![an inconvenient truth al gore an inconvenient truth al gore](http://image.tmdb.org/t/p/w780/4Nx3XAGPwv5AfdrSq9LFDEACl3T.jpg)
An inconvenient truth al gore movie#
In brief, Al Gore has the right idea-climate change is an urgent issue that requires immediate action, and his thoughtful movie is a welcome addition to the usual array of mindless Hollywood summer fare. I'll discuss all three of these aspects below. Gore's movie is an advocacy piece that is part documentary, part biography, and part campaign ad. It is based on a slide show on climate Gore has presented to audiences worldwide over 1000 times in the past 15 years, but it is not purely a documentary. This thought alone should rouse us enough to act upon Gore’s inconvenient truth.Al Gore's global warming movie, "An Inconvenient Truth," aims to call attention to the dangers society faces from climate change, and suggests urgent actions that need to be taken immediately. The carbon consumers in the G8 countries are causing environmental change that has its gravest effects on the poorest countries. It is no coincidence that the leaders of the USA and Russia, and the previous Chancellor of Germany, are closely allied with oil and gas companies. Being rich today means rich in fossil fuels. I found the film moving, but the book – with its carefully presented charts and statistics – more rewarding. This is particularly true if you read the book of the same name. Having said that, unless you are an earth scientist, you will probably find something new and stimulating in what he is saying. The ex-Vice President is not a scientist (he trained as a lawyer) and his presentation is a work of advocacy aimed at a lay audience. Gore punctuates his slide show with footage taken in 2005 when Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans. Hotter summers are correlated with stronger cyclones. The heat wave of summer 2003 caused thousands of deaths in Europe. The effects of this are visible all around us: of the 21 hottest years since 1860, 20 occurred over the past quarter of a century. The trouble is, Gore points out, that as the ice at the poles melts due to global warming, less sunlight is reflected by the polar glaciers, which creates a positive feedback cycle of warming at the poles. So what? If it gets a bit hotter, crank up the air conditioner, get a beer from the fridge and rent another gory movie. More disquieting still, the current level of atmospheric CO 2 is unprecedented over the past 650 millenia. And then comes the crunch: on the scale of the past 650 000 years, the increase in CO 2 since World War II is extremely rapid. The rate of this overall increase looks tiny, but a plot of atmospheric CO 2 and temperature over the past 650 000 years reveals that the two quantities are tightly correlated. However, the unease starts creeping in as we realise that, in the summer, the curve almost never returns to its previous minimum but levels off at a slightly higher point. So far, this is reassuringly in agreement with high-school biology.
![an inconvenient truth al gore an inconvenient truth al gore](https://markcz.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/04/al-gore-carbon-graph.jpg)
![an inconvenient truth al gore an inconvenient truth al gore](https://cdn.onebauer.media/one/empire-images/articles/58db1afe4241efc56995101c/an-inconvenient-sequel.jpg)
He established that in the summer, when the plants in the northern hemisphere are busy fixing CO 2, its atmospheric levels decrease during the northern winter, they increase. This curve is also known as the Keeling Curve in honour of Charles Keeling, who took the CO 2 measurements from 1958 onwards. It all started, he tells his audience, when one of his professors at Harvard University, Roger Revelle, presented in class the now iconic serrated curve describing the concentration of atmospheric CO 2 over time.
![an inconvenient truth al gore an inconvenient truth al gore](https://quotefancy.com/media/wallpaper/3840x2160/1821206-Al-Gore-Quote-Well-the-title-An-Inconvenient-Truth-is-a-way-of.jpg)
And Gore is a master of the unsettling plotline. But as the discerning movie buff knows, it all comes down to delivery. The hair-raising message he relates is also beginning to become as clichéd as last year’s favourite psychopath: inhabitants of industrialised nations are collectively destabilising Earth’s climate. Like all effective horror movies, An Inconvenient Truth has a slow build-up in fact, the setting is about as banal as it gets: a public lecture given by a well-known member of the political establishment, former US Vice President Al Gore. It is all the more surprising that the most horrific of the current crop of scary movies has recently won an Oscar, not to mention the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to its main protagonist. Horror movies are a popular, albeit rather despised, film genre.