The Cute Little Red-Headed Girlfriend and I went to go see An Inconvenient Truth this past weekend. It's in limited release in only two theaters in Los Angeles, so we headed out to an early show in the hopes that we could get in. Fortunately, the theater was large and able to accommodate the crowd that showed up.

I'm not a huge fan of PowerPoints, but Al Gore's slideshow on global warming is really impressive. I say that because the film An Inconvenient Truth documents a slideshow presentation, in the same way that public television might present a staged opera. What you see is something designed for one format (slideshow), but reproduced in another format (film).

There are some brief filmed segments spliced in between the slide presentation that go into Gore's autobiography. I know some critics believe the real goal of those segments is to present Gore as a presidential candidate. They do serve that function rather well. However, I also think the autobiographical elements serve as a good "wrapper" for the slides, adding a personal and emotional component to Gore's logical argument about global warming.

f you are unfamiliar with the data on global warming, I think you will find the movie very persuasive. That's how the Cute-Little-Red-Headed-Girlfriend responded to it. The film hit her like a ton of bricks. "That was very scary!" she exclaimed to me on the way out of the theater.

I've done some reading on the issue of global warming and follow the topic in the news, so many of Gore's arguments were familiar to me. What leaped out at me was Gore's assertion that despite having honed his argument over the years in order to make it air tight, he still felt like he was failing to communicate to people how urgent the situation is.

This feeling of failure really struck a chord with me because in my mind it speaks not only to the issue of global warming but also to many other political issues facing the U.S. right now. Gore communicates his point very, very capably. I don't think this is a failure of logic or of communication.

I think the failure comes down to the human capacity for self-delusion. It comes down to the fact that it doesn't matter what your opinion is on any issue if you're not willing to do something about it. How long are we going to not do something about global warming? Are we still arguing about the issue at this point, or just stalling, waiting for it to go away?