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If Al Gore is correct, all of this development, all of the real estate, all of Venice, Sarasota County, and a good portion of the state will be gone in less than 50 years time. Our homes will be under 20 to 40 feet of water. Going along with that apocalyptic scenario is a vision of North America turned into a desert and Western Europe returning to an ice age.

Which, of course, is just crap. Couldn't possibly happen. Our government will think of something. Science will be our friend.  Besides, Gore is just trying to get attention for himself while looking at the 2008 elections.

Or... maybe Gore ain't all wrong. What if...? What if there is just a smidgen of truth in Al Gore's film,  An Inconvenient Truth?

If Gore is only partially right in stating that global warming will cause more polar melting, then we as Venice residents should be mightily concerned. We have already seen what rising waters have done in just a small way. Gore talks about a couple of island nations that have had to be abandoned due to flooding. Here we have seen our beaches just starting to be eaten up by the gulf. We fight it with "beach renourishment," an idea that has become as ludicrous as peeing into a high-speed fan and about as equally productive (anyone been down to Venice Beach lately? Have you seen what has happened to the last round of million dollar sand -- it's already gone).

The trouble is that many of the folks poo-pooing Gore haven't taken the time to listen to what he is actually saying. It doesn't help that the messenger here, Gore himself, is a figure of controversy and has unfortunately become a symbol of everything that is wrong with the Democratic Party. Gore is an easy messenger to (metaphorically) shoot, therefore his message is easy to write off as political bullshit.

I'm going to ask you to do a couple of things. The first is to beg you to try to divorce the concept of Gore the politician from Gore the man and environmentalist. Forget for a moment about Gore versus Bush in 2000 and just try to give him a fair listen. To do this, I would encourage you to think about our survival as a species as a fundamental human issue and not a partisan issue. Dead Democrats and dead Republicans don't vote.

Next, I'm going to ask you to go out and rent or buy the flick. For those of you with Netflix, here's a quick link.

This movie will startle and perhaps even scare the crap out of you. For those of us living on the gulf coast, it should be a must see and a call to action. We can't afford to continue to war on nature with more gas guzzling automobiles and more massive air-conditioned mansions -- we are dooming our town and our children for the sake of convenience and greed.

John Patten is the editor and publisher of Venice Florida! dot com and had previously worked in broadcasting for over 12 years. He can also be incredibly rude at times.