An Inconvenient Truth
Year: 2006
Director: Davis Guggenheim
Media: Film
ID in Amazon: An Inconvenient Truth
Went to see “An Inconvenient Truth” last night and was impressed. Al Gore is does pretty well here, stays (mostly) apolitical and has some nice self-deprecating humour as he tries to get a very serious point across. He knows that climate change is a tough sell in the US where science literacy is so low and the popular press is easily manipulated by lobbyists so he tries to make it all as accessible as possible.
Whilst all the graphs of CO2 levels and temperature variation are extremely persuasive the most emotionally gripping part for me were the photographs of glaciers from different periods demonstrating the massive retreat they have undergone in living memory.
There is a fair bit about Gore (I suspect mainly used as a break from the “hard stuff” of science), but I don’t think it detracted from the film and there was some useful background on how he became involved.
Tags: climate+change global+warming al+gore an+inconvenient+truth
[…] An Inconvenient Truth […]
The CO2 and temperature curves look great, but the message is a bit subtle.
The earth warms over thousands of years and the gas increase (methane
matches temperature even closer than CO2) cuts in hundreds of years
after teh warming starts.
The sceptics jump on this and say that CO2 can’t be causing warming.
(they also act like they discovered this — actually it’s been mainstream
climate science for a decade or so)
But what is happening is warming causes more CO2 which causes more warming.
The variations in the earth’s orbit that set the timing don’t seem to be big
enough to cause the ice ages without this “help” from CO2 and methane.
The importance of all this (apart from showing why the sceptics are wrong to
attack Gore about this) is that if the same sort of processes cut in
over the 21st century, changes are going to be at the high end of the
ranges shown in the recent IPCC reports.