Carbon Neutral Strategies

Negative & Skeptical Reviews

An Inconvenient Truth (6/10) by Tony Medley

Al Gore is trying to prove that we are in a period of global warming, which is like trying to prove that grass is green with an abundance of evidence, or trying to kill a mosquito with an atomic bomb. Unfortunately, in addition, he is trying to get us to believe that man is responsible, and that we in the United States have the ability to stop it if only we had the will. This film, which is junk science gone mad, is the baby of leftie producer Laurie David, wife of Seinfeld co-creator, Larry.

An Inconvenient Truth: Gore as climate exaggerator

by Ronald Bailey

I have long been a critic of former Vice-President Al Gore, but as a recent convert to the view that humanity is contributing significantly to the current increase in average global temperatures, I was trying to keep a somewhat open mind about his new global warming movie, An Inconvenient Truth. As a film, An Inconvenient Truth is a competently made documentary centered on Gore's famous global warming slide show interspersed with shots of him brooding on the fate of the earth. This is the sort of movie that

Ask Mr. Science: The moral flaws of Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth.

By Gregg Easterbrook

As a motion picture, An Inconvenient Truth has a lot to say, but contains little imaginative cinematography that might have made global warming engaging at the suburban cineplex. The picture the movie paints is always worst-case scenario. Considering the multiple times Gore has given his greenhouse slide show (he says "thousands"), it's jarring that the movie was not scrubbed for factual precision. For instance, this 2005 joint statement by the science academies of the Western nations, including the National Academy of Sciences, warns of sea-level rise of four to 35 inches in the 21^st century; this amount of possible sea-level rise is current consensus science.

Yet An Inconvenient Truth asserts that a sea-level rise of 20 feet is a realistic short-term prospect. Gore says the entire Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets could melt rapidly; the film then jumps to animation of Manhattan flooded. Well, all that ice might melt really fast, and a UFO might land in London, too. The most recent major study of ice in the geologic past found that about 130,000 years ago the seas were "several meters above modern levels" and that polar temperatures sufficient to cause a several-meter sea-level rise may eventually result from artificial global warming. The latest major study of austral land ice detected a thawing rate that would add two to three inches to sea level during this century. Such findings are among the arguments that something serious is going on with Earth's climate. But the science-consensus forecast about sea-level rise is plenty bad enough. Why does An Inconvenient Truth use disaster-movie speculation?

Ain't It Cool News: Review

Hola all. Massawyrm here. (a self-described extreme conservative). Well, with An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore sets out to challenge that way of thinking and manages to turn what could easily be a 100 minute episode-of-Nova snoozefest into a riveting conversation and argument on the need to reduce our CO2 emissions. This is effectively a filmed version of the lecture he’s been giving over the last six years, inter-cut with a series of personal anecdotes shot at locations pivotal in Gore’s life. Using stories of his past as metaphors, Gore manages to introduce us to himself in a whole new light, while simultaneously laying the groundwork for arguments made later in the film. And those arguments are incredibly simple – elegantly simple in fact.

While not entirely unassailable (as arguments go), what seemed like a “Save the Spotted Owl” plea for environmental consciousness rapidly became a wrecking ball of rhetoric that tore down common myths and hit every point in the argument, from personal cost, industry and the technology needed. This isn’t some crazy, left wing, bleeding heart, tree hugger plea – this is an honest to god, very well thought out evaluation of facts, figures and concepts. And its an argument, valid or not, that is so good, it should be heard by members of all political slants and bents.

This film, this lecture, comes across as very personal; a passionate argument in the old school sense of the word. This isn’t the stodgy, stiff shirt Al Gore we all remember – this is an Al Gore who jokes openly, is warm and entertaining and speaks with pain about his loss in 2000. You can easily tell that he’s a changed man, someone who while on the track to the White House gave us what he thought we wanted, and now, with nothing to lose, can let it all hang out and just be himself.

And the man before us in the film, well, he’s one I quite like now. He’s been moved from the category of people I never hope to meet into the realm of “Man, I’d really love to pick this guys brain over a cup of coffee.” And believe me, that’s a BIG deal. This is a guy I believed stood against most everything I believe, and while he still may, I no longer think it’s because of anything but that we want different things and have different priorities.

RealClimate: Review

RealClimate ... climate science from climate scientists:  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. He also does a very good job in talking about the relationship between sea surface temperature and hurricane intensity. As one might expect, he uses the Katrina disaster to underscore the point that climate change may have serious impacts on society, but he doesn't highlight the connection any more than is appropriate (see our post on this, here).

For the most part, I think Gore gets the science right, just as he did in Earth in the Balance. The small errors don't detract from Gore's main point, which is that we in the United States have the technological and institutional ability to have a significant impact on the future trajectory of climate change. This is not entirely a scientific issue -- indeed, Gore repeatedly makes the point that it is a moral issue -- but Gore draws heavily on Pacala and Socolow's recent work to show that the technology is there (see Science 305, p. 968 Stabilization Wedges: Solving the Climate Problem for the Next 50 Years with Current Technologies).

I'll admit that I have been a bit of a skeptic about our ability to take any substantive action, especially here in the U.S. Gore's aim is to change that viewpoint, and the colleagues I saw the movie with all seem to agree that he is successful.

In short: this film is worth seeing. It opens in early June.

Seattle PI: Review

Seattle Post-Intelligencer: Gore's global-warming film is riveting, inspiring

By WILLIAM ARNOLD
P-I MOVIE CRITIC

It is no hyperbole to say that the Al Gore global-warming documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth," is the decade's scariest movie. Indeed, it's a mind-boggling disaster epic that draws its special power from the fact that we are both the villains and victims of the story.

Gore-haters and global-warming naysayers will try to dismiss it, but it's hard to imagine how anyone -- no matter what their political or religious persuasion, or personal feelings about the former vice president -- can sit through it and not be profoundly affected.

New York Times Review

NY Times:  CANNES, France, May 23 — "An Inconvenient Truth," Davis Guggenheim's new documentary about the dangers of climate change, is a film that should never have been made. It is, after all, the job of political leaders and policymakers to protect against possible future calamities, to respond to the findings of science and to persuade the public that action must be taken to protect the common interest.

But when this does not happen — and it is hardly a partisan statement to observe that, in the case of global warming, it hasn't — others must take up the responsibility: filmmakers, activists, scientists, even retired politicians. That "An Inconvenient Truth" should not have to exist is a reason to be grateful that it does.

I can't think of another movie in which the display of a graph elicited gasps of horror, but when the red lines showing the increasing rates of carbon-dioxide emissions and the corresponding rise in temperatures come on screen, the effect is jolting and chilling. Photographs of receding ice fields and glaciers — consequences of climate change that have already taken place — are as disturbing as speculative maps of submerged coastlines. The news of increased hurricane activity and warming oceans is all the more alarming for being delivered in Mr. Gore's matter-of-fact, scholarly tone.

Rolling Stone Review

Rolling Stone review:  3-Stars "Humanity is sitting on a time bomb. If the vast majority of the world's scientists are right, we have just ten years to avert a major catastrophe that could send our entire planet's climate system into a tail-spin of epic destruction involving extreme weather, floods, droughts, epidemics and killer heat waves beyond anything we have ever experienced- a catastrophe of our own making. If that sounds like a recipe for serious gloom and doom -- think again. From director Davis Guggenheim comes the Sundance Film Festival hit, "An Inconvenient Truth," which offers a passionate and inspirational look at one man's commitment to expose the myths and misconceptions that surround global warming and inspire actions to prevent it. That man is former Vice President Al Gore, who, in the wake of defeat in the 2000 election, re-set the course of his life to focus on an all-out effort to help save the planet from irrevocable change. In this eye-opening and poignant portrait of Gore and his 'traveling global warming show,' Gore is funny, engaging, open and downright on fire about getting the surprisingly stirring truth about what he calls our 'planetary emergency' out to ordinary citizens before it's too late."

Ebert Review

Roger Ebert summary:  4-Stars:  "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."

Feedback on Ebert's Review:  I've received so many messages about my review of Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" that, frankly, I don't see how the Answer Man can process them. I could print a dozen or a hundred, but that would lead us into an endless loop.

Many are supportive. More are opposed to the movie and just about everything in it, and are written by people who have not seen the movie and will not see it for a variety of reasons, including the theory that it is "liberal propaganda." What I fail to understand is why global warming should be a liberal or conservative issue. It is either happening or is not, and we can either take action to try to slow it, or we cannot. That is why a great many conservatives have agreed with Gore on this.