Al Gore puts his foot down in An Inconvenient Truth, the most urgent and alarming statement on the threat of global warming yet. IAN CHRISTOPHER is all ears.


THE TRUTH of this film’s title is not a new fact: that the Earth is going to hell in a global-warming hand basket will not come as a surprise to many. The facts are presented to a small audience by Al Gore (yes, the one who lost to George W the first time round) in a PowerPoint presentation and... that’s pretty much the documentary. A lecture on global warming by a famously boring ex-politician doesn’t sound like much fun, and yet, for some reason, An Inconvenient Truth is fascinating.

Gore ditches his political non-persona from the start – “I used to be the next president of the United States” (crowd laughs) “I don’t find that particularly funny.” And then he concisely, entertainingly, grippingly, lays out the eco-disaster that the planet has embarked upon. We see glaciers retreating to nothing, ice shelves calving off Antarctica, once massive lakes all but dried up, all interspersed with simple, powerful, statistical displays. In one particularly effective scene Gore rides a cherry-picker style platform to be level with the point on his graph showing present-day carbon dioxide levels. None of this is new of course but Gore restates the familiar facts in a way that frightens as much as it enlightens.

And this is the point. This is a wholly didactic film whose one aim is to galvanise public support for Kyoto and other carbon-reducing measures. There is no balancing counter-position to be given – all scientists agree that global warming is here, we have caused it, and, if not addressed, a cataclysm will follow. Rising sea levels will submerge whole cities and displace hundreds of millions of people, storms and hurricanes will worsen, as will infectious diseases, and drinking water will become scarcer. This unquestioned view slips somewhat into sermon territory at times but it is countered by Gore’s enthusiasm and is never heavy-handed. The film is still American however and it does use American political PR-ish tactics. Gore wields the emotional simile without compunction – he likens his advance eco-warning to Churchill warning about the coming threat of Nazi Germany – and indulges in conflation – virtually all the world’s ills from Darfur to Katrina to Ebola are due to his personal bugbear; he was (and secretly still is) a politician after all.

Gore’s peculiar position as ex-presidential hopeful adds a peculiar dimension to the mix. He gives a brief bio of himself (he’s been on to global warming since the 70s and launched the first governmental enquiries into it) and the scenes of the 2000 election being stolen from him have a clear message – what a terrible turn for the planet, if only he had won we may not be in this state. Though Gore has claimed elsewhere that he will not make a second run at the top job, if this film is seen by as many people as it deserves, I suspect (and hope) he will.