An Inconvenient Truth (sure is)
It is the numbers and statistics and photos and maps which ultimately get to you in the Al Gore documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth," which opened at the Midtown Theatre in Harrisburg last night and seeks to convince people that global warming is a terrifying reality. Gore, the former Vice President and 2000 Democratic Presidential candidate, has delivered this lecture to over a thousand audiences around the world.
The images I especially won't soon forget show areas of the world that would be flooded if sea levels rose 10-20 feet, which Gore says would happen if half of the Greenland ice cap and half of the Antarctic ice cap melted away. Large parts of Florida would disappear. So would most of the Netherlands, large parts of the San Francisco Bay region, sectons of lower Manhattan, and much of the area around Calcutta, India. Millions of people would be displaced.
Gore brings intelligence, passion, and an endearingly self-deprecating humor to the Cassandra role in this documentary, which was directed by Davis Guggenheim. Yet he remains a suppporting actor--a very good supporting actor--to the numbers and graphics. Everything Gore tells you is based on real science done by real scientists, not hacks on some interest group's payroll. As he notes, there is no controversy among legitimate scientists over the reality of global warming. That some think otherwise is a perverse tribute to efforts by companies like Exxon Mobil to plant doubt in people's minds, much as the tobacco companies did in the 1950s after the Surgeon General first linked cigarette smoking to lung cancer.
According to Gore, "An Inconvenient Truth" is not intended to lay the ground work for a 2008 Presidential run. I'm not so sure. There are parts in it about his life and career that would be at home in any campaign film and aren't really needed to make the case for global warming. But so what if it is? We could do far worse than to have a President who is intelligent, competent, cares passionately about the environment, and cares about helping people more than big oil companies.
Go to see this film and take your children--they will be able to understand and appreciate it, so well is the topic presented. You won't be bored--it's not just another dry PowerPoint presentation (and in fact, was done on Keynote, the Apple presentation software). I guarantee you'll come out of the film knowing something you didn't know before, will worry about the future, but know there are things that can be done if only the country can muster the political will.