An Inconvenient Truth (2006, Paramount Classics/Participant, dir. Davis Guggenheim, PG, 100 min) is Al Gore's well-announced film about global warming. The film is structured as a college lecture by the former Vice President, with many colorful maps, charts, and video and film clips. That shows that the lecture format for a documentary film can really work, if the argument is compelling. And it is. The biggest "truth" seems to be that carbon dioxide emissions has shot up exponentially in the past few decades, compared to all known history where climate variations can be tracked. The "differential calculus" part of his argument is actually the most disturbing of all of his arguments. He makes an analogy between this truth and a geographical one (the idea that once South America and Africa fit together), and then various "times changing" truths such as our gradual acceptance that cigarette smoking is extremely damaging to health. He goes into many scientific details, such as loop currents that keep Europe mild, and especially the grim possibility of widespread melting of Arctic, Antarctic and Greenland ice caps. An interesting physical observation is the lakes that form in the ice, and eat through the ice, loosening it with moulins. The rough analogy is rain on the snow (raindrops pelting through a snow cap, with older snow taking longer to melt). Toward the end, Gore makes a lot of the fact that most people are in a position where they are paid to ignore "inconvenient truths" and say what the people who pay them and give them the words tell them to say. (The "We give you the words" problem.) He talks about Kyoto, and at the end we are wondering how much of this is really a political problem, and how much reflects back on our personal lifestyle choices. Would this be just a question of buying higher mileage (or "clean" such as electric) and smaller cars, or does it go deeper, giving up some freedom and autonomy. Can we engineer our way out of this? We need to solve this, and this could be the biggest problem we have ever faced. (Even new diseases like bird flu and AIDS are more likely to develop in a global warming environment.) Individualism and our sense of individual rights can be sent back into old tribal patterns if we lose the infrastructure that makes our modern idea of personal autonomy possible.
This point deserves another walkthrough. The film does have some pointed aerial shots. There is the Big Muskie dragline and then the Appalachian stripmine, all with mountaintop removal (it looks like Bryce Mountain in southern West Virginia), a kind of mutilation. There are a few graphic pictures of the flooding in New Orleans (with the bloody sunrise through smoke) right after Hurricane Katrina came through in Aug. 2005, the first pictures of Katrina in a commercial film. Gore goes on to point out that the rise in sea levels from the loss of glaciers could inundate most of lower Florida and lower Manhattan, including the World Trade Center memorial site. But it will also wipe out the livings space of tens of millions of poor people in India and Bangladesh. Katrina resulted in unprecedented calls for volunteerism (to the point that some people took in "refugees" into their own homes, even strangers), but imagine this on an international scale.
Yet conventional capitalistic society expects individuals to compete with each other, especially to protect and provide for their own families in an adversarial matter. At one point in the film, Gore reenacts the time in 1989 when his own son was critically injured, and goes on to make the point that we must face these environmental issues in order to leave our children a world suitable for them to live in. One could make that point about other issues (overexposure of children to media and especially violence and pornography). People who do not have children may feel immune from these pressures, and others may expect them to restrain themselves and make sacrifices for other people's kids. But having family makes it harder to remain objective. People are often pressured to see what others who depend upon them want them to see and say. It is hard to face major changes in the way we live in such a climate. On the other hand, the possibility that real hardships can come from "mother nature" make the case for family and social cohesion, as opposed to individual autonomy, even more compelling. The tragedy is that this is an issue we can do something about. But we must face the Inconvenient Truth.
CBS 60 Minutes (April 1, 2007; Aug. 19, 2007) on glaciers in Patagonia and Antarctica, and the extinction of penguins who cannot find krill under disappearing ice, here.
The Book, "An Inconvenient Truth: The Planetary Emergency of Global Warming and What We Can Do About It", officially authored by Al Gore, published by Rodale/Melcher Media, ISBN 1-59486-567-1, 328 pages, paper, large size, contains the maps and charts for careful study, as well as a sensational collection of photographs (amounting to a "filmstrip") and commentary. Retail is $21.95.
Al Gore’s second book is “Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis”, published this fall (2009) by Modale/Melcher Media, with ISBN 978-1-59486-734-7, 414 pages, paper. It’s so illustrated that it is like a movie.