AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH: Nature Waits for None, Not Politicians and Corporatists (nor You and Me)!
Written: Jun 17 '06 (Updated Jul 03 '06)
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Pros: Brilliant illustrated lecture, well supported with facts and illustrations, leavened by humor and personal experience.
Cons: Critics will attack the film on political grounds, perhaps call Al Gore a "Godless Liberal."
The Bottom Line: In AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH, former Vice President Al Gore launches a crusade ultimately more crucial than the foolish one bleeding us in the Mideast, for it encompasses Mankind's entire future.
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| macresarf1's Full Review: |
“Kilimanjaro is a snow covered mountain 19,710 feet high, and it is said to be the highest mountain in Africa. Its western summit is called the Masai Ngāje Ngāi, the House of God. Close to the western summit there is the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard. No one has explained what the leopard was seeking at that altitude.”
Former Vice President Al Gore does not mention one of Ernest Hemingway's most famous short stories, "The Snows of Kilimanjaro," nor its above epigraph, but the 1936 story might be a metaphor for his movie AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH, Gore's own life, and the general complicated, contradictory subject of Global Warming itself. For the snows which covered the mountain's slopes in 1936, there even when Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner went to Kenya to make the movie in 1952, are mostly gone. Mr. Gore shows us that fact in a pair of of vivid photos taken 30 years apart, one of a number of almost frightening comparisons.
Gore, who introduces himself humorously as "formerly The Next President of the United States," shows us the lovely blue and misted globe which is our World, first viewed by American Apollo Astronauts, and later, a more distant photo taken by the cameras of a subsequent robotic spacecraft. Nothing could be more tranquil and serene. But like Gore's life, like our own, the World's appearance may conceal certain unseen tragic aspects.
As a man's face may not reveal the sorrow of loss, as ones body may belie a condition which will destroy it, Global Warming may resemble normality, or sometimes surprisingly, great unbalances of hot and cold. Mountain snows melting prematurely -- suddenly -- in the Highlands of Africa, the Himalayas of Asia, the Alps of Europe, or the Rocky Mountains of North America may cause unseasonal floods, tornadoes, even blizzards. Paradoxically, they may effectuate droughts, wild grass and forest fires, shrinking lakes, and rivers which fail to reach the sea. The rise on an average of a degree or two of temperature in the tropical land masses may loose new plagues on the World. The disappearance of the polar caps or Greenland ice floes may cause unseasonably cold winters in one area of the Globe but a catastrophic increase in the number of warm weather hurricanes and typhoons elsewhere.
Hurricane Katrina, as Gore points out, was the first time Americans as a people saw the contradictory message of Global Warming.
Strange things, for a myriad of reasons, WERE happening. More of us were forced to face the consequences of believing the paid reports and advertising of applied scientists, corporate flacks, and their political allies.
Godfrey Reggio and Phillip Glass in their magnificent visual and musical tone poem, KOYAANITSQATSI, showed general audiences the same phenomena back in 1983, without a word of narration, but the viewers preferred to get doped up and see the picture as a "happening."
Almost as a scientific outline for the above film (and its sequels), Gore brings to us his message of deceiving perceptions in one of the best illustrated lectures ever committed to film. The difference is that AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH is a call to action.
Gore like Harry, Hemingway's regretful hero in "The Snows of Kilimanjaro," describes the gangrene which will kill him (and us):
"'The marvelous thing is that it's painless,' [Harry] said. 'That's how you know when it starts.'"
With little of Harry's self-deception or self-importance, or later anger and recrimination, but with the same self-deprecation and urgency, is how Gore shows us the foolish carelessness, hedonism, and self-denial which will ruin our lives, our children's lives, and the planet as we have known it.
Then, he asks us: What are you and I -- what are we all -- going to do about it?
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Gore all but avoids any specific references to the Bush Administration's rejection of the Third Assessment of the UN's International Panel on Climate Control (2001), our "unsigning" of the Kyoto Accord on Global Warming, our standing with Australia alone against all the other industrialized states, and eventually confessing that we can't do anything about the matter anyway (because it would cut into corporate profits).
Gore does establish his bonafides, having studied at University over thirty years ago with one of the leading pioneer ecologists.
And he does break up the lecture by showing himself schlepping his own bags through airports across the United States, Europe, China, to give "The Lecture." [One thousand times since 1989.] The former Vice President makes clear that his is an ecological agenda, not a political one.
And he does take time in AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH (sometimes awkwardly) to show a few of the personal regrets in his life.
Item: Years ago, his little son slipped from his grasp, ran out into traffic, and was killed, an event which appears to have marked him deeply. It is the kind of thing which makes a man think what might have been, and what will be.
Item: His beautiful older sister (by ten years), who often took care of him, and was his confidant and friend, had a lifelong cigarette habit, and she died prematurely of lung cancer. "A death no one should have," Gore says, laconically. Most affecting are home movies of the beautiful teen age sister with little Al at the beach, or later, her smiling at him, driving along in an open car while she casually smokes in the breeze. It did not help that the Gores, a distinguished Tennessee political and business family, had tobacco holdings (which Senator Gore, Sr., got rid of after his daughter's death).
[The former VP avoids referring to the bought and paid for "studies" from the hacks of applied science, and the massive advertising campaigns to persuade people of my generation that filter cigarettes or Virginia tobacco was better for them. (I lost my father to emphysema.) How well I remember the actors in white lab coats who stood before TV cameras and cheerfully urged candidates for emphysema, lip, throat and lung cancer, or heart attacks "to give your throat a treat instead of a treatment!" The cases are in the courts to this day, and Big Tobacco continues to finesse its huge profits, selling one of the few proven legal deadly poisons, which causes the deaths of hundreds of thousands Worldwide, while adding to both indoor and outdoor pollution.]
These vignettes interrupt the flow of "The Lecture" in AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH (directed by David Guggenheim), but they also suggest what has formed the evolution of Gore's thinking, provide needed relief, and a measure of humanity.
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Jovially, before various packed audiences, with the help of clickers, pointers, an elevator platform, and a giant process screen, Al Gore teaches us the history of the Universe, tailing off after billions of years to our tiny portion of time on earth. He uses graphs, comparisons, photos, cartoons (the Simpsons, the frogs in the pan of water, the Flintstones), and that elevator platform to make his points. Most impressively, he goes straight up in the air nearly thirty feet to illustrate on a timeline of human existence where the rise of CO2 gases in our atmosphere parallels the rise in our average Global temperature over the last hundred years.
He shows us overlay maps which illustrate how rising oceans will wipe out hundreds of islands around the World, put Ground Zero in Manhattan under water, drown much of Florida (while, curiously, doing nothing much about swamp fire), and either give me wet feet in downtown San Francisco -- or provide me the business opportunity of a bayside dock site.
Gore takes on the minority of still skeptical scientists. Hundreds of "peer-reviewed" studies now support the rise in CO2 gases, the corresponding rise in temperatures, the collapse of glaciers into the oceans, the weakening of ice fields by the intrusion of bubbles of air and fresh water, the dimming of the atmosphere, the rise of unheard of viruses in "The Hot Zones," increased numbers of tropical storms, the loss of life forms of all sorts, etc. His evidence is pretty convincing in the face of cheap shots by Ann Coulter or Rush Limbaugh, and the www.junkscience.com crowd.
[Here, in my Bay Area, a particularly obnoxious talk show host and applied scientist, "Doctor Bill" Wattenburg (who has himself billed on Station KGO-AM as "The Smartest Man in the World"), railed for decades about "eco-freaks" who believe in Global Warming. An arrogantly proud inventor of atomic weapons, he may have to change the tone of his insulting lectures because Corporate America is beginning to see the oil smear on the wall.]
[I remember clearly conversations I had with John Bergven, the husband of my wife's girlfriend, in the early 1960's. Bergven had scientific degrees from three of the finest Universities in Sweden, and he came out from the midwest to direct the structural design of the new Cold War "Arctic Early Warning System." In the first of these conversations, John said to me, "Haf you-u ever heard of the Greenhouse Effect?" I said that I had not, and, with his quixotically curious smile, eyes dancing, he replied, "Oh, la-la, you are going to hear a lot about it, in twenty years-s-s! No one of the Federal higher-oops vant to touch it now, but they'll haf to. Mark my verds, my friend" I have, often, since.]
Of many examples Gore provides in the 100 minute documentary for the destruction caused by Global Warming, particularly poignant is the plight of the Arctic Polar Bear, which must swim for considerable distances in search of food, resting on ice floes. In the last few decades, significant numbers of these bears have been found drowned in Arctic waters because the floes are becoming smaller, further apart, and the ice itself fragile -- full of air bubbles and perculating fresh water. (The ice breaks up under the bear's weight.) Their deaths are caused by exhaustion, hypothermia or being swamped by wave action. Once thriving, these magnificent animals are now seriously endangered.
It is a short step from a large mammal like a Polar Bear to a human, and we need more than a raw fish to live.
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To put difficult science simply, CO2 gases (significantly produced by man, and by America in terms of greatest volume) raise the Earth temperature, melting of the icecaps, causing the oceans to rise, wild fires to take place in some places and flooding in others, the emergence of new plagues, and the annihilation of whole species all over the World.
In other, more precise words (as described on the AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH Website):
"We’re already seeing changes. Glaciers are melting, plants and animals are being forced from their habitat, and the number of severe storms and droughts is increasing.
"The number of Category 4 and 5 hurricanes has almost doubled in the last 30 years.
"Malaria has spread to higher altitudes in places like the Colombian Andes, 7,000 feet above sea level.
"The flow of ice from glaciers in Greenland has more than doubled over the past decade.
"At least 279 species of plants and animals are already responding to global warming, moving closer to the poles. If the warming continues, we can expect catastrophic consequences."
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"Deaths from global warming will double in just 25 years -- to 300,000 people a year.
"Global sea levels could rise by more than 20 feet with the loss of shelf ice in Greenland and Antarctica, devastating coastal areas worldwide.
"Heat waves will be more frequent and more intense.
"Droughts and wildfires will occur more often.
"The Arctic Ocean could be ice free in summer by 2050.
"More than a million species worldwide could be driven to extinction by 2050.
"There is no doubt we can solve this problem. In fact, we have a moral obligation to do so. Small changes to your daily routine can add up to big differences in helping to stop global warming. The time to come together to solve this problem is now – TAKE ACTION"
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To put it even more simply, the glaciers are retreating, the deserts are expanding, the lakes in the central land masses are drying up, the rivers can't reach the seas, life forms are dying off, new plagues are appearing and our children are going to lead much more miserable lives than most of us have.
ARE WE GETTING IT YET?
Are you getting wet yet?
[Consult The Third Assessment of the UN's International Panel on Climate Control (2001):
http://unfccc.int/resource/docs/convkp/conveng.pdf
OR, the Official Website of AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH:
http://www.climatecrisis.net/aboutthefilm]
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And yes, it is true we are are going to have to change our ways, and if we don't, events will force us to.
As Hemingway's careless, heedless, wasteful Harry imagined, drifting into his dream of death: ". . . instead of going on to Arusha they turned left, he evidently figured that they had the gas, and looking down he saw a pink sifting cloud, moving over the ground, and in the air, like the first snow in [a] blizzard, that comes from nowhere, and he knew the locusts were coming, up from the South. Then they began to climb and they were going to the East it seemed, and then it darkened and they were in a storm, the rain so thick it seemed like flying through a waterfall, and then they were out and Compie [Harry's pilot] turned his head and grinned and pointed and there, ahead, all he could see, as wide as all the world, great, high, and unbelievably white in the sun, was the square top of Kilimanjaro. And then he knew that there was where he was going."
It sounds like the kind of experience millions of people around the Earth will have before their time, in years to come.
Unfortunately, whether or not we face our own AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH, we shall soon no longer have the snows of Kilimanjaro to comfort us.
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UPDATE: JUNE 29, 2006 -- An Associated Press article by Seth Borenstein, entitled "Scientists Call Gore's Climate Film Accurate" (carried in the San Francisco Chronicle), reports that all nineteen top scientists who had seen Gore's film, or had read the book on which it is based, and were willing to answer questions, "had the same general impression: Gore conveyed the science correctly; the world is getting hotter, and it is a manmade catastrophe in the making caused by the burning of fossil fuel."
The only major criticism was that Gore had understated the problem.
The article notes that most Administration-connected science leaders had not seen the film. Neither the head of the Environmental Protection Agency nor of NASA has seen it, but the President's science advisor planned to.
"President Bush said he won't see [the film]."
Recommended:
Yes
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