“I used to be the next president of the United States.” So Al Gore introduces himself to audiences in An Inconvenient Truth, a documentary revealing hitherto unglimpsed (at least in this country) evidence that Gore has charm, ease, a sense of humour and even a personality.
It also reveals the state of global warming, and why this is a huge threat to human life (or at least comfort) on Earth. It largely reproduces a roadshow Gore has taken around the US and to other parts of the world, using a range of high-tech projections to explain climate change, how it happens, what its consequences are and what we could do about it. Apart from the gadgetry, Gore is the strongest suit of this roadshow: he is a persuasive activist for something to be done about global warming.
The graphics are a show in themselves; there’s even an animated segment illustrating the pathetically misleading attempts by the US government to assure its citizens that global warming is not a problem. A lot of graphs climb across a vast screen that would possibly have seemed more at home reflecting images of a cast-of-thousands epic; Gore is dwarfed by it. But that, too, he turns to good advantage, using a platformed crane to hoist himself up as the figures on this looming disaster climb ever higher.
Between such segments from the Gore presentation are the usual kinds of filler with which documentary-makers pad out their works. There is Gore on a plane, busy at his laptop; Gore taking a phone call, and so on. This is less than riveting, but I suppose they needed some kind of starch to insert among the protein of fact, or we might feel overwhelmed by it all.
In fact, one is overwhelmed by An Inconvenient Truth — one emerges convinced by Gore’s argument. He says that of nearly 100 academic articles assessed not one questioned the reality of global warming, whereas a similar survey of press articles revealed a goodly proportion that still referred to it as merely a theory, or simply called it a controversy, without coming down on either side of the argument.
This is a little disingenuous, in that academia is more likely to be conformist when certain ideas enter its mainstream; the system of peer review and supervision generates a uniformity of views. The media, on the other hand, is keen to sniff out “controversy” even when it has not fully germinated, and will tend to present both sides of an argument without doing a nationwide survey of experts to see how many of them believe something and how many the opposite.
Nonetheless, this feels rather like the American Christian right’s constant assertion that the evolution of species is just a theory, neglecting to mention that all we have to go on, in any matter, are competing theories, and that creationism has even less evidence to support it. Facts are a matter of the broadest consensus, based on the most effective descriptions of whatever it is being studied. We know nothing for sure — nothing in the sense of an absolute truth. There are only relative truths, things that are more true than other things.
That said, it is hard to work out whether Gore is right or not. Is humanity and its precious environment so threatened by global warming? And, even if global warming is a fact, is it what scientists call “anthropogenic” — in other words, caused by human activity? A scan through the available material on the internet leaves one bewildered and not knowing quite what to believe. Amid the cacophony of dispute, I could find no convincing refutation of the existence of anthropogenic global warming, but we must, at least, entertain the notion that this is a big scare story or not as bad as it’s painted. We must have the argument and come to some conclusions.
Yet, what does swing it in favour of Gore’s view of global warming is the fact that US President George W Bush and the money-grabbing oil-baron cronies he works for are so busy denying it all.