An Inconvenient Truth is an excellent presentation of the best available global warming science in an understandable and entertaining format. The only thing I found disturbing was the total neglect of nuclear energy as part of the solution. It is absolutely necessary to replace coal as the source of baseline power (i.e. power when the wind does not blow or the sun does not shine). Carbondioxide sequestration is far in the future (maybe) and if its economics are poor it will not in fact happen.

Many green people such as myself (see ImprobableUniverse.com) are coming around to realizing the above. Patric Moore, co-founder of Green Peace and James Lovelock, inventor of the Gaia hypothesis, are two notables. Lovelock has stated (in 2001) that the Greens will look back 50 years from now and see this as the time when they really blew it by being anti-nuclear.

There are now many safe nuclear options. Modern reactor designs can be made inherently safe (e.g. High Temperature Gas Cooled Reactor). In the future, ADS designs (Accelerator Driven System - advocated by Carlo Rubia, physics Nobel laurate) will have the advantage that they cannot go critical, they can have a proliferation free fuel cycle (i.e. Thorium based) and they can burn up the most toxic waste from conventional nuclear reactors.

Though the nuclear waste issue is difficult, it is manageable. Reprocessing of cooled down waste from a properly designed ADS would yield less than 20 cubic yards of waste per year in America even if all our energy came from ADS. A small addition of depleted uranium (which is now used for armor piercing bullets in Iraq) would insure against the bred uranium being used in a terrorist bomb.

These problems are much more manageable than a burned out planet. Humanity and a healthy ecosystem can coexist if we make the right choices. Of course political domatism from fossil fuel interests or from uninformed Greens will result in disaster for all.