Uncover AnInconvenientTruth and its impact on the environment

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An old Al Gore photo

What did AnInconvenientTruth do? The movie won awards.  Along with Michael Moore, An Inconvenient Truth helped make documentaries more commercially viable.

Did you love it?  It was an eye-opening documentary for many.  Climate change and its potential catastrophic consequences were highlighted.  Everyone should watch it to understand what's at stake.

It enlightened people who needed to know about global warming.  Al Gore became one of the most talked about Americans after An Inconvenient Truth.  Also Davis Guggenheim.

Was the truth spread?  AnInconvenientTruth has a lot of factual information.  He supports his points with data, figures, graphs, and photos.  

Here are some things energy policymakers should know.  Which policymakers?  Politicians, corporations, and even households make decisions.

It's also a piecemeal biography.  It's not a detailed chronicle, just a look at pivotal moments from his life that drove him forward.  Yet AnInconvenientTruth exists to address anthropogenic global warming.  There was considerable box office success, impact and critical acclaim for this movie.  At Sundance 2006, it was one of the best independent films.

How does AnInconvenientTruth work?

Photographs show trends and changes in glaciers.  Carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere have never been at or above their current levels based on ice core samples spanning hundreds of thousands of years.  According to AnInconvenientTruth, CO2 is the leading cause of global warming, which can have disastrous consequences.  Global warming is also caused by human activity, it says.

Review summaries and comments from An Inconvenient Truth.

Arguement Global Warming

Basically, the movie makes these points:

• The thin shell called the atmosphere is getting filled with pollution.
• Gore hadn't been very good at communicating his point.  Not as much as he'd like
• We need to change the way we treat our planet
• Earth Rise changed humanity's perspective when it was first seen.  Soon after it was taken, environmental awareness soared. This earth photo is unique and now one of the most-reproduced photos in history.
  
• Al Gore shows how two continents' coastlines look alike.  One of his classmates thought they might have been able to fit together at one time, but the teacher denied it.  The current theory says yes, but back then scientists thought differently.  There was consensus that continents don't move.
• We all know what the greenhouse effect is, heat is trapped by the atmosphere, and even more trace gases trap heat.  By the way, Calvin Consulting will calculate and report the amount of greenhouse gases your firm emits.  Most production companies require it.  Give us a call.  
  
• Back in college, our protagonist first noticed the pattern of atmospheric carbon dioxide levels.  They went up and down every year like clockwork, but they showed a definite upward trend.  There was a 20% increase in CO2 concentrations measured at the top of a mountain in Hawaii in only 40 years, according to the pollution graphs.
• Once AG got into politics, he educated Congress about this little problem, got some laws passed, and unsuccessfully ran for president to fix it.  After losing the 2000 election, he resumed his original mission, using his slide show to warn people about upcoming environmental disasters.
• Next came the photos.  Every glacier he shows in his climate pictures has shrunk over the decades.  Tanzania's Mount Kilimanjaro.  Glacier National Park.  Columbia Glacier and a few others.  Many people are losing their fresh water supply because of this change.
• Ice cores are next.  There are two graphs showing temperature and carbon dioxide data over the last 650 thousand years.  Both go up at the same time.  Then down again.  They fit together like those coastlines in AnInconvenientTruth.  Temperature and CO2 are represented by the two traces.  There was a big difference between a nice day and having a mile of ice over your head. And now he says, "This is really not a political issue so much as a moral issue." Maybe he means present day warming trends could have the same effect.  Our kids deserve a good legacy.
• AnInconvenientTruth continues with graphs of our planet's temperature change, including the hockey stick chart.  These graphs show that recent temperatures have been higher than ever.
• Storms can be stronger and more frequent when the oceans are warmer.  Let's take Hurricane Katrina as an example.  With warmer weather comes warmer ocean temperatures, so we have another gift from global warming.
• Churchill warned us that our actions would have serious consequences.  One of the best examples is global warming.
• The number of insurance claims and damages has skyrocketed.  Global warming is to blame, says AnInconvenientTruth.
• What else will global warming do?  Mostly floods and droughts. It increases severe  precipitation vents and aridity (as measured by this index) in other areas.
  
• Things are changing faster than we think.

Changing polar conditions?

• There's a lot of incriminating evidence in the Arctic.  A photo shows the broken Ward Hunt Ice Shelf, while another tells the story of drunken trees.  The permafrost holding them upright defrosts and no longer supports them.  In northern Alaska, trucking seasons are shorter and infrastructure is dying.
• There's a lot of evidence the melting arctic ice shield is thinning and shrinking.  There's a chance it'll disappear.  AnInconvenientTruth says the arctic will warm up faster than the rest of the world.  The polar bears seem to need that ice, and if they have to swim too far, they could drown.
• It gets worse.  We might stop relying on ocean currents and Hadley Cells (air currents) if the temperature differential decreases.  The water running off North America after the last great melt changed the salt concentration in the Atlantic Ocean, shut down the ocean current, and caused a new ice age.  Greenland's ice sheets might do the same.
• According to AnInconvenientTruth, global warming is linked to migration patterns.  Birds don't arrive at the same time as their prey, insects infest new places.  Diseases (like SARS and West Nile Virus) go along with them.  Also, coral reefs die off.
• The ice off the coast of Antarctica is melting fast because of global warming.  There was no more ice on top of the continent.  The ice slid into the water and raised the sea level.
• The projected changes in Greenland are shown on maps that have become a trademark of AnInconvenientTruth.  Floodwaters submerge Florida, Manhattan and other heavily populated areas.
• There's been a population explosion in the 20th century.  It's like never before when it comes to food demand.  More people are imposing a greater impact on nature, so it's amplified.  People from North America, especially.
• As the boiling frog metaphor illustrates, inaction (when it comes to making changes to benefit the environment) seems harmless if consequences happen slowly.  It's not so if the effects happen suddenly.
• Al Gore's father quit the lucrative tobacco farming business because of AnInconvenientTruth.  Morals played a big role in that reason.
• Out of 928 scientific articles, none denied man-made global warming existed.  More than half of 636 "popular press" articles were indecisive.
• A great AnInconvenientTruth quote: "It's hard to get a man to understand something if his salary depends on him not understanding it."
• Why do the most successful companies build the most efficient cars?  Market and regulatory acceptance seem to be important.  We need to reduce air pollution caused by cars.  Plus, it's less damaging to the environment.
• Okay, so what do we do?  There are a few things you can do to reduce your carbon footprint, like using more energy-efficient appliances, driving a higher-mileage vehicle, and improving transportation efficiency
• Despite the US and Australian feds not being too concerned about global warming, smaller jurisdictions like states are.  Americans have a history of solving social and environmental problems. They might be able to win this one.
• It's our only home.  It's just a tiny pixel.  Let's take care of it.

THE UNCARED WORLD
"I'm very sorry to say but our earthh is in a very bad condition...We all need to care a lot for it!" - Navya, India

Tough Critics

Al Gore says there's no scientific disagreement about global warming.  Some parts of the issue are up for debate.  People who speak out against AnInconvenientTruth get labels like "denial", "heretic" or "astroturfing" (a front funded by big business).  Whether or not the accusations are true, groups like Friends of Science fall into this category.

Martin Durkin's documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle got the Brits into this argument.  It doesn't deny global warming, but identifies causes outside of mankind's carbon emissions.  Even when they include some real hard science, people holding this view tend to act as if they're on shaky ground.

Critics of AnInconvenientTruth include:

• Richard Lindzen says Al Gore doesn't acknowledge that the climate changes all the time.  Also, he disputed the 928 article claim.
• Spencer once asked Gore if warmer arctic temperatures during the depression had anything to do with thin ice cover or GHGs.
• Tim Ball points out several problems with global warming.  AnInconvenientTruth uses examples that may be influenced by other factors.  You can see glacier photos taken at different times of the year.

What to do?

Check out AnInconvenientTruth.  Everybody should.  Don't forget that your view of the subject won't be complete afterward, but much better.  'AnInconvenientTruth' is a great introduction to global warming.

You should also check out The Great Global Warming Swindle if you're really interested in this.  I'd also like to get some critical comments on both.  They're everywhere.  You can start with IMDB or ChatGPT.  You'll be pretty well informed.

Go back from AnInconvenientTruth to the Solution Global Warming webpage, or visit the Stuff in the Air homepage.

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What was the significance of this film?

Al Gore witnessed air scientists losing jobs and social status because of An-Inconvenient-Truth they could not ignore. He needed to do something about it; now the world knows what that was.

Do you have concerns about air pollution in your area??

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Thank you to my research and writing assistants, ChatGPT and WordTune, as well as Wombo and others for the images.

GPT-4, OpenAI's large-scale language generation model (and others provided by Google and Meta), helped generate this text.  As soon as draft language is generated, the author reviews, edits, and revises it to their own liking and is responsible for the content.