![]() Broadly, An Inconvenient Truth denounces consumerism, yet asks of its audience no specific sacrifice. Gore’s movie takes shots at Republicans and the oil industry, but by the most amazing coincidence says nothing about the poor example set by conspicuous consumers among the Hollywood elite. As Eric Alterman noted in the Atlantic, David “reviles owners of SUVs as terrorist enablers, yet gives herself a pass when it comes to chartering one of the most wasteful uses of fossil-based fuels imaginable, a private jet.” For David to fly in a private jet from Los Angeles to Washington would burn about as much petroleum as driving a Hummer for a year if she flew back in the private jet, that’s two Hummer-years. Laurie David, doyenne of Rodeo Drive environs, is one of the producers. ![]() But the film flirts with double standards. Why does Gore insist on giving a wrong explanation?Īn Inconvenient Truth comes to the right conclusions about the seriousness of global warming plus we ought to be grateful these days for anything earnest at the cineplex. (See this chemistry page maintained by the carbon dioxide study center at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.) Anyway, you don’t really need to know how greenhouse gases function. It is the chemistry of carbon dioxide, not its density, that matters. ![]() The main atmospheric gas, nitrogen, does not absorb energy on those wavelengths. Carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas produced by fossil-fuel combustion and forest fires, has molecular bonds that vibrate on the same wavelengths at which infrared energy radiates upward from Earth’s surface the vibration warms the CO 2, trapping heat. For instance, Gore spends a while saying Earth’s atmosphere is relatively thin, then somberly declares, “The problem we now face is that this thin layer of atmosphere is being thickened by huge quantities of carbon dioxide.” Thickness is not the issue. Fewer details might have made the movie more effective, especially given that some details are off. 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.Īn Inconvenient Truth spends too little time on what audiences might do about global warming, too much time trying to impress us with the Ask Mr. ![]() 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. The picture the movie paints is always worst-case scenario. But they make the political part feel contrived, since Gore scarcely suffers solitude he has a wonderful, loving family and participates in many public causes.Īs 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 scenes are meant to convey our inability to imagine the burden the former vice president bears. When Gore isn’t being applauded, Guggenheim presents him as alone and melancholy: walking alone, musing alone, standing alone in a darkened barn. And Katherine Harris may be a natural disaster, but what’s she doing in a movie about climate change? If director Davis Guggenheim wanted to film a biography of Gore, he should simply have done so. The political sequences have all the heft of a video press release: Time and again we are shown crowds looking adoringly at Gore, or cheering him on. (I attended an early effort, in the late 1980s.) Mostly we see Gore talking and pointing at charts, interspersed with detours into the former vice president’s political career: the Florida recount, Gore’s stump-speech telling of his son’s auto accident and his sister’s tragic death from lung cancer. About two-thirds is a quasi-documentary of Gore presenting to an audience the greenhouse slide show he’s been giving for nearly 20 years. An Inconvenient Truth is worthy in content, admirable in intent, and motivated by the sense of civic responsibility Hollywood on the whole has abandoned. As someone who has come to the view that greenhouse-effect science is now persuasive, I’m glad Gore made a movie that will help average voters understand the subject.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |