Phases review: An Inconvenient Truth

My roommate got a postcard for 2 free tickets to An Inconvenient Truth in the mail today.

We saw it yesterday for $5.75 each.

I'm like "AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAaaaah shit bastards."

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Why should a Malaysian watch a movie by Al Gore? To most of us, he’s probably the stupid cowboy who visited and made some ill-informed remarks about reformasi back in the 1990s, and then lost the American presidency to another stupid cowboy. Now, however, he’s given up politics for the agenda of saving the world.

This movie is based on Gore’s book of the same title and the lectures he has been giving on climate change, a.k.a. global warming. It’s not a feature film so much as a sermon. It’s not even an ordinary documentary, since those generally have a lot of footage of nature plus a few diagrams. This has some footage of nature, some diagrams, and a lot of one guy talking. Gore is a good narrator, however, and the nature shots are spectacular.

To convince a lay audience that something radical is happening in a scientific field, they have to be shown what’s normal for comparison – if a space alien visited Earth in December 2004, how would it know that tsunamis weren’t seasonal occurrences? The movie does this quite effectively. He calls up a graph tracking atmospheric carbon dioxide levels from 300,000 years back (from air bubbles preserved in polar ice). The graph traces zigzags several millennia wide and less than a metre deep. When it reaches the 20th century, however, the trace goes up and up and up to the ceiling about five metres high.

The Antarctic section is another memorable demonstration of the strangeness of the changes our planet is undergoing. It starts with a flyover of one of the ice shelves hanging off the southern continent, the narrator telling us that it’s seven hundred feet high. It’s bigger than Malaysia. And yet, only a few years ago, scientists were stunned to find it honeycombed by pools of melted water. The pools absorbed the sun’s heat much more than the ice, and so kept expanding until the whole thing broke apart into the ocean. He also shows ‘before’ and ‘after’ photos of glaciers all over the world, vanishing. “Soon there will be no more snows of Kilimanjaro.”

To further push the point that this is a global issue, the movie spends some time on Gore’s visits to China, lecturing in packed halls. He’s shown meeting with PRC scientists and government officials, asking them about pollution controls and the state of the environment. To anyone who’s been there, as I have, the gray smog-filled skies in the background are painfully reminiscent.

My point here is that we should watch this movie and should care about climate change, even though we’re not a big industrial nation. For developing countries there are two choices. As we build new factories and power plants, we can either do it with newer, cleaner, technology, or repeat the mistakes of the giants and get caught in the same traps – and with less money and resources to pull ourselves out of them.

One of the movie’s pitfalls is the overuse of Gore. (Yes, that was meant as a pun.) A good portion of the movie is taken up by shots of his face. He spends several minutes talking about his son’s near-fatal accident at age six, and another several minutes reminiscing about how he lost the 2000 election to George W. Bush. There are also promiscuous shots of his Apple laptop, since he’s on that company’s board of directors.

A personal story that did resonate with the message of the movie was that of his sister’s death. His father, who was also a senator, also farmed beef cattle and tobacco. His sister, who started smoking as a teenager, died of lung cancer. He alludes to tobacco and cancer several other times as an example of another cause-and-effect relationship that was long hidden from the public because a powerful industry didn’t want it known.

The end credits are worth staying to watch because they include practical advice for those who felt that the message was worth hearing.
(paraphrased from memory):

“Walk, ride a bicycle, or take public transportation instead of driving.”
“Buy energy-efficient applicances.”
“Write to your political representatives and ask them to do something about climate change.”
“If they don’t listen, run for office.”
“If you believe in prayer, pray that people can find the strength to change.”

Amen, friend.