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From SeeingBlack.com Movies During this season of action blockbuster movies, former Vice President Al Gore presents action on a global scale—through the humble, old-fashioned slide show.
How odd to see a June movie audience watching Gore on the big screen as he shows pictures and graphs on the reality of global warming (which makes those Storm special effects in “X-Men: The Last Stand” look downright sophomoric). Yet, lectures, slides and images—many of which are frightening—are the stuff of “An Inconvenient Truth,” a new documentary that is part earth exploration, part scientific plea and part biography of the man who was once, as he says, “the next president of the United States.” The biographical part includes the fact that while Gore was a college student, one of his professors was studying the steady rise of carbon dioxide in earth’s atmosphere and how this rise in CO2 correlates to the rise in atmospheric temperature. Gore continued to care very deeply about human impact on the environment and when he was elected to Congress, he continued to press for pro-ecology legislation. Three more tragedies—his son’s near-fatal car accident in 1989, his sister’s death from lung cancer and his loss in the 2000 U.S. presidential race—have all served as stark reminders to him that things that are precious can be taken away, and that he wants to make good use of the life and time given him.
What he has been doing, especially since 2000, is traveling around the world and repeating what scientists have been saying for years and that he, with a large public profile, can say much louder: that human beings have about ten years to turn around energy use habits, primarily the burning of fossil fuels such as oil and coal, that are destroying the earth’s atmosphere. He manages to make a complex topic easy and even entertaining to follow, explaining how the burning of these fuels builds CO2 in the air and traps warm air in the atmosphere. Proof of warming comes through images of once majestic snow-capped mountains that are no longer
Throughout, he is a relaxed, reliable narrator who debunks the myth, fed to journalists by paid lobbyists, that there is actually a debate within the scientific community on the reality of global warming. I also did not get any whiff of cheesy politicking, as if Gore is championing the earth and making a movie just to get back on the political trail that he left behind in 2000. The story he tells here is, literally, so globally important, it seems beside the point to speculate about what angle Gore may be trying to work by telling the truth. Iverem’s review of “An Inconvenient Truth” also appeared on www.BET.com. Her new book of poems, Living in Babylon, is available through this site at www.Am © Copyright by SeeingBlack.com |
