White to move and mate in two #667 — An Inconvenient Truth

White to move and mate in two. The chess puzzle is published on Sundays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays. It is customary for advanced players to wait till midnight ET before posting the full solution. Before then, they provide some stats about the solution (e.g., the number of distinct checkmate moves), help guide others, and sometimes post hints. But, there are no hard-and-fast rules, feel free to post comments as you please.

This seminal film concerning climate change came out in 2006, and somehow went completely under my radar at the time. I finally bought the DVD in 2009, and I'll always remember two big 'aha!' moments from it. The first one was the explanation of how Milankovitch cycles and CO2 levels in ice cores correlate extremely well with glacial periods at intervals of 100,000 years (at least for the past 800,000 years or so). The second was when Al Gore gets on a ladder next to a large graph of historical CO2 levels to show how much they have risen just since the start of the industrial revolution.

The film certainly piqued my interest in climate change, and that's when I began to hang out on sites like Real Climate and Skeptical Science, who at this stage were engaged in a pitched battle with the climate change deniers. 1998 was a big year for the deniers, because temperatures soared due to one of the biggest El Niño events in recent history. So of course, instead of following the trend over the past century, the deniers were all about starting their graphs in 1998 and claiming temperatures had levelled off since then. Ah, those were the days. I continued hanging out on those sites, sparring with the deniers, until a few years ago when it became obvious that we had a huge problem on our hands, and rampant consumption of fossil fuels was entirely responsible for it.

Here's a trailer for the film (though it's admittedly a bit over the top):

An Inconvenient Truth cinematic trailer

And now, on to tonight's puzzle. Below are links to an on-line board to help you work the puzzle, and the solution. But don't peek at the answer until you've made an honest attempt to solve the puzzle, or you'll spoil the fun!

On-line board

Solution