by Cheryl Hammond
Go see this movie. This movie version of Al Gore’s traveling global warming/ climate change presentation is fascinating and moving. With a gigantic computer screen behind and an on-stage Gore, a chart of CO2 concentrations vs. global temperatures over a 600,000–year period provides a frightening illustration of why we need to worry about the burning of fossil fuels. Gore climbs aboard a scissor lift to reach the dramatic rise on the chart that represents the conditions we are now experiencing and conditions expected in 45 years.
Although seeing Gore on-stage behind his charts gives us a feel for the origination of this movie, the movie migrates easily between the on-stage Gore and dramatic video of melting and calving glaciers, bleached coral reefs, and hurricanes. Gore’s basic, clearly drawn technical illustration of greenhouse gasses trapping heat from the sun is punctuated with a clip from the Futurama animated TV series that surprisingly is not only fun, but helps make the point. In fact, the movie adds enough humor to keep us listening and understanding despite the high intensity of the subject matter.
Video of the effects of global warming in the Arctic, Antarctica, and Greenland are especially gripping. Meltwater covering large expanses of ice are shown to be creating vertical tunnels though the glaciers that lubricate the surface of the bedrock, destabilize the ice masses, and cause them to slide more easily into the sea. An animated polar bear swimming in the Arctic and unable to find ice to rest on emphasizes the loss of sea ice and the likely extinction of polar bears.
An Inconvenient Truth mixes in scenes from Gore’s life that influenced him to rethink what was important and to make the climate crisis a priority. Idyllic scenes of living on a farm as a boy illustrate what can be lost. Early farm and family scenes also allow Gore to compare the earlier industry skepticism about the dangers of tobacco smoking with the skepticism about global warming. Nancy Gore, Al Gore’s older sister, died from lung cancer after smoking from the age of 13. Just as it was immoral for the tobacco companies to mislead about the dangers of cigarettes, it is immoral for oil and coal companies to confuse people about the science of global warming and to pretend a consensus does not exist on the main conclusions.
Dramatic maps of the effects of sea level rises show how the maps of the world will have to be redrawn. In Calcutta and Bangladesh alone, 60 million people would be displaced. Showing a map of Manhattan with sea levels 20 feet higher, Gore asks whether it is possible that we should prepare for other serious threats in addition to terrorism.
Comparisons of automobile fuel economy standards in the United States and rest of the world, including China, illustrate the faulty thinking in the U.S. that we must make a “choice” between the economy and the environment. In fact, companies making more efficient cars in other countries are doing quite well while U.S. manufacturers making low mpg vehicles are currently in economic trouble. Ironically, American car manufacturers cannot sell cars to China because we don’t meet their environmental standards.
Gore warns us not to go from denial to despair without stopping on the intermediate step of asking what we can do.
The film opened on May 24, 2006 this year and is the third highest grossing documentary in the United States to date. Gore and the distributor have pledged proceeds to further education about climate change.