence. It educates. It encourages.

From the time Gore introduces himself (“I’m Al Gore. I used to be the next president of the United States”), through the final roll of the credits, it entertains. There’s no remnant of the stiff presidential candidate who was fodder for so many comedians and political cartoonists.

Gore sallies forth with his knowledge and position regarding global warming with ardor and humor. The weight of grim data and predictions is prudently balanced with poignant personal anecdotes and goofy humor.

We’re treated to a clip from Matt Groening’s campy “Futurama.” From an episode titled “Crimes of the Hot,” Simpsons-like characters keep global warming at bay, at least for a while, by dropping gigantic ice cubes into the ocean.

In response to critics who say that the more realistic measures Gore seeks to combat globing warming will cause devastating economic hardship, Gore stands before a bigger-than-life illustration of an old-fashioned balance scale. On one side is a heap of gold bars; on the other is the world.

Ummm, says Gore, I’d really like some of those gold bars. Ummm, ummm. Then he turns to the side weighing in the world, the whole world. No world, he muses ? the audience is already laughing ? no gold bars.

This isn’t about money; it’s about a moral imperative. If something isn’t done within the next 10 years, millions of people ? our children and grandchildren ? could die in this century because of climate change, the movie challenges.

We see Gore as a young boy on his family’s cattle and tobacco farm where he was so enthralled ? you can still hear it in his voice ? he says it took him years to learn the difference between work and play.

We see the boy gazing with adoration at his older sister, a smoker who would later die quite young from lung cancer. Not a way you want to die, Gore says.

It took his sister’s death to convince his father of the dangers of smoking. Albert Gore, Sr. stopped farming tobacco after his daughter’s death.

So when Gore says, quoting Upton Sinclair, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it,” it’s not to poke a stick in the other guy’s eye. It’s something he knows from personal experience.

Are the dangers of global warming as real as the dangers of smoking tobacco?

Gore makes you hope they’re not.

He compares global changes attributed by many scientists to global warming to “a nature hike through the Book of Revelation.” Deadly heat waves; disappearing glaciers; more and more violent hurricanes; melting ice caps and drowning polar bears ? he offered a litany of horrors you might think, or pray, would put the fear of God, or at least global warning, in most anyone.

But some folks are hard to sell on the idea that global warming is a bona fide menace, something we need to do something about and right quick.

Last year, a coalition called the Evangelical Climate Initiative put together a statement titled, “Climate Change: An Evangelical Call to Action.” In it, they wrote, “human-induced climate change is real,” and called for measures to stop it.

Signers included pastor of Saddleback Community Church, Rick Warren; “Christianity Today” editor David Neff and executive editor Timothy George; and Leith Anderson, the former president of the National Assn. of Evangelicals.

Yet other evangelicals sided with James Sherk, an economist who has often written on the global warming debate. As Sherk sees it, the claim made by the Evangelical Climate Initiative, the same claim made by Al Gore, that “millions of people could die in this century because of climate change” is nothing more than “a lot of hype.”

The evidence, says Sherk, is shaky, its science agenda driven.

Gore presents a persuasive argument that says otherwise. Scientists on either side of the debate will tell you he got the science of those who hold to the theory of global warming right.

His weakest contention is his appeal to consensus, the idea that the theory of global warming must be sound because a majority of scientists support it.

It’s not hard, though, to find a scientist who will tell you consensus science is bad science or, as Michael Crichton would have it, not science at all. Nobel Laureate in Physics Brian David Josephson says it especially well.

He wrote: “If scientists as a whole denounce an idea this should not necessarily be taken as proof that the said idea is absurd: rather, one should examine carefully the alleged grounds for such opinions and judge how well these stand up to detailed scrutiny.” The same applies when scientists as a whole embrace an idea, not as absurd, but as truth.

As for the truth about human-induced global warming, I’m still on the fence. There’s enough credible evidence to convince me both that it’s true and that it’s not.

At the end of “An Inconvenient Truth,” several messages are threaded though the credits, one being, for those who believe in prayer, to pray. Another is an African proverb that suggests, “When you pray, move your feet.”

A devoted yet exceedingly practical Dutch sister named Nell I once knew would have said this: “When you’re late, pray but run for the bus.” She also would have said, “Prepare for the worst and hope for the best.”

When it comes to global warming, Al Gore has convinced me that’s what we need to do. The documentary-related web site, www.climatecrisis.net, will tell you how.