Global warming and climate change may seem like boring topics, but in the last few years it has become a hot topic in popular media. While films such as The Day after Tomorrow scared audiences with its Apocalypse-like scenes, most scientists dismissed the science as inaccurate and doom-laden. But now an unlikely candidate, former presidential candidate Al Gore, has taken it onto himself to show the real sciences and threats of global warming, and it is even scarier than the dramatised, alarmist action of The Day after Tomorrow.
Michael Moore has made documentaries sexy. Gore takes his passion for climate changes into Moore’s realm, and the result is a surprising success that is anything but boring. An Inconvenient Truth, which opens in South Africa this week, is centred on Gore’s travelling slideshow, which he claims to have shown a 1 000 times. The film premiered earlier the year at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival. When it opened in the USA in May, it became the fourth most successful documentary of all time. Gore also released a book with the same title as the film in June.
Gore has always been fascinated by climate change. During his rise as a politician it was never far from his mind, and in 1992, before he became vice-president his book, Earth in the Balance, reached the New York Times bestseller list. As part of the Clinton administration he helped broker the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, only to see his work go down the toilet when it was not ratified by the United States due to opposition in the Senate. The new administration became openly hostile to the protocol after George¹s Bush¹s election as president. Off course president George Bush and Gore has a history together and Gore handles the friction between the two politicians’ differences with humour, which sometimes belies the serious message he is trying to convey. One of the favourite lines of the movie is Gore’s introduction to himself: ”Hi, I am Al Gore and I used to be the next president.”
He shocks audiences by showing them now and then pictures of glaciers in Patagonia and Kilimanjaro. The difference is startling in seeing how the glaciers have deteriorated. The message is clear: if this is what these areas look like now, what it will it look like in 50 years if the decline continues. Especially discontenting is a chart that shows climate change on earth for the past 650 000. Researchers at the Physics Institute at the University of Bern and the European Project for Ice Coring in Antarctic drew up the chart by using the data from the extracted ice cores from the Antarctic. The ice cores showed carbon dioxide concentrations higher than at any time during the past 650 000 years. In fact, as Gore demonstrated with a lot of song and dance, it is off the charts. A large part of the film is dedicated to melting ice in the glaciers.
Gore shows how the majority of sunlight is reflected off the brilliant white glaciers and just bounces back into space. But once the ice melts, the opposite happens. The water now absorbs the majority of sunlight, contributing to warming our oceans. The film has wowed critics, despite being built around Gore¹s global warming slideshow presentation. People expected it to be boring. Instead they found it gripping. But the film might only be preaching to the converted. President George Bush said he doubts whether he would see the film. US senator James Inhofe, whose infamous quote of comparing global warming to one of the greatest hoaxes in human history features in the film, compared the film to Adolf Hitler’s book Mein Kampf.
Scientists who had seen the film or read the book agree that Gore’s science for the most part in the film is spot-on. Associated Press spoke to 19 scientists and none could find a major glitch in the film, although they sometimes differed on the presentations of facts. The film has already been parodied on a variety of American shows and despite its opponents claiming its unimportance the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a non-profit public policy organisation which is funded by ExxonMobil and the Ford Motor Company Fund among other big corporations, ran two television advertisements using the tagline ”Carbon Dioxide – They call it pollution; We call it life,” in retaliation to the film. In South Africa An Inconvenient Truth, was also shown the opening night film at the 27th Durban International Film Festival in June. But it will officially open on circuit on September 18, where it will be shown in most theatres.