Tweaking the Truth for Dramatic Effect
“Story is a form that requires conflict. It requires good guys and bad guys. It relies on dramatic effect to hold your attention. But when facts are pressed into a fictional form, there are consequences. Some facts get all the focus. Others get tweaked. Some get left out altogether.”
The ACTOR in U: The Comedy of Global Warming
The story interweaving through the interview footage in U: is no different than any other. We tweaked the truth here and there, favoured some facts over others and left some things out we’d rather we hadn’t (over the course of two hours, you can only cover so much). Below you’ll find a few of the things we know we tweaked and would like you to know about.
- Although we sometimes refer to Tuvalu as “sinking” that is, of course, pure poetic license. It’s the ocean that’s rising, not the land that’s sinking. And while Tuvalu may not be completely inundated as Al suggests in his opening scene, its highest elevation is only five metres. Sea levels need not rise much to make most of the land surface uninhabitable either due to inundation, erosion, the increased threat of flooding as a result of storm surges, or the leeching of saltwater into the freshwater table.
- According to Wikipedia, New Zealand is accepting an annual quota of Tuvaluans not as environmental refugees but as part of an ongoing employment program. While Tuvaluans will eventually have to evacuate their country if things turn out as predicted, it seems no nation has yet stepped forward to accept them as environmental refugees.
- While its implied that Al is the CEO of an tar sands development company, Alberta’s chief source of carbon emissions at this point in time is actually from burning coal to produce electricity. That said, the sands remain a very large source of emissions and stand to rise dramatically should development continue as planned.
- The Hotstove Planet host’s contention that if you analyzed the atmosphere by thinking of it as one hundred human breaths – and inflated one of those breaths to the size of the theatre – all the greenhouse gases would fit inside the area of the flame of a cigarette lighter was closer to the truth when the show was to be performed in the much smaller PCL Studio of the TransAlta Arts Barns. In a space the size of the Media Room, all the greenhouse gases would fit into an area of about two cubic meters.
- The demonstration of the scientific method alludes to the sunspot explanation for global warming. The counter-argument that sunspot activity and not greenhouse gas concentrations is what’s warming the planet is very often brought up by climate change skeptics. While sunspot activity does correlate with fluctuations in average global temperatures it cannot fully explain the warming that has occurred in the last part of the 20th and early 21st centuries.
- In spite of the fact we used her voice in the hip hop song warning that the government’s plan to use carbon capture is a “bad idea”, Laurie Blakeman is not against carbon capture per se, nor is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which recognizes it will be an important tool in the arsenal to combat global warming. Whether the current Alberta government should be relying so heavily on this new technology to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions is another question. Who should pay for the very expensive measure and whether taxpayers’ money would be better spent on other environmental initiatives are also matters of debate.
- We did get the Tuvaluan myth off the internet. And from a photo essay on that country. Tivo’s recounting of it is quite accurate, but the rather homoerotic details are the playwright’s.
- SPOILER ALERT: The idea that Al would get West Nile virus from a mosquito bite is not altogether impossible but still extremely fanciful. The spread northward and southward of vector-borne diseases (those spread through insects and other animals) as a result of global warming is a cause for concern elsewhere, but Edmonton appears to be drying out and that will probably mean we’ll have less mosquitoes here. And, of course, none at Christmas.