Al Gore's film "An Inconvenient Truth"



1.      Al Gore
Albert Arnold “Al” Gore, Jr. (born March 31, 1948) served as the 45th Vice President of the United States from 1993 to 2001 under President Bill Clinton. He was the Democratic Party nominee for President in the 2000 U.S. presidential election.
Gore is currently an author, businessman, and environmental activist. He was previously an elected official for 24 years, representing Tennessee in the U.S. House of Representatives (1977-85), and later in the U.S. Senate (1985-93), and finally becoming Vice President in 1993. In the 2000 presidential election, Gore won the popular vote by more than 500,000 votes. However, he ultimately lost the Electoral College, and the election, to Republican George W. Bush when the U.S. Supreme Court settled the legal controversy over the Florida vote recount by ruling 5-4 in favor of Bush. It was the only time in history that the Supreme Court may have determined the outcome of a presidential election.
He is a founder and current chair of the Alliance for Climate Protection.
Gore has received a number of awards including the Nobel Peace Prize (joint award with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) (2007), a Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album (2009) for his book An Inconvenient Truth, a Primetime Emmy Award for Current TV (2007), and a Webby Award (2005). Gore was also the subject of the Academy Award-winning (2007) documentary An Inconvenient Truth in 2006. In 2007 he was named a runner-up for Time’s 2007 Person of the Year.


An Inconvenient Truth

“The world we take for granted may not be here for our children.”
Albert Gore

An Inconvenient Truth is a 2006 documentary film directed by Davis Guggenheim about former United States Vice President Al Gore's campaign to educate citizens about global warming via a comprehensive slide show that, by his own estimate, he has given more than a thousand times.
Since the film's release, An Inconvenient Truth has been credited for raising international public awareness of climate change and reenergizing the environmental movement. The documentary has also been included in science curricula in schools around the world.

Synopsis

Throughout the movie, Gore discusses the scientific opinion on climate change, as well as the present and future effects of global warming and stresses that climate change "is really not a political issue, so much as a moral one", describing the consequences he believes global climate change will produce if the amount of human-generated greenhouse gases is not significantly reduced in the very near future. Gore also presents Antarctic ice coring data showing CO levels higher now than in the past 650,000 years.
The film includes segments intended to refute critics who say that global warming is unproven or that warming will be insignificant. For example, Gore discusses the possibility of the collapse of a major ice sheet in Greenland or in West Antarctica, either of which could raise global sea levels by approximately 20 feet (6 m), flooding coastal areas and producing 100 million refugees. Melt water from Greenland, because of its lower salinity, could then halt the currents that keep northern Europe warm and quickly trigger dramatic local cooling there. It also contains various short animated projections of what could happen to different animals more vulnerable to climate change.
The documentary ends with Gore arguing that if appropriate actions are taken soon, the effects of global warming can be successfully reversed by releasing less CO and planting more vegetation to consume existing CO. Gore calls upon his viewers to learn how they can help him in these efforts. Gore concludes the film by saying:
"Each one of us is a cause of global warming, but each one of us can make choices to change that with the things we buy, the electricity we use, the cars we drive; we can make choices to bring our individual carbon emissions to zero. The solutions are in our hands, we just have to have the determination to make it happen. We have everything that we need to reduce carbon emissions, everything but political will. But in America, the will to act is a renewable resource."
He suggests to viewers things at home they can do to combat climate change, including "recycle", "speak up in your community", "try to buy a hybrid vehicle" and "encourage everyone you know to watch this movie."
Gore's book of the same title was published concurrently with the theatrical release of the documentary. The book contains additional information, scientific analysis, and Gore's commentary on the issues presented in the documentary. A 2007 documentary entitled An Update with Former Vice President Al Gore features Gore discussing additional information that came to light after the film was completed, such as Hurricane Katrina, coral reef depletion, glacial earthquake activity on the Greenland ice sheet, wildfires, and trapped methane gas release associated with permafrost melting.


2.      Read the fragment of the transcript to the film. Speak on:

a) actual effects of global warming that are causing great concern;
b) the two basic factors that cause a collision between our civilization and the Earth;
c) the side effects and potential hazards of the scientific and technological progress.

Effects of Global Warming

Europe has just had a year very similar to the one we've had where they say nature has just been crazy, all kinds of unusual catastrophes like a nature hike through the book of Revelations.
Flooding in Asia, Mumbai, India this past July (2005): 37 inches of rain in 24 hours, by far the largest downpour that any city in India has ever received. A lot of flooding in China also. Global warming paradoxically causes not only more flooding, but also more droughts. This neighboring province right next door had a severe drought at the same time these areas were flooded. One of the reasons for this has to do with the fact that global warming not only increases precipitation worldwide, but it also relocates the precipitation. Focus most of all on this part of Africa just on the edge of the Sahara. Unbelievable tragedies have been unfolding there and there are a lot reasons for it. Darfur and Niger are among those tragedies. One of the factors that has been compounding this is the lack of rainfall and the increasing drought. This is Lake Chad, once one of the largest lakes in the world. It has dried up over the last few decades to almost nothing. That has been complicating the other problems that they also have. The second reason why this is a paradox: Global warming creates more evaporation of the ocean that seeds the clouds, but it also sucks moisture out of the soil. Soil evaporation increases dramatically with higher temperatures. And that has consequences for us in the United States as well.

Civilization and Earth

We are witnessing a collision between our civilization and the Earth. There are two factors that are causing this collision.
1.    Population - when the baby boom generation was born after WW II the population had just crossed the 2 billion mark. I'm in my 50s and it's already gone to 6,5 billion. If I reach the demographic expectation for the baby boomers, it will go over 9 billion. If it takes 10,000 generations to reach 2 billion and then, in one human lifetime, ours, it goes from 2 billion to 9 billion, something profoundly different is going on right now. We're putting more pressure on the Earth. Most of it's in the poorer nations of the world. It puts pressure on food demand. It puts pressure on water demand. It puts pressure on vulnerable natural resources, and this pressure is one of the reasons we have seen such devastation of the forest, not only tropical but elsewhere. It is a political issue. This is the border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic. One set of policies here. Another set of policies here. Much of it comes not only from cutting, but also burning. Almost 30% of the CO2 that goes up into the atmosphere each year is from forest burning.
2.    The scientific and technological revolution is a great blessing in that it has given us tremendous benefits in medicine and communications. But this new power that we have also brings a responsibility to think about its consequences. Here's a formula to think about. Old habits plus old technology have predictable consequences. Old habits that are hard to change plus new technology can have dramatically altered consequences. Warfare with spears and bows and arrows and rifles and machine guns, that's one thing. But then a new technology came: Atomic bomb blast. We have to think differently about war because the new technologies so completely transformed the consequences of that old habit that we can't just mindlessly continue the patterns of the past. In the same way we have always exploited the Earth for sustenance. For most of our existence we used relatively simple tools: the plow, the tractor. But even tools like shovels are different now. A shovel used to be like this. Shovels have gotten bigger and every year they get more powerful. Our ability to have an effect on the surface of the Earth is utterly transformed. You can say the same thing about irrigation which is a great thing, but when we divert rivers without considering the consequences, sometimes the rivers never reach the sea. There were two rivers in central Asia that were used by the former Soviet Union that were used for irrigating cotton fields unwisely. The Aral Sea was fed by them used to be the fourth largest inland sea in the world. When I went there I saw this strange sight of an enormous fishing fleet resting in the sand. Making mistakes in our dealings with nature can have bigger consequences now because our technologies are often bigger than the human scale. When you put them all together they made us a force of nature. This is also a political issue.


Three Misconceptions

1.    Isn't there a disagreement among scientists about whether the problem is real or not? Actually, not really. There was a massive study of every scientific article written on global warming in the last ten years. They took a big sample of 10 percent, 928 articles. And you know the number of those that disagreed with the scientific consensus that we're causing global warming and that is a serious problem out of the 928: Zero. The misconception that there is disagreement about the science has been deliberately created by a relatively small number of people. One of their internal memos leaked and here is what it said according to the press. Their objective is to reposition global warming as a theory rather than fact. One of their memos leaked 4 years ago. They said, "Doubt is our product, since it is the best means of creating a controversy in the public's mind." But have they succeeded? You'll remember that there were 928 reviewed articles. Zero percent disagreed with the consensus. There was another study of all the articles in the popular press. Over the last fourteen years they listed a sample of 636. More than half of them said, "Well, we are not sure. It could be a problem, may not be a problem." So no wonder people are confused. Hey! What did you find out? Working for whom? Scientists have an independent obligation to respect and present the truth as they see it. "Why do you directly contradict yourself in the testimony you're giving about this scientific question?"
"That last paragraph in that section was not a paragraph which I wrote. That was added to my testimony." "If they force you to change a scientific conclusion it is a form of scientific fraud by them." "I've seen scientists who were persecuted, ridiculed, deprived of jobs, income simply because the facts they discovered led them to an inconvenient truth that they insisted on telling." "He worked for the American Petroleum Institute and in January of 2001 he was put by the president in charge of environmental policy. He received a memo from the EPA* that warned about global warming. He had no scientific training whatsoever, but he took it upon himself to overrule the scientists. I want to know what this guy's handwriting looks like. This is the memo from the EPA. These are his actual pen strokes. He said, "No, you can't say this. This is just speculation." This was embarrassing to the White House. So this fellow resigned a few days later. The day after he resigned he went to work for Exxon-Mobil. You know more than a hundred years ago, Upton Sinclair wrote this: "It's difficult to get a man to understand something if his salary depends on him not understanding it."

2.    The second misconception: Do we have to choose between the economy and the environment? This is a big one. A lot of people say we do. I was trying to convince the first Bush administration to go to the Earth Summit. They organized a big White House conference to say, "We're on top of this." One of these viewgraphs caught my attention and I want to talk about it for a minute. Here is the choice we have to make according to this group. We have here a scale that balances two different things. On one side, we have gold bars. Mmmmm. Don't they look good! I'd just like to have some of those gold bars. On the other side of the scale we have. The Entire Planet! Hmm? I think this is a false choice for two reasons. Number one, if we don't have a planet. The other reason is that if we do the right thing, then we are going to create a lot of wealth and we are going to create a lot of jobs, because doing the right thing moves us forward. I've probably given this slide show a thousand times. I've tried to identify all those things in people's minds that serve as obstacles to them understanding this. Whenever I feel like I've identified an obstacle, I try to take it apart, roll it away, remove it, and blow it up. I set myself a goal: communicate this real clearly. The only way I know to do it is city by city, person by person, family by family. And I have faith that pretty soon enough minds are changed that we cross a threshold. Let me give you an example of the wrong way to balance the economy and the environment. One part of this issue involves automobiles. Japan has mileage standards up here. Europe plans to pass Japan. Our allies in Australia and Canada are leaving us behind. Here's where we are. There is a reason for it. They say that we can't protect the environment too much without threatening the economy and threatening the auto makers, because auto makers in China might come in and just steal all our market. Well, here is where China's auto mileage standards are now. We can't sell our cars in China today because we don't meet China's mileage standard. California has taken some initiative to have higher mileage cars sold in California. The auto companies have sued California to prevent this law from taking effect because as they point out, eleven years from now this would mean California would have to have cars for sale that are as efficient eleven years from now as China's are today: clearly too onerous a provision to comply with. Is this helping our companies to succeed? Actually, if you look at who's doing well in the world it's the companies that are building more efficient cars. Our companies are in deep trouble.

3.    Final misconception: If we accept that this problem is real, maybe it is just too big to do anything about. There are a lot of people who go straight from denial to despair without pausing on the intermediate step of actually doing something about the problem. That's what I would like to finish with: the fact that we already know everything we need to know to effectively address this problem. We've got to do a lot of things, not just one. Increasing end use efficiency we can remove global warming pollution that would otherwise be put into the atmosphere.
·      More efficient electrical appliances
·      Higher mileage cars
·      Other transport efficiency
·      Renewable technology
They all add up and pretty soon we are below our 1970 emission. We have everything we need, save perhaps political will. In America, political will is a renewable resource. We have the ability to do this. Each one of us is a cause of global warming, but each of us can make choices to change that with the things we buy, with the electricity we use, the cars we drive. We can make choices to bring our individual carbon emissions to zero. The solutions are in our hands. We just have to have the determination to make them happen.


Answer the following questions

1.        Who creates obstacles in people’s minds to understanding the problem of global warming?
2.        What case does Al Gore make against the choice between the economy and the environment?
3.         What actually needs to be done about the problem of global warming pollution?
4.        What choices can we make to bring our individual carbon emissions to zero?
5.         What indicates that the United States, though not having ratified Kyoto, is stepping up to taking the initiative?
6.        What historical facts does Al Gore refer to prove that American people are capable of taking on global warming?
7.        Why do you think that throughout the film Al Gore keeps emphasizing that fighting global warming is a moral issue?
8.        What aim did he pursue by writing books and making the film?






*EPA – Environmental Protection agency. A U.S. governmental organization that established rules and standards for protecting the environment e.g. against pollution. It was started in 1970.

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