I'm not sure I've ever seen a documentary I would call "important" before. I was not a fan of Fahrenheit 9/11, and while I loved Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, I found it informative and powerful, but not important. PBS' Frontline has had two very excellent features on Iraq, but they were also informative and powerful, not important. Last month, however, I saw a movie that I would not only call mandatory viewing, but also the Most Important Movie of Our Generation. I encourage you to see it as soon as you can.

The film is An Inconvenient Truth. It is a new documentary that explains global warming in terms any English major can understand, and lists a few things you and I can do to stop it. It’s raked in over $7 million at the box office, and thank God for it – climate change at unprecedented speed and perhaps even unprecedented levels is scientific fact, but is something we can change. The movie is an adaptation of the slideshow Al Gore has been giving about global warming for the last twenty years, but watches more like a History Channel special on the real pirates of the Caribbean than it does a stuffy classroom presentation. Despite Gore’s presence, it is not a political film, instead making the point that climate change is neither a liberal or conservative issue, but a moral one. Unfortunately, though it is Gore’s presence that makes the film so compelling, it is also what limits the film potential to make a real impact on the American public since this may cause some to write it off as propagandistic.

The earth has always been subject to climate change, but the last 40 or so years have seen it happen faster than ever before. As the movie’s website says, “The vast majority of scientists agree that global warming is real, it’s already happening and that it is the result of our activities and not a natural occurrence. The evidence is overwhelming and undeniable.” 928 peer-reviewed scientific journal articles have been published on the subject, and all 928 confirm the existence of climate change far beyond the historic range. The hottest ten years on record have all occurred in the last 14 years. 2004 and 2005 were the biggest years ever for storms, as warmer waters create more and bigger hurricanes (like Katrina, Rita, and the first-ever hurricane in South America). Ice shelves in Western Antarctica are disappearing, and the Artic Ocean may see iceless summers by 2050. Glaciers have shrunk by 80 percent in some places, and even Greenland is melting. Mt. Kilimanjaro, long famously snowy, is expected to have no snow at all within a decade. The latest evidence of global warming was published just last week by Science magazine – as it turns out, climate change is far more to blame than poor vegetation management for the increase in western U.S. forest fires. Snow packs are melting earlier in the spring, leading to longer dry seasons.

These are the early stages of global warming, and it will only get worse from here. Within 25 years, deaths attributed to global warming will have doubled to over 300,000 people a year. If either Greenland or western Antarctica melts, sea levels will rise by 20 feet. This would put most of Florida, San Francisco, Manhattan, New Orleans, Shanghai, and Hong Kong underwater. People would no doubt evacuate in time – the waters aren’t going to rise overnight – but other cities would be faced with hundreds of millions of refugees, creating an economic and, for many families, emotional nightmare. As both floods and droughts increase, Africa will see even more wars over water. Hurricanes and monsoons will also continue to get stronger.

So what, you say. Sure, it’s happening, but there’s no proof that we’re the ones to blame. Technically, this is true. There is no actual proof that humans are the cause of global warming. However, global temperature and carbon dioxide levels have matched one another perfectly for the last 650,000 years (they can actually measure that stuff), and current CO2 levels are far higher than any in that 650,000 year range. This is a correlation, which, as any kid who has ever slept through Statistics knows, is not proof of causation. This particular correlation, however, has been so strong for so long that it would make for a shocking coincidence. It can be said with some degree of certainty that our increased CO2 emissions are to blame for global warming.

But even if we are not to blame, global warming still poses a grave threat to us, and there is still something we can do to stop it. The federal government can sign the Kyoto Protocol and double funding for renewable energy research—it would cost the same as a week of funding for the Iraq War. Our states can lower the freeway speed limit (gas mileage is a curve that peaks around 55) and increase regulations on automobile emissions–something like 5% of the vehicles create 40% of vehicle emissions. We as citizens can educate ourselves by seeing Gore’s movie, increase pressure on businesses and politicians through letters and phone calls, recycle more (seriously, those Waste Warriors aren’t in the dorms because they’re art), share refrigerators, and encourage our parents and ’07 friends to make environmentally friendly decisions the next time they buy a car or major appliance. Visit climatechange.net for more information.

An Inconvenient Truth is an important step. Newsweek says it “has done more in a month for green awareness than [Gore’s] 20 years in D.C.” This may be true, but it is somewhat ironic. No one else could bring the movie this amount of attention or give it the credibility it has except a former Vice President. At the same time, I have talked to plenty of folks who refuse to see it based solely on his presence in it. That doesn’t make a lot of sense – the Southerner Gore was once pro-life, and a part of the administration that passed welfare reform, NAFTA, and a balanced budget. Yet all that aside, he makes the point that this is a moral issue, not a political one. Gore hardly ever even mentions politics in the movie, and when he does, it is not from a partisan perspective.

Though this movie could serve as a potential springboard to get Gore back in politics, I really do not think that is what he wants. For one thing, politicizing an issue like this could harm any chance of actually getting something done about it, and climate change has been a personal crusade for Gore since his college years. Furthermore, former Gore aides say he honestly does not seem interested in a political comeback, that he is really enjoying his new life as an activist—and I believe them. He has been at his best when on his own – the speeches he wrote himself were always his most acclaimed (including the 2000 concession speech), and he has been dynamic in recent interviews. When his handlers surround him, he takes their advice too seriously; that is why we saw three different Gores in the three 2000 debates. He is only himself when he is by himself, and I don’t think he would want to risk throwing that away and falling back into his old stiff, robotic traps.

So I beg you, even if you despise Al Gore, see An Inconvenient Truth. I’ve never been a big Gore fan myself: he always based his public persona on opportunism rather than on his convictions. I never liked that about him – who would? Yet, his movie has helped make global warming a personal crusade for me as well. Hopefully, there’s still time for us to make a difference. Let’s not blow it.