Review of An Inconvenient Truth (2006) by Gina W — 19 Jul 2009

Al Gore asks, "Should we prepare for other threats besides terrorists?".

Decidedly yes.

Formerly the next president of the United States who never got to do the job, Al Gore continues to go city by city delivering his slide presentation on global warming to try and better the world, not just the country. This twice Oscar nominated film not only explores in detail the progression and effects of global warming, but also follows Al Gore's autobiographical journey of important moments in his life that made him who he is today. This movie really is a frightening account of what could happen fifty short years down the road if action isn't taken. It isn't all despairing, however. Gore relays the information in an often amusing manner with jokes and banter effectively switching from one subject to the next while tying everything together.

I have to say, he really is an amazing public speaker who has had a fire under him to do something about global warming since he was a young man in college. If we had gotten to see more of this personality (like that which was exhibited when he hosted Saturday Night Live) before the election, would his vote have been more substantial? Probably not, after all Jeb Bush was running Florida and what's past is past, but you can't help but wonder while watching this film......what if? What if they had let the popular vote carry the election? What if we had started working on global warming with an environmentally friendly president seven years ago? How much better could we be off today? I wish the man would run again, but I'm sure his pride has something to do with it and I can respect that.

The numbers and the science is devastating. The effects are everywhere. One of them is that with global warming, you get stronger storms like Hurricane Katrina which started off as a Level One in Florida, then went south a bit and mixed with warmer waters and came back to New Orleans as......well, we all saw the news. The glaciers are melting and becoming so thin that more pieces are going to break off and create heightened sea levels all over the world. 60 million people are at stake in India alone. Plus there has been evidence now of polar bears actually drowning as they swim sixty miles or more to find the disappearing ice. The last time a big piece of glacier broke off into the ocean, it stopped the North Atlantic Current and threw Europe into another ice age within ten years. But that could never happen again, right? There's no big piece of ice near there, is there? Oh wait......yeah......GREENLAND. And it's got shallow pools of water forming at the top which tunnels down through the ice melting it. The world is in big trouble unless action is taken.

And people despair and say oh well, nothing we can do now, huh? That's wrong. Gore showed a chart showing how much we could fix with each step and actually we have the methods to get our carbon dioxide emissions down below those of 1970. If we tried. Gore says, "It's not a political issue. It's a moral one," and it really is. The United States is the biggest contributor to the problem by far so this country does need to take a leading role in correcting it. We are one of two countries in the world who has not signed the Kyoto agreement. That motivated several U.S. cities to sign it as cities instead. States are taking initiative where the federal government is slacking.

People always use the economy versus the environment argument and in all honesty, taking initiative to fix these old methods and bad habits people are using would create more jobs in the long run. Plus what would you rather have? A few gold bars or the whole world? What use is money when there is no world??

An interesting tid-bit about this movie is that it is the first carbon-neutral documentary. Meaning that for every carbon emission this movie caused through travel and making the movie, they offset the emissions through renewable energy credits to renewable energy projects. They decided it would be ironic, not to mention wrong, if this film contributed to the problem they were trying to address. Syriana also used this method as well as The Day After Tomorrow which was the first carbon-neutral film, paid for out of the director's own pocket.

Please go see this movie. It's a great watch. This movie is an A.