An Inconvenient Truth

We went to see “An Inconvenient Truth” at the Mercury Cinema (echoes of Orson Welles?) in Nice, which was followed by a discussion organised by a Cafe Cine group.



In the title of my diary on Stone’s film “Wall Street” I said that greed was glamourous and deadly. In this case we come to the truly deadly consequences of our greed, which threaten to kill all of us.


Future generations ?

The film was grim viewing and afterwards a couple of invited scientists argued that the situation was probably worse than Gore had said, and that he’d exaggerated the possibilities for counteracting the effects of climate change. One of the scientists, a Brit who looked a bit like a Father Christmas, passed on this news with many a jolly chuckle. I felt relieved that I have no children and sorry for those who do - and even more for the children themselves.

Cf.:

When I said I was going to a press screening of "An Inconvenient Truth," a friend said, "Al Gore talking about the environment! Bor...ing!" This is not a boring film. The director, Davis Guggenheim, uses words, images and Gore's concise litany of facts to build a film that is fascinating and relentless. In 39 years, I have never written these words in a movie review, but here they are: You owe it to yourself to see this film. If you do not, and you have grandchildren, you should explain to them why you decided not to.

Roger Ebert

John Doerr (who works with Gore) said (in a TED talk): “I’m really scared. I don’t think we’re going to make it.” After seeing the Gore film he had some friends round for dinner and they all agreed climate change was a real problem. Then it was his 15 year-old daughter’s turn and she said: “I’m scared and I’m angry. Your generation created this problem, you’d better fix it.” All eyes turned to him and he didn’t know what to say.

However he goes on to describe what he and his colleagues at Kleiner are doing to use their entrpreneurial skills to tackle the problem and to encourage others to do so:

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/128

Hero’s journey

I thought that “An Inconvenient Truth” combined the personal, the political and the scientific very well; they are, after all, aiming at the widest possible audience and people are interested in people. After having written that, I viewed the film again on DVD with the director’s commentary. He said that his father had made over a hundred documentaries and focused on how individuals and groups were affected by issues, because “people are interested in people.” His son agreed, hence the focus on Gore and not just the argument about climate. Gore’s biography has some dramatic episodes which explain his current dedication to this cause.

Guggenheim wisely structured the movie after the Joseph Campbell model, that is, it's a hero's journey. The director obviously grasped that in making An Inconvenient Truth, he was basically trying to capture a concert-type performance on film and says that the movies that influenced him most were Martin Scorsese's The Last Waltz (1978) and Jonathan Demme's Swimming to Cambodia (1987).

http://homevideo.about.com/od/dvdrevi3/fr/IncvntTruthDVDa_2.htm

CF.:

What elevates the book, and the movie, is the way that Gore’s personal story and the story of climate change move in carefully orchestrated counterpoint to articulate a vision of hope and a challenge for the future. If Gore indulges in fear-mongering, it is not the cheap partisan tactic that promises a war that will not end against an enemy that cannot be defined. Gore defines the enemy—and it is us. He promises a war, but it is a war against the darker aspects of human nature, the selfish, shortsighted worldview that drives us to plunder now at the expense of our neighbors and our children.

Jacob Foster is a DPhil student in mathematical physics at Balliol College, Oxford, and a PhD student in complexity science at the University of Calgary. His current interests range from the mathematical properties of complex networks to the geometry of the Big Bang.

http://www.oxonianreview.org/issues/6-1/6-1foster.htm

Updated and improved



The film was made very quickly - 6 months - whereas Guggenheim’s previous documentary had taken two years. The speed was partly due to the fact that Gore had done so much of the research and thinking about presentation already, and was constantly updating and improving it. CF.:

Churn, baby, churn

“One good piece of advice found in Guy Kawasaki's Rules for Revolutionaries is the idea of constantly striving for improvement, or churning. In Japanese we might refer to this idea as "kaizen" or an attitude of continually looking for ways to improve, even the smallest of details. It is interesting to see that Al Gore was constantly learning from each presentation and refining his message and his visuals along the way. This is a good lesson for all of us.

http://presentationzen.blogs.com/presentationzen/2006/06/duarte_design_h.html

There’s another very comprehensive piece about the design in the “slide-show” and the film by a professional designer:

Good design is not about style

My favorite aspect of the movie’s presentation is the timelessness of its visuals. Gore’s slides use nothing but core graphic design fundamentals to do the job and become an important lesson on how the design aesthetic works.

There is a distinct lack of gradients, shading, fanciful fonts, cool transitions or any other spoils of modern presentation software. The motion graphics when used were judicious and focused. There was no specific template from one slide to the next. Thankfully, there was also a complete lack of bulleted lists.

The general design aesthetic clearly focused on the fundamentals.

http://www.designbyfire.com/?p=29

Freebies

In the DVD commentary Guggenheim makes it clear that he is very appreciative of Gore’s work and extremely impressed by Gore’s dedication and energy. I almost get the impression that he regrets the fact that he’s made this film relatively early in his career; he says that he doubts if he’ll ever make anything as important again. At the same time he’s clearly very glad that he has made it and feels privileged to have done so. It’s yet another heartening example that people want to devote themselves to things the can believe in and feel proud of - he also notes that many people and organizations gave them stuff - because they recognised it was an important project - ( cf Doerr of Kleiner above), cf. this offer from a designer commenting on the film (and it also makes the point about people responding to people):

“Sure, they can sell the DVD of the movie and people can show that, but it's more effective if people can interact with a real person in a live presentation setting. Come on Al, unleash this presentation to the masses and let others get out there and make the presentation too. (Note: I have just heard that Gore may be training 1000 people to make similar presentations. True? I'd offer my services for free to help train a group of scientists to do something similar to what Al Gore, a lay person, has done.)”

Here the team at Duarte Design talk about working with him, and they too were impressed:

Q: What was the process like?

A: "We had been working closely with him on his presentation for a while before the concept of a movie was proposed. He would call us with ideas and take us in a direction. Once we'd identified stories or images and had them animated, he would come in for a review. He was brilliant, charming and affirming. Our Account Manager and Designers put their own sweat into the piece because he (and the cause) were very contagious. He would call their cell and say "I heard about these bees in South America, check it out for me" or "I came up with a way to make this section more powerful, why don't you think about this or that." He was refining the file each time he presented it and calling us with feedback and we'd go for another round. As we researched facts and resourced images, people were very helpful when we told them who wanted the images and what it was for."

http://presentationzen.blogs.com/presentationzen/2006/06/duarte_design_h.html

Guggenheim stresses that he wasn’t an environmentalist before this film and had his doubts about making such a film - a guy talking about a lot of charts and graphs ? But when he went to see Gore and watched his presentation he was hooked within ten minutes. Cf.:

“Al Gore's presentation is so good, so compelling, that they made a movie about it. A movie that is essentially an Al Gore presentation with solid, simple use of multimedia. What a concept -- who the heck thought *that* would be interesting? But it is.
‘A movie about Al Gore giving a PowerPoint presentation about global warming doesn’t sound all that exciting, but if you liked “March of the Penguins,” you’ll love “An Inconvenient Truth.’
-- Eleanor Clift, Newsweek “

http://presentationzen.blogs.com/presentationzen/2006/05/al_gore_another.html

This is partly because Gore is a very good presenter and a number of people have remarked on how different he is from his “stiff” and “wooden” performance in the 2000 campaign, though a very different Gore, relaxed, smart, funny, self-deprecating, emerges in a Spike Jonze documentary made during the campaign. Cf.- well worth viewing:

(NB 5 mins in, his dedication to conservation climate issue is clear. He explains through what they’re doing - filming - the camera, he points out, is smaller, lighter and better than few years before - and he says we can do that with all technology - and make it less polluting)

“This is the man the media mocked as wooden and stiff? In part I and part II Gore addresses his reputation for being stiff on several occasions. The same guy we see hanging out with his family in this video is the same guy we see giving Keynote presentations about global warming to packed houses across the US. In both cases he seems different from the Al I saw on TV six years ago. Maybe he's just learned to take "the real Al" public. Maybe he's just learned to be himself in front of the public. Whatever the reasons for his transformation, he is today quite the speaker. And thanks to Duarte, Al Gore is a pretty savvy visual communicator as well.”

http://presentationzen.blogs.com/presentationzen/2006/06/duarte_design_h.html

Audience of millions

While the director hadn’t given the issues a lot of thought, he says in the DVD commentary that now he thinks about them daily. He didn’t think there would be much of an audience for the film and that maybe some schools would use it. But the fact that by the time of recording the DVD 2 million people had seen the film - “blows my mind.” That number must have increased dramatically with the release of the DVD - in FNAC in Nice they had a lot of copies on the shelves. So Gore doesn’t have to do it personally city by city - though he will go on doing that - but now millions more can see him present his powerful case - and, with the DVD, get an update with reports which have come out since the film was completed and which confirm the case it makes in a disturbing way.

Cf.:

Before going to a multiplex theater to see An Inconvenient Truth (2006), I had not given much thought to global warming, and I certainly had no expectation that any politician could bring the topic alive for me. But I was stunned by Davis Guggenheim's film, a compelling version of Al Gore's presentation on the topic. The movie is intellectually and emotionally engaging, and it merits watching regardless of what you think about climate change or the former Vice President.

The DVD containing An Inconvenient Truth would be worth buying for the feature film alone, but it comes with bonus materials that enhanced my appreciation of the movie. The best of these is Gore's half-hour update on the information given in the film, and there's a good director's audio commentary as well.

http://homevideo.about.com/od/dvdrevi3/fr/IncvntTruthDVDa.htm

When “balance” lies

The case spelled out in the film and Gore’s “slide show” is quite clear, massively supported by the scientists working in this general area (despite the attempts of the Right to spread doubt) and it’s quite scandalous that the basic facts are still being questioned with the stupid collusion of the media.

IPCC's 2nd Working Group Report Shows Temperature Increases and Corresponding Global Warming Impacts Updated April 17, 2007

The IPCC has released the summary and North America Chapter from its Working Group II report.

http://www.net.org/warming/ipcc_briefing2.vtml (National Environment Trust)

One of the most telling things in the film was when Gore said that a study had been done of peer-reviewed scientific papers on the climate, using a sample of about 10% - about 920 papers. They found ZERO papers which questioned the basic facts of climate change and our role in it. When they compared this with a similar sample of media reports, they found that over 50% included dissenting views ! This is disgraceful distortion, partly due to the media’s corporate nature and connection with corporations involved with energy sources, but also, as Gore himself has complained, to do with the dogmatic adherence to the idea of “balance” - getting both sides of a story, even when the other side are flat-earthers. Cf. Ebert again:

Am I acting as an advocate in this review? Yes, I am. I believe that to be "impartial" and "balanced" on global warming means one must take a position like Gore's. There is no other view that can be defended. Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), chairman of the Senate Environment Committee, has said, "Global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people." I hope he takes his job seriously enough to see this film. I think he has a responsibility to do that.

Ibid.

Truth doesn’t always lie somewhere in the middle of competing views; some people’s views are warped by their vested interests, e.g. tobacco corporation executives - as the documentary record now shows. Included in the film was Upton Sinclair’s “It’s hard to get people to understand something when their salary depends on them not understanding it.” Some energy corporations have tried to undermine the case for climate change by spreading doubt and funding dissenting views, just as the tobacco corporations had tried to undermine the case for the link between smoking and cancer.

“Unfortunately both for Lorillard and their customers, the reality was a little different. The Micronite filters were 30% crocidolite, otherwise known as Brazilian blue asbestos, considered to be one of the most dangerous forms of asbestos. Implicated in both asbestosis and in mesothelioma, a particularly virulent form of lung cancer, asbestos is not exactly considered a health benefit for the lungs. Even worse, the filter made the cigarette hard to draw, resulting in the smoker using heavy suction, and drawing the smoke and filter particles deeply into the lungs.”

http://www.damninteresting.com/?p=394

Cf.:

Gore says that although there is "100 percent agreement" among scientists, a database search of newspaper and magazine articles shows that 57 percent question the fact of global warming, while 43 percent support it. These figures are the result, he says, of a disinformation campaign started in the 1990s by the energy industries to "reposition global warming as a debate." It is the same strategy used for years by the defenders of tobacco. My father was a Luckys smoker who died of lung cancer in 1960, and 20 years later it was still "debatable" that there was a link between smoking and lung cancer. Now we are talking about the death of the future, starting in the lives of those now living.

Roger Ebert

Real science

On the internet there are a lot of attacks on Gore and his film - fortunately there are also sites like www.realclimate.org:



Real Climate's assessment of AIT:

... it is interspersed with personal reflections from Gore that add a very nice human element. Gore in the classroom in 1968, listening to the great geochemist Roger Revelle describe the first few years of data on carbon dioxide increases in the atmosphere. Gore on the family farm, talking about his father's tobacco business, and how he shut it down when his daughter (Al Gore's sister) got lung cancer. Gore on the campaign trail, and his disappointment at the Supreme Court decision. This isn't the "wooden" Gore of the 2000 campgain; he is clearly in his element here, talking about something he has cared deeply about for over 30 years.

How well does the film handle the science? Admirably, I thought. It is remarkably up to date, with reference to some of the very latest research. Discussion of recent changes in Antarctica and Greenland are expertly laid out.

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=299

After the favourable review of “An Inconvenient Truth” on realclimate.org there is a long set of responses - a course on climate change in itself. Some of them are very technical, but some are very illuminating even for the lay-person. One, for example, is a rebuttal of some of the main sceptics’ arguments and begins with a refutation of the claim that Gore has exaggerated the claims of his former professor, Roger Revelle:

Response 177 CM Says: 6 June 2006

Robert Balling, the global warming skeptic, has recently published an article, “Inconvenient Truths Indeed,” in which he outlines six scientific criticisms of Gore’s movie.

http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=052406F

This article has been trumpeted by lay pundits and certain segments of the political blogosphere as a “full debunk of the misleading scientific arguments.” Below is my response to his points. Any additional comments, corrects, additions? Thanks -CM

...
Climate research exploded as a field of science thoughout the ’90s, and an extensive amount of research has been done in the last 16 years. Revelle died in 1991 and therefore cannot comment on his statement in light of much more significant and conclusive data. Balling’s first critique, a cherry-picked 16 year old quote, is not a substantive criticism of the current data presented by Gore in the movie. Many people would read this first criticism and discount the remaining article; however, because Balling’s first point is incredibly inane does not a priori disqualify the remaining five. So let’s continue.
…
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=299

There’s a fuller refutation further on from Justin Lancaster, a friend of Revelle - response 222

Also contained in the responses is a link to a BBC Panorama programme which showed that the disinformation campaign about climate change starts at the top in the US :

A US government whistleblower tells Panorama how scientific reports about global warming have been systematically changed and suppressed.

Some of America's leading climate scientists claim to Panorama that they have been censored and gagged by the administration.

One of them believes the publication of his report, which catalogues the unprecedented rate of ice melt in the Arctic, was delayed as Americans prepared to vote in 2004.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/panorama/5005994.stm

Cf. http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/03/17/60minutes/main1415985.shtml

But, thanks to Gore, many dedicated scientists and, for example, all those local politicians in the US who have got the climate change message and oppose central government's absurd and dangerous denial, even Bush is having to admit the facts. Indeed - as the responses also show - even the Wall Street Journal is starting to admit this inconvenient truth:

Journalists are already beginning to grasp the difference. In today’s Wall Street Journal, Sharon Begley writes “Scientists Explain How They Attribute Climate-Change Data” (May 12, 2006; Page A15). Begley explains how climate scientists attribute increasing global average temperatures to increasing levels of greenhouse gases, rather than natural variations in climate:

...Again, changes in the sun's output since 1861 are too small to have warmed the world enough to weaken the Walker circulation that much, the scientists calculate. Adds Dr. Vecchi, "We looked at 2,000 years of data and asked whether internal variability could produce the weakening. There is less than a 1% chance it did."

The debate over what has caused the increase in severe hurricanes centers on whether they're just something Earth kicks up from time to time or are the result of seas warmed by anthropogenic climate change. In a study presented at an American Meteorological Society conference, scientists noted warming in every ocean basin where hurricanes form. Natural variations tend to hit one basin at a time.

WSJ

What is to be done?



Even often jaded and sceptical film critics have been shaken by this film, and Ebert was moved to include in his review a list of what you can do to help :

An Inconvenient Truth is a deeply troubling and extremely well made film that makes a complicated subject accessible to everybody. (The use of a Futurama cartoon as a teaching tool is an especially nice touch.) Shaken as I was after the credits rolled, I was also able to be just a little bit proud of myself-at least I hadn't driven to the movies that day.

http://www.philadelphiaweekly.com/view.php?id=12305

What can we do? Switch to and encourage the development of alternative energy sources: Solar, wind, tidal, and, yes, nuclear. Move quickly toward hybrid and electric cars. Pour money into public transit, and subsidize the fares. Save energy in our houses. I did a funny thing when I came home after seeing "An Inconvenient Truth." I went around the house turning off the lights.

Ebert

The climate of opinion is changing, even in America:

We asked the question: Who's a Leader? On November 3, we found out the answer: YOU ARE! You organized hundreds and hundreds of rallies in all 50 states and sent over 14,000 invitations to politicians to join you and offer their plan to stop global warming. And together, we united under 1Sky - the solutions that science and justice demand. We are the leaders we have been waiting for - and our movement has just begun.

http://stepitup2007.org/

From Austin and New Orleans:



This (rather long) article is is my contribution to the cause. I also recommend that you buy the DVD - watch it with friends and give copies to others - an xmas present which can help save the planet.



The trailer:



The film' site: http://www.climatecrisis.net

See also: http://www.stopglobalwarming.org