Make no doubt about it: Al Gore is the star of this film. And he acquits himself very well. Committed to telling the world about global warming since his college days, he continued presenting his itinerant slide show after winning (but not being elected to) the Presidency in 2000. He comes across in this film as a witty, warm, knowledgeable, intelligent human being with a very important message: Global warming is real and we have a very short time to do something about it before something drastic happens to the earth's ecosystem and its inhabitants.
Roger Ebert has given An Inconvenient Truth a Four-star review writing in the Chicago Sun-Times:
“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.”
The atmosphere is a very small, very fragile part of the earth. It is important to remember that earth didn't have an atmosphere in the early years of its existence. Only gradually was one formed by plants and animals that breathed carbon dioxide and generated oxygen. Al Gore's presentation of his slide show draws on some very impressive research and includes some amazing graphics displays that are state of the art. They've seemingly done the impossible by making the presentation of these graphics so razzle-dazzle as to not be boring. In fact the amazing accomplishment of this movie is that it presents what is essentially scientific research in a way as to not be boring.
Al, wisely, intersperses some of his own personal story to break up the ponderousness of the factual presentation. We see him going through security at an airport, driving his car to the family ranch, working on his laptop. As he says, "The debate is over." Reputable scientists are nearly unanimous that global warming is happening and human beings are the cause of it. Greenhouse gas emissions (carbon dioxide mainly) are trapping the sun's rays and heating up the atmosphere, which is causing melting of the polar ice caps, more frequent and violent hurricanes and tornadoes and rising sea levels among other anomalies. Torrential rains are becoming more common as are parched and arid areas.
Data from ice cores from the Antarctic takes the research back 650,000 years so we don't have to rely just on data taken since temperatures started to be recorded a hundred or so years ago. By far the biggest danger is the disintegration of the Greenland and Antarctic ice shelves. If these immense chunks of ice were to become unhinged from their moorings and slide into the sea, all seacoast cities and communities would be obliterated affecting a billion people worldwide.
One cannot help wondering what the world would have been like if Al Gore instead of George W Bush had been elected President in 2000. He is such a decent man; one wonders how the Republicans were able to, if not assassinate his character (which they did to Bill Clinton), assassinate his personality instead. But that is their modus operandi! They'll smear an opponent in any way they can. Instead of the reasonableness which the Democrats offer, the Republicans offer the certainty of a true believer and they appeal to true believers everywhere. God is (according to them) on their side so anything that is done to further their cause is justified. Sound familiar? Their cause includes a continued devotion to oil so they pay scientists to cast doubt on the validity of the global warming scenario.
Gore would have implemented measures to ameliorate the effects of global warming and get the US away from dependence on oil. Bush started a war to secure America's oil supply via access to Iraq's second largest proven oil reserves in the world. The world is the loser. Instead of civilization taking a step forward, it has entered a new Dark Ages. The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, has been terminated by the Bush Administration and the American people, at least a majority of them, seem to be in favor of it. After all, if they weren't, in a democracy, they wouldn't have voted for George W Bush and filled Congress with Republicans.
