An Inconvenient Truth

In our lecture we watch the documentary film 'An Inconvenient Truth'. An Inconvenient Truth focuses on Al Gore and on his travels in support of his efforts to educate the public about the severity of the climate crisis. The film documents a Keynote presentation that Gore has presented throughout the world. It intersperses Gore's exploration of data and predictions regarding climate change and its potential for disaster with his own life story.

Gore then begins his slide show on climate change; a comprehensive presentation replete with detailed graphs, flow charts and stark visuals. Gore shows off several majestic photographs of the Earth taken from multiple space missions, Earthrise and The Blue Marble. Gore notes that these photos dramatically transformed the way we see the Earth, helping spark modern environmentalism.

Throughout the movie, Gore discusses the scientific opinion on climate change, as well as the present and future effects of global warming and stresses that climate change "is really not a political issue, so much as a moral one", describing the consequences he believes global climate change will produce if the amount of human-generated greenhouse gases is not significantly reduced in the very near future. Gore also presents Antarctic ice coring data showing CO₂ levels higher now than in the past 650,000 years.

"Each one of us is a cause of global warming, but each one of us can make choices to change that with the things we buy, the electricity we use, the cars we drive; we can make choices to bring our individual carbon emissions to zero. The solutions are in our hands, we just have to have the determination to make it happen. We have everything that we need to reduce carbon emissions, everything but political will. But in America, the will to act is a renewable resource."

The film was interesting and was a good link to what we are studying for our second project. I thought Al Gore's film was an effective in a way that he managed to attract such a general audience attention through his simple visualizations of the data he had collected. He got a clear message across that if appropriate actions are taken soon, the effects of global warming can be successfully reversed.