Critical Analysis Over the Movie, an Inconvenient Truth

An Inconvenient Truth is a film produced by Davis Guggenheim that shows a man's eager crusade to stop global warming deadly progress. The man putting on this traveling lecture show is no other than the former Vice President himself, and Nobel Peace Prize winner, Al Gore. After his defeat in the 2000 election, Al Gore set out to educate people about his long time concern for global warming and hopefully get people of the world to take action. The film is a large power-point show of personal experiences and ideas he has learned from scientific theories and facts. To make sure the audience understands how serious this problem is, Gore uses photographs of current events that could have resulted from global warming and graphs that lead up to serious events yet to come. He pleads that most people feel that the earth is so big, that we could never have a lasting harmful effect on it. This he states is not true and demonstrates with many graphs showing increased values of carbon dioxide concentrations and temperature over many years and he comments on their distinctive relationship. Taking things out of a political standpoint, Gore expresses that this is strictly a moral issue and that mankind needs to rise above the conflict and take responsibility to save the earth that supports their needs. If we act like a frog in a glass of water slowing heating up, things could get bad, and by then it would be too late. With belief that there is still time to make a difference, An Inconvenient Truth ultimately brings about a plot that expresses Gore's persuasive argument that will have you ready to take upon the largest moral challenge facing our planet today.

The themes of the film start out with the basics and then progress with more details. For viewers new to the global warming concept, Gore starts out with a general explanation which is very effective for this film. Then he speaks of a college professor that had an impact on him by the name of Roger Revelle, who studied the hard data that proved that CO2 concentrations were on the rise. Showing this teacher, student relationship in the film gives Gore a more believable appearance to the audience. Gore goes on to express his beliefs in global warming with pictures - for example those of Mt. Kilimanjaro and shrunken glaciers around the world. Gore is correct in saying that many mid-latitude glaciers are melting in response to warming atmosphere, but not Mt. Kilimanjaro. In the article “The woes of Kilimanjaro: Don't blame global warming,” Philip Mote, a University of Washington research scientist says “global warming has nothing to do with the decline of Kilimanjaro's ice, and using the mountain in the northern Tanzania as a poster child for climate change is simply inaccurate” (2007). The scientist relates Kilimanjaro's ice loss due to solar radiation (University of Washington, 2007). This article refutes Gore's claim regarding Mt. Kilimanjaro, but validates his other information on other glaciers. A specific problem Gore speaks of is the decline in ice mass in the Himalayas and how 40% of people in the world receive their water from the springs fed by the belt water coming off this glacier, will lose this resource and face a shortage.

Gore truly believes in his heart that the ice has a story to tell us. The glaciers theme is a very visual one that grabs people and keeps them attentive as he progresses through other factors believed to be affected by global warming. He leads us into graphs of temperatures becoming higher than normal when looked at over a thousand years. When compared to the trends in CO2 concentrations, the two are very closely related. Then he talks of the hottest years being of the recent last fourteen years, and the hottest of all them being 2005. The European continent recently had life threatening heat waves with a loss of 35,000 individuals and India reaching an extreme of 122 degrees Fahrenheit. The article “Death rates will rise because of global warming, researchers warn,” expresses that Harvard researchers put together a city specific weather data/death study and found that more than 6.5 million people have died in the United States between 1989 and 2000 due to weather extremities (2007). This data is also hard to ignore, and keeps the listener attentive. This directs Gore into the next theme of his slide-show that higher temperatures make more powerful storms due to water temperature. He then explains that the United States had an all time record of tornados and Japan had one for typhoons all due to hotter weather. Pictures of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans demonstrate what could result from global warming and shows heart breaking occurances that can and have happened. In the article “Is global warming causing an increase in hurricane activity,” scientists explain that “more research from observation, theory, and modeling is needed to resolve the current debate around global warming and hurricanes” (2007).