An Inconvenient Truth

Synopsis: A documentary on the threat that climate change poses to the Earth - it's causes, effects and history and potential solutions to it. Presented by Al Gore through a lecture that he has given to audiences across the globe, plus through more introspective moments.
Genre: Documentary
Director(s): Davis Guggenheim
Production: Paramount Classics
  Won 2 Oscars. Another 31 wins & 11 nominations.
 
IMDB:
7.5
Metacritic:
75
Rotten Tomatoes:
93%
PG
Year:
2006
96 min
$23,727,472
Website
3,783 Views


You look at that river

gently flowing by.

You notice the leaves

rustling with the wind.

You hear the birds.

You hear the tree frogs.

In the distance, you hear a cow.

You feel the grass.

The mud gives a little bit

on the river bank.

It's quiet. It's peaceful.

And all of a sudden,

it's a gear shift inside you.

And it's like taking a deep breath

and going,

"Oh, yeah, I forgot about this."

This is the first picture of the Earth

from space

that any of us ever saw.

It was taken on Christmas Eve, 1968

during the Apollo 8 Mission.

...within relatively comfortable

boundaries.

But we are filling up that thin shell

of atmosphere with pollution.

Ladies and gentlemen,

Mr. Al Gore.

I am Al Gore.

I used to be the next president

of the United States Of America.

I don't find that particularly funny.

I've been trying to tell this story

for a long time,

and I feel as if I've failed to get

the message across.

I was in politics for a long time

and I'm proud of my service.

You gotta be kidding me.

This is a national disaster.

Get every doggone Greyhound bus line

in the country,

and get their... moving to

New Orleans.

That's them thinking small, man,

and this is a major, major, major deal.

What do you need right now?

There are good people,

who are in politics in both parties

who hold this at arm's length

because if they acknowledge it

and recognize it,

then the moral imperative to make

big changes

is inescapable.

... unless you fix the biggest damn crisis

in the history of this country.

...scouted out landing spots

and they lost radio contact

when they went around

the dark side of the moon.

And there was inevitably

some suspense.

Then when they came back

in radio contact,

they looked up

and they snapped this picture,

and it became known as Earth Rise.

And that one picture exploded

in the consciousness of humankind.

It lead to dramatic changes.

Within 18 months of this picture,

the modern environmental movement

had begun.

The next picture was taken on the last

of the Apollo missions,

Apollo 17.

This one was taken

on December 11, 1972,

and it is the most commonly published

photograph in all of history.

And it's the only picture of the Earth

from space that we have

where the sun was directly

behind the spacecraft

so that the Earth is fully lit up

and not partly in darkness.

The next image I'm gonna show you

has almost never been seen.

It was taken by a spacecraft

called The Galileo

that went out to explore

the solar system.

And as it was leaving Earth's gravity,

it turned its cameras around

and took a time lapse picture

of one day's worth of rotation,

here compressed into 24 seconds.

Isn't that beautiful?

This image is a magical image in a way.

It was made by a friend of mine,

Tom Van Sant.

He took 3,000 separate

satellite pictures

taken over a three-year period,

digitally stitched together.

And he chose images

that would give a cloud-free view

of every square inch

of the Earth's surface.

All of the land masses

accurately portrayed.

When that's all spread out,

it becomes an iconic image.

I show this because I wanna tell you

a story about two teachers I had.

One that I didn't like that much,

the other who is a real hero to me.

I had a grade school teacher

who taught geography

by pulling a map of the world down

in front of the blackboard.

I had a classmate in the sixth grade

who raised his hand

and he pointed to the outline

of the east coast of South America

and he pointed

to the west coast of Africa

and he asked,

"Did they ever fit together?"

And he asked,

"Did they ever fit together?"

And the teacher said,

"Of course not. That's the most

ridiculous thing I've ever heard."

That student went on to become

a drug addict and a ne'er-do-well.

The teacher went on to become

science advisor

in the current administration.

But, you know,

the teacher was actually reflecting

the conclusion of the scientific

establishment of that time.

Continents are so big,

obviously they don't move.

But, actually, as we now know,

they did move.

They moved apart from one another.

But at one time they did,

in fact, fit together.

But that assumption was a problem.

It reflected the well-known wisdom

that what gets us into trouble

is not what we don't know,

it's what we know for sure

that just ain't so.

This is actually an important point,

believe it or not,

because there is another

such assumption

that a lot of people have in their minds

right now about global warming

that just ain't so.

The assumption is something like this.

The Earth is so big

we can't possibly have

any lasting harmful impact

on the Earth's environment.

And maybe that was true at one time,

but it's not anymore.

And one of the reasons

it's not true anymore

is that the most vulnerable part

of the Earth's ecological system

is the atmosphere.

Vulnerable because it's so thin.

My friend, the late Carl Sagan,

used to say,

"If you had a big globe

with a coat of varnish on it,

"the thickness of that varnish

relative to that globe

"is pretty much the same

"as the thickness

of the Earth's atmosphere

"compared to the Earth itself."

And it's thin enough

that we are capable

of changing its composition.

That brings up the basic science

of global warming.

And I'm not gonna spend a lot of time

on this because you know it well.

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Al Gore

Albert Arnold Gore Jr. (born March 31, 1948) is an American politician and environmentalist who served as the 45th Vice President of the United States from 1993 to 2001. Gore was Bill Clinton's running mate in their successful campaign in 1992, and the pair was re-elected in 1996. Near the end of Clinton's second term, Gore was selected as the Democratic nominee for the 2000 presidential election but lost the election in a very close race after a Florida recount. After his term as vice-president ended in 2001, Gore remained prominent as an author and environmental activist, whose work in climate change activism earned him (jointly with the IPCC) the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007. Gore was an elected official for 24 years. He was a Representative from Tennessee (1977–85) and from 1985 to 1993 served as one of the state's Senators. He served as Vice President during the Clinton administration from 1993 to 2001. The 2000 presidential election was one of the closest presidential races in history. Gore won the popular vote, but after a controversial election dispute over a Florida recount (settled by the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled 5–4 in favor of Bush), he lost the election to Republican opponent George W. Bush in the Electoral College. Gore is the founder and current chair of the Alliance for Climate Protection, the co-founder and chair of Generation Investment Management and the now-defunct Current TV network, a member of the Board of Directors of Apple Inc., and a senior adviser to Google. Gore is also a partner in the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, heading its climate change solutions group. He has served as a visiting professor at Middle Tennessee State University, Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, Fisk University, and the University of California, Los Angeles. He served on the Board of Directors of World Resources Institute.Gore has received a number of awards that include the Nobel Peace Prize (joint award with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2007), a Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album (2009) for his book An Inconvenient Truth, a Primetime Emmy Award for Current TV (2007), and a Webby Award (2005). Gore was also the subject of the Academy Award-winning (2007) documentary An Inconvenient Truth in 2006. In 2007, he was named a runner-up for Time's 2007 Person of the Year. more…

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