What happens to a candidate after an unsuccessful run for the Presidency? Thinking of names such as Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis, and Bob Dole the answer would seem to be not much unless you want to be the new spokesperson for Viagra. There could be more going on behind the scenes, but at least to the public eye, these men have all but disappeared from the radar.

Al Gore was denied the Presidency in 2000. Whether it was on the up and up or not no longer matters – the facts are what they are. What is really extra-ordinary is that he was not content to disappear from the limelight and watch everything he fought for all these years wither on the vine. Instead, he took the opportunity of having so much free time to make his case to audiences across the nation and around the world. The topic so near and dear to his heart? The environment, specifically global warming.

An Inconvenient Truth is based on all of his lectures. The content is basically the case he has been making for quite some time, revised for the big screen. The revisions aren’t sensational, it’s just taking the presentation that was directed toward the intimate setting of a live audience and translating it for a motion-picture audience. This meant updating information where necessary and enhancing his presentation materials. In some cases, the presentation needed to be done a bit differently. The majority of the film is still Gore talking to a live audience, it’s just been made more friendly toward the non-live audience viewing it in theaters or now on DVD.

An Inconvenient Truth opens with the images of nature with narration provided by Gore. It then cuts to a presentation he is making to a variety of audiences. The topic, of course, is global warming. With the background of Hurricane Katrina and other weather-related disasters, Gore introduces his position on the topic.

As an idealistic young member of Congress, Gore was naive enough to believe that once he made this case, everyone in Congress would be as concerned as he was. That wasn’t the case, and it was largely what motivated him to go into politics himself.

Most of An Inconvenient Truth consists of a lecture by Gore in which he lays out the case for climate change. Specifically, he sets out to raise the alarms among the populace that we’re rapidly approaching a time when we won’t be able to stop the effects of the damage we’ve inflicted on our planet.

Intercut with Gore’s lecture are photos of people and places that stop An Inconvenient Truth from becoming a boring documentary. He uses facts illustrated so anyone can understand to show how we’ve entered a period of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that has never been registered before in over 650,000 years they looked back. This includes warming periods from the ice ages. He also clearly shows the correlation between that and global temperatures and the projections for the next fifty years.

Gore is humorous at times, telling the story of a science class where a student asked if Africa and South America were ever one continent after looking at a map of the two next to each other. Gore uses this anecdote well to demonstrate how the prevailing wisdom of one generation is changed as we gain more and more scientific knowledge. This keeps the language of An Inconvenient Truth from being difficult to follow. The facts are laid out in a way that just about anyone can understand. The creators of the Simpsons donated a cartoon on global warming to the film that has the same tone as the television show, also delivering a point about the environment with acerbic humor.

Gore touches on information most of us have heard, such as the polar ice caps and the population decline of the polar bear as indications of the damage we have done to the fragile balance in our world. He also delves into things that haven’t been widely reported to us, such as the disappearance of the snow on Mount Kilimanjaro and the disappearances of glaciers across Europe.

There is a downside to the DVD. Gore does take on the Bush Administration’s horrid record on the environment. That makes it easy for critics and deniers to say he’s just postulation to get jabs in at the person he sees as being in the White House unjustly. Gore doesn’t come off as a sore loser to me, but rather as someone who took what happened and decided to do what he could about a topic he was passionate about. Still, the direct jabs at the Bush Administration is fodder for his detractors and those in denial.

It’s really hard to deny Climate Change with the facts that are laid out in An Inconvenient Truth. And if we are fast approaching a time when we won’t be able to stop the planet from warming up and flooding our coastal cities and other low-lying areas (think, Florida), does Gore present any solutions? There are some, but the gist of this angle seems to be that we managed to stop the damage we were doing to the ozone layer surrounding the planet and we can do the same now.

The other criticism that I have is that portions of the film come off more like Al Gore’s biography rather than focusing on the topic of global warming. While I do think knowing more about Gore’s motivations in this area gives him an increased credibility, parts of this are also self-serving.

To stave off critics, Gore manages to make the point in a quote I like quite a bit: It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it. The quote is from Upton Sinclair and was about conditions in the U.S. Meat Packing Industry, but also works well to global warming. It makes the case that the same people who saw no problems with the meat packing industry were those making money off of it. Just as those who say there is no global warming – or that humans might not be the cause of it – are those who fear that altering their way of doing things would cut into their bottom line.

The update feature on the DVD is nice. Gore talks about the increase in evidence that has accumulated in the year between when the film was made and when the DVD was released. There are some terrific extras on the DVD and it’s worth checking out, if not having in your home.

I recommend An Inconvenient Truth to everyone, even the disbelievers. Watch this and at least think about the charts Gore presents and verify what they say at an independent source such as factcheck.org: http://www.factcheck.org/society/can_you_prevent_global_warming.html. It’s good to get in the habit of always checking your sources for any topic and see who is providing the money behind the conclusions they draw, no matter what the conclusions are. Just like there were scientists being paid by the tobacco industry to say smoking didn’t cause the host of health problems we now know they do, there are scientists on the payrolls of corporations who don’t want to make the changes that might be necessary to curtail our current climate crisis.

Before you listen to anyone and dismiss climate change, check out An Inconvenient Truth. The facts are laid out in a way that is pretty hard to dismiss, and are pretty easy to understand. Gore is a terrific speaker, and although I thought there were some issue with it being focused on his personal life, the message he’s trying to get out is way too important to the future generations of this planet to ignore.


SPECIAL FEATURES:

• Commentary with Director Davis Guggenheim
• Commentary with Producers Laurie David, Lawrence Bender, Scott Z. Burns, and Lesley Chilcott
• An Update with Former Vice-President Al Gore
• The Making of An Inconvenient Truth
• “I Need to Wake Up” Music Video by Melissa Ethridge