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| Why didn't save ourselves when we had the chance |
"We have
unspoken collective pack to pretend climate change wasn't happening as though
as long as we ignored it is hard enough it wouldn't be true."
"We know how to profit but not to protect."
This is 2055 when Las Vegas is under sand, Sydney on
fire, the Taj Mahal ruined, and cities are underwater. Droopy faced and sad
eyed Pete
Postlethwaite presents himself as the archivist and he shows lives of six
people at the first decade of 21st century. He gave a sad smile to
people at 2009 who did nothing though they knew the apocalypse is coming, as we are ‘The Age of Stupid’
People call themselves rational but in reality
they are more influenced by feelings not reasoning. Koreans knew school
bullying is bad for years, but they did not make any moves until
one student who suffered from bullying killed himself. Public felt the problem
and instantly cried for eradication of bullying and there have been some changes.
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| Afteramath of Katrina, all because of Global Warming |
Current climate change
crisis is not that different from the circumstance described above but there is
one and huge difference. This is that in the first case, people felt the need
of change but in the second case, current climate change, people are not feeling it.
Therefore, the documentary film
was especially concentrated on the pathos, that is to say it emotionally appealed
to people for changes. It was a good approach not to use a lot of statistics and scientific facts and even a few times this appeared in the film, the 1970s poster like pictorial style made it easy to understand. Especially, description of hurricane Katria was significantly effective. Finally, by being more contingent to emotional appeal, we,
audience could feel that people in the planet Earth must make changes and I
should be the first one to change.
However, the documentary lacks in solutions of global warming like what we can do to reduce the emission
of greenhouse gas such as carbon dioxide. It briefly talks about green energy but it
was not the purpose of introduction of solutions but for the sake of criticizing human greed.
Changes in public’s routine lives are the most influential
treatment overcoming a current crisis as public takes a large portion of global
green gas emission, but it provided none.
It even gives an impression that the
director tried to cram in all solutions in the last twenty minutes and left out
changes we can make during the process because the director tried to talk too
much and summing up all the ideas was so time consuming and failed to put ways I can do to save our planet. The film was criticizing the ignorance of our age and alerting
us for a change, but never gave solutions we can follow.
Many average people still raise a question ‘What if a global warming is
just a natural cycle and it would sometime balance the temperature to normal’ Well,
yeah, according to Don Easterbrook, Professor Emeritus of Geology at Western
Washington University, he predicted that the temperature will slowly decline
till 2010 and he was right. (click if you want to see the article) I also once thought that global warming is not caused by us but by natural phenomena such as the increased activity of Sun too. However, the main stream scientists argue that the
hypothetical natural cycle cannot explain observed ‘fingerprint of greenhouse induced gas’
Leaving aside all controversies, ‘The Age of Stupid’ made me to feel that whether the cause is human or not, if we ignore a current crisis, there will be no people to enjoy our prosperity of our society.
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| the day of judgment is looming |
'The Age of Stupid' succeeded in alarming people of the climate
change which is the first and the most important step mankind to leave a better place for descendants to live. The film gives a clear message to us, whatever you believe,
crisis is now and we must change. This argument was so compelling that even I,
who was a skeptic of a current climate change, felt that I have to change. Finally,
I will end the film review with what Femand Pareu said. “We know how to profit
but not to protect.” And now it is time we to learn how to protect, when we
still have time.