To the editor:

George Gurley’s column last Sunday (“Inconvenient Truth”), amid its snide and personal attacks on former Vice President Al Gore, elides the very simple message that Gore is trying to convey and dismisses the film because it dares make a moral demand upon us.

Here, in short, is Gore’s message:

¢ It is the overwhelming consensus of the scientific community that anthropogenic global warming is real and accelerating. That’s just a matter of scientific fact, and trotting out one or another scientist to dispute it in no way mitigates that fact.

¢ We, better than any nation in the world, have the wherewithal to do something about it. If this seems debatable, I would simply mention that we went from never having orbited a satellite to walking on the moon in 10 years. If we want to do it, we can do it.

¢ Hence the moral claim: If we are able to halt or slow warming, or even ameliorate it in a small degree, every ethical system I know of places us under a moral obligation to do so because failure to act will at the very least increase the suffering of millions in the future. Failure to act is a grievous moral wrong.

Mr. Gurley may not like Gore; he may even consider him a zealot. But the facts suggest that whatever we think of Gore or Gurley, we must do something about our consumption of fossil fuels.

The message really is that simple.

Marc Carter,

Baldwin