An Inconvenient Truth

[MacGuffin]

Trailer here.

Release Date: May 24th, 2006

Starring: Al Gore 

Directed by: Davis Guggenheim 

Premise: Al Gore has traveled the world delivering a presentation on the global climate change, proving that humankind must confront global warming now or face devastating consequences--this film captures his journey as a worldwide environmental champion.

[1976]

I hear they completely ignored the storylines from the "Inconvenient Truth" comic books, so I won't be watching this.

[©brad]

this would have a better chance if gore weren't in it.

[pete]

sometimes I felt the movie was being too ALeGORErical.

[grand theft sparrow]

this would have a better chance if gore weren't in it.

Too true.  Everyone's looking at it like "Manbearpig: the movie"

[Ravi]

You'd think an Al Gore movie would be boring, but the subject matter itself has an inherent attraction, and the presentation is engaging.  Most of the film is the slideshow presentation, with short vignettes outside of it inserted occasionally.  We don't see Gore the politician.  We see the Gore whose passion and research into global warming are evident.  He stresses the moral imperative for controlling global warming.

Hopefully the audience for this film doesn't consist only of people who already agree with it.  But even if you do, it is an important reminder about the effects of global warming.  I think word-of-mouth on this one will spread.  It will probably have a long life on DVD for schools, universities, etc. to screen.

[mogwai]

hopefully we'll be around when the dvd is released. and the 10th anniversy edition and so on.

[Redlum]

Excellent. A film that should be shared and downloaded.

Not only does it present the facts extremely clearly; it also cleverly contrasts the many great designs of the natural world we live in which, are far more elegant than any of our design (now or in the future), and how we're fucking them up by becoming our own force of nature.

I was slightly dissapointed that he didnt tackle the population growth issue (although he did present the statistics), he only hinted at the idea of population control (one child policy)...but I think I'm tantalised at the dystopian concepts of Children of Men at the moment.

[Jeremy Blackman]

I saw half of this movie before the theater's power shut off. I got a refund. True story.

Anyway, yes, the lecture itself is brilliant, especially the graphs, charts, statistics, and the explanations thereof. But the movie itself (or at least the part I saw) is pretty horrible. Did anyone else feel the sense of pity and regret that I felt during the mood-lit scenes which show us a contemplative Al Gore looking out various windows?

[MacGuffin]

Gore's "Truth" DVD boasts earth-friendly package

Mother Nature won't be harmed when former Vice President Al Gore's hit global-warming documentary "An Inconvenient Truth" comes out on DVD November 21.

The DVD packaging consists entirely of waste products that have been recycled, including paper, inks and coatings formulated to emit virtually no volatile organic compounds into the atmosphere. That means no plastics and no laminates.

"An Inconvenient Truth," a Paramount release directed by David Guggenheim, grossed $22.7 million in U.S. theaters, a huge amount for a documentary.

"I'm excited about the documentary's release on DVD," Gore said in an interview. "The DVD is a vital way for us to continue the conversation about global warming with even more Americans. As more and more people understand what's at stake, they become a part of the solution, and share both in the challenges and opportunities presented by the climate crises."

The DVD will feature a new introduction by Gore, with updates on global temperatures, population, hurricanes, projections of soil moisture and more. Also included: the Melissa Etheridge music video "I Need to Wake Up," and audio commentaries from Guggenheim and producers Lawrence Bender, Scott Burns, Laurie David and Lesley Chilcott.

A portion of the proceeds from the sale of each DVD will be donated to Alliance for Climate Protection, a bipartisan environmental group.

[Ravi]

The DVD packaging consists entirely of waste products that have been recycled, including paper, inks and coatings formulated to emit virtually no volatile organic compounds into the atmosphere. That means no plastics and no laminates.

So its going to be on one of these...

[MacGuffin]

Gore Film Sparks Parents' Anger
Showing 'Inconvenient Truth' Would Require Counterpoint
Source: Blaine Harden; Washington Post

FEDERAL WAY, Wash., Jan. 24 -- Frosty E. Hardison is neither impressed nor surprised that "An Inconvenient Truth," the global-warming movie narrated by former vice president Al Gore, received an Oscar nomination this week for best documentary.

"Liberal left is all over Hollywood," he grumbled a few hours after the nomination was announced.

Hardison, a parent of seven here in the southern suburbs of Seattle, has himself roiled the global-warming waters. It happened early this month when he learned that one of his daughters would be watching "An Inconvenient Truth" in her seventh-grade science class.

"No you will not teach or show that propagandist Al Gore video to my child, blaming our nation -- the greatest nation ever to exist on this planet -- for global warming," Hardison wrote in an e-mail to the Federal Way School Board. The 43-year-old computer consultant is an evangelical Christian who says he believes that a warming planet is "one of the signs" of Jesus Christ's imminent return for Judgment Day.

His angry e-mail (along with complaints from a few other parents) stopped the film from being shown to Hardison's daughter.

The teacher in that science class, Kay Walls, says that after Hardison's e-mail she was told by her principal that she would receive a disciplinary letter for not following school board rules that require her to seek written permission to present "controversial" materials in class.

The e-mail also pressured the school board to impose a ban on screenings of the film for the district's 22,500 students.

The ban, which the school board says was merely a "moratorium," was lifted Tuesday night, subject to rigorous conditions. Still, the action has appalled the film's producers and triggered a ferocious national backlash.

Members of the school board say they have been bombarded by thousands of e-mails and phone calls, many of them hurtful and obscene, accusing them of scientific ignorance, pandering to religion and imposing prior restraint on free speech.

It has been a terrible ordeal, school board member David Larson said during a long, emotional speech at the board meeting.

"I am here to foster healing in our community," he said, while noting with sadness that "civility and honest discourse are dying in our country."

What the school board had really intended to do, Larson and school board members insisted, was not to stop schools from teaching the science of global warming, but merely to follow long-standing school board rules that require students to be exposed to "other perspectives" when they view a film like "An Inconvenient Truth."

"We do not need to lose balance in order to save the Earth," Larson said.

Exactly what "balance" might amount to, however, was not spelled out.

The National Academy of Sciences, together with nearly all of the world's leading climate experts, have agreed that there is conclusive evidence that human activity is causing the Earth to warm and that there is an urgent need to reduce the amount of carbon being released into the air.

In public comments at the board meeting, several riled-up Federal Way residents argued that "An Inconvenient Truth" was, indeed, scientifically true and that saying otherwise is "deliberate obfuscation."

These residents derisively compared the search for "balance" in the global-warming issue to decades of phony claims by cigarette companies about the lack of "proof" that smoking is harmful to human health.

Before the board meeting started Tuesday night, several residents buttonholed Larson and asked him if there should be a "balanced" presentation of the Nazi Holocaust, because there are many who deny that it occurred.

"The Holocaust happened," Larson said. "We have evidence and photos. The difference between the Holocaust and the global warming is we don't have photos of what will happen 50 years from now."

Sitting in on this conversation was Walls, the seventh-grade science teacher whose class includes Frosty Hardison's daughter.

"We do have photos of snow melting off Kilimanjaro," Walls said, hopefully.

In the end, though, the board opted for an abundance of balance.

That means that "An Inconvenient Truth" may be shown only with the written permission of a principal -- and only when it is balanced by alternative views that are approved by both a principal and the superintendent of schools.

Hardison was pleased.

"I am happy they are giving the kids as much information as possible," he said.

His daughter's science teacher, meanwhile, said she is struggling to find authoritative articles to counter the information in the Gore documentary.

"The only thing I have found so far is an article in Newsweek called 'The Cooling World,' " Walls said.

It was written 37 years ago.

[Pubrick]

that makes me want to swear a lot and hit someone.. and kudos to the writer for channeling his indignation into facts and all that, i'm impressed he didn't make the easy observation that the man who's scared about global warming is called FROSTY.

seriously that is fucked up. when i saw An Inconvenient truth it was at an imax screen with stadium seating and the room was FILLED COMPLETELY with the whole grade 10 of a nearby girl's school. this is one of the top girl's schools in the city, based on RELIGIOUS principles, and they were all there on a mandatory science field trip. one of the girls, bless her blossoming bosom, apologized to me for her school interrupting my otherwise perfect screening of the movie. but there was nothing to apologize for! they were the best audience i've ever seen a movie with. they laughed at all the funny parts, they loved the futurama bit, they even stayed awake during the long boring repetitive parts of overwhelming evidence, and quietly agreed as they exited after the hopeful ending. and why wouldn't they? it's their world the movie is about.

the best part was actually when al gore says two developed countries didn't ratify the kyoto protocol, US, he says.. pause... and australia. big laugh.

where is the book or movie or documentary that defines exactly what the fuck america's problem is right now. why does the school board bend over to some religious zealot out of fear of being unconstitutional, while the whole country can't make its goddamn leaders do anything they truly want??? really. america hates its youth. sequel to Youth Without Youth : America Without Youth. either sending them off to well-payed death camps or miseducating them into oblivion. since when did information, and therefore scientific superiority, become something to fear? it's what made you the winner of the 20th century!

this is some fucked up information-age backlash. i can't tell anymore if it's a rotten core that's seeping out or a parasitic growth that has broken in, either way it's taking over and you're losing fast. the one hope i have is that somehow, and this is on some hippy it's-way-too-hot-to-be-online-right-now shit to end this rant, enough people realise what all the geniuses (joseph campbell, terrence mckenna, john c lilly, etc) who have moved to hawaii to die, and others who didn't (einstein, lynch) have said.. that art, science, religion and philosophy are all racing toward some common point of understanding. so the way to that point must involve acceptance of progress, to follow your bliss without restricting another's as you do the locomotion with me.

but it's hard to stay optimistic in this sweltering heat, and in the face of intractable ignorance, and with the unfortunate knowledge that those girls i was talking about are probably all sluts.

[polkablues]

FEDERAL WAY, Wash.

I know a guy who went to school in Federal Way.  Maybe this helps explain why he's an idiot.

Things aren't boding well for my state if the most memorable things about it in recent memory are this and that guy who died while having sex with a horse.

[pete]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070131/ap_on_go_co/congress_climate

Panel hears climate 'spin' allegations By H. JOSEF HEBERT, Associated Press Writer
1 hour, 55 minutes ago

WASHINGTON - Federal scientists have been pressured by the White House to play down global warming, advocacy groups testified Tuesday at the Democrats' first investigative hearing since taking control of Congress.

The hearing focused on allegations that White House officials for years have micromanaged the government's climate programs and has closely controlled what scientists have been allowed to tell the public.

"It appears there may have been an orchestrated campaign to mislead the public about climate change," said Rep. Henry Waxman (news, bio, voting record), D-Calif. Waxman is chairman of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee and a critic of the Bush administration's environmental policies, including its views on climate.

Climate change also was a leading topic in the Senate, where presidential contenders for 2008 lined up at a hearing called by Sen. Barbara Boxer (news, bio, voting record). They expounded — and at times tried to outdo each other — on why they believed Congress must act to reduce heat-trapping "greenhouse" gases.

"This is a problem whose time has come," Sen.        Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., proclaimed.

"This is an issue over the years whose time has come," echoed Sen. John McCain (news, bio, voting record), R-Ariz.

Sen. Barack Obama (news, bio, voting record), D-Ill., said "for decades far too many have ignored the warning" about climate change. "Will we look back at today and say this was the moment we took a stand?"

At the House hearing, two private advocacy groups produced a survey of 279 government climate scientists showing that many of them say they have been subjected to political pressure aimed at downplaying the climate threat. Their complaints ranged from a challenge to using the phrase "global warming" to raising uncertainty on issues on which most scientists basically agree, to keeping scientists from talking to the media.

The survey and separate interviews with scientists "has brought to light numerous ways in which U.S. federal climate science has been filtered, suppressed and manipulated in the last five years," Francesca Grifo, a senior scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, told the committee.

Grifo's group, along with the Government Accountability Project, which helps whistle-blowers, produced the report.

Drew Shindell, a climate scientist with        NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said that climate scientists frequently have been dissuaded from talking to the media about their research, though NASA's restrictions have been eased.

Prior to the change, interview requests of climate scientists frequently were "routed through the White House" and then turned away or delayed, said Shindell. He described how a news release on his study forecasting a significant warming in Antarctica was "repeatedly delayed, altered and watered down" at the insistence of the White House.

Some Republican members of the committee questioned whether science and politics ever can be kept separate.

"I am no climate-change denier," said Rep. Tom Davis of Virginia, the top Republican on the committee, but he questioned whether "the issue of politicizing science has itself become politicized."

"The mere convergence of politics and science does not itself denote interference," said Davis.

Administration officials were not called to testify. In the past the White House has said it has only sought to inject balance into reports on climate change.  President Bush has acknowledged concerns about global warming, but he strongly opposes mandatory caps of greenhouse gas emissions, arguing that approach would be too costly.

Roger Pielke Jr., a political scientist at the University of Colorado who was invited by GOP lawmakers, said "the reality is that science and politics are intermixed."

Pielke maintained that "scientific cherry picking" can be found on both sides of the climate debate. He took a swipe at the background memorandum Waxman had distributed and maintained that it exaggerated the scientific consensus over the impact of climate change on hurricanes.

Waxman and Davis agreed the administration had not been forthcoming in providing documents to the committee that would shed additional light on allegations of political interference in climate science.

"We know that the White House possesses documents that contain evidence of an attempt by senior administration officials to mislead the public by injecting doubt into the science of global warming and minimize the potential danger," said Waxman, adding that he is "not trying to obtain state secrets."

At Boxer's Senate hearing, her predecessor as chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee, Sen. James Inhofe (news, bio, voting record), R-Okla., had his own view of the science.

There is "no convincing scientific evidence" that human activity is causing global warming, declared Inhofe, who once called global warming a hoax. "We all know the Weather Channel would like to have people afraid all the time."

"I'll put you down as skeptical," replied Boxer.