I have now watched Al Gore's Inconvenient Truths and PBS's Hot Politics and have learned a great deal about the issues in the world going on today.

Before seening Al Gore's depiction of the problems with global warming a couple years ago when the documentary first came out, I had not really taken a side on the issue. But his data that he presented and the number of different sources he found was sufficient to show that he had done his research. The chart showing the levels of CO2 and how it is directly related to the temperature of the planet was surprising especially how high CO2 levels have risen in the past couple decades. Even though the documentary did talk a little bit more about his personal life than I wanted to hear, it did a good job of getting the main point across.

The documentary, Hot Politics was especially interesting because it addressed many of the issues that our nation has succeeded in keeping a secret to many of its citizens. The world has tried to make several attempts to help the increasing CO2 levels and alleviate the growth of global warming, but the US has basically ignored all these attempts. It aggrevates me that Bush has only recently began to say there is a real problem with global warming but has not began to try and help the problem. Instead he is trying to fight this war over severals issues one of which is certainly energy. Energy which in the future will be reduced in the amount of consumption by the US. This documentary did do a great job of depicting how each administration has felt and acted on this issue of global warming. We could see that while Clinton and Gore were in office there were deals in the mist that would try and help solve these issues. Like Gore trying to set up plans for the Kyoto Protocols before he left office. Which then shows how much Bush's administration was on oppisite ends, and didn't even try to continue these attempts made by Gore. Instead they just ignored the issues and acted like it wasn't a problem for the US to deal with, and that the rest of the world should. In all, the documentary did really show me how many of the issues on global warming have become so controversial and will ultimately be left of the new President of 2008 to deal with.