It’s Getting Hot in Here

Al Gore addresses the effects of global warming in An Inconvenient Truth. Photo Eric Lee. Courtesy Paramount Classics.

At the beginning of the new documentary An Inconvenient Truth, former U.S. vice-president Al Gore introduces himself as the man “who used to be the next president of the United States.” It’s funny to a point, then not so much, because it’s a reminder of what might have been.

But don’t cry for Al Gore, people. He has moved on. Of the nail-biting conclusion to the 2000 election, Gore says with typical understatement, “well, that was a hard blow. What do you do? You make the best of it.” And for Gore, that meant returning to the issue that’s obsessed him since college: global warming.

For the past few years, he’s been touring the world with a surprisingly engaging slide-show talk on the subject — how it works, what causes it and its very real, very dire consequences. Along the way, he caught the attention of Laurie David, the high profile Hollywood environmentalist who is married to Curb Your Enthusiasm’s Larry David. She helped persuade Gore to participate in the documentary, signing on as a producer and bringing in TV veteran (Deadwood) Davis Guggenheim to direct.

Gore estimates he’s given the presentation a thousand times. After failing to get the message out while in public life, he says he knows of no other way to educate the mainstream, but “person by person, family by family.” The show is an impressive affair. Backed by a slick presentation of graphs and charts and corny animation — including a woeful polar bear drowning when it can’t find a purchase on melting ice floes — Gore seriously but amiably sets out the crisis. Rising carbon-dioxide emissions have raised temperatures around world, triggering a complicated series of problems, ranging from melting glaciers, to increased hurricane and tornado activity, to drought and flooding. These phenomena, in turn, have exacerbated political, ethnic and class tensions in places including drought-stricken Niger and Darfur, and, closer to home, in the poor black neighbourhoods of New Orleans.

If the planet continues to warm up, rising sea levels from the melting ice of Greenland and Antarctica will, within in the next few decades, engulf large coastal cities, displacing millions of people. Shanghai, Beijing, Mumbai and most of Lower Manhattan will be under water, Gore says, as a computer image shows the flooding of the World Trade Center memorial site. “Is it possible,” Gore asks in his one brief moment of petulance, “that we should guard against other threats besides terrorists?”

Still, for Gore this is “not a political issue, but a moral one.” Trouble is, in America, morality and politics are increasingly intertwined. When the religious right continues to amp up its battle against the teaching of science in schools, how sympathetic will it be to scientific findings about carbon-dioxide levels that date back 650,000 years? In some quarters, suggesting the Earth is that old is akin to proposing that we evolved from primates. So it’s no surprise that naysayers have written off global warming as an unproven “theory” and dismissed Gore as tree-hugging alarmist.

Gore with scientists in China. Photo Eric Lee. Courtesy Paramount Classics.

Yet in An Inconvenient Truth, Gore comes off as the avuncular voice of reason. In this thoughtful and tightly paced doc, Gore makes the complicated science of global warming accessible for a lay audience. Gore notes that the upward trend of carbon-dioxide emissions and temperatures are currently off the charts, wildly beyond the normal flux. He goes on to explain that in more than 900 peer-reviewed studies in credible science journals, not one has challenged the idea of global warming.

However, most average folks wouldn’t know that. In the popular press, 53 per cent of articles about global warming have presented it as a controversial idea. Gore points out that scientists have been cowed into silence by the current administration; specifically, there’s the case of Philip Cooney, a former environmental adviser to U.S. President George W. Bush (though he had no scientific background or expertise in the field) who edited a report on global warming by government scientists to play down their findings. When his tampering was exposed, Cooney resigned and promptly took a position at ExxonMobil. 

While Gore has been coy about running in 2008, this hagiographic portrayal by director Guggenheim completes Gore’s transformation from also-ran to eco-hunk. Interspersed with scenes of the lecture are Gore’s thoughts on life in and out of politics (including his poignant memories of nearly losing his young son after he was hit by a car, and his grief over the lung cancer death of his older sister), scenes of him revisiting his childhood home and a pointed montage of the controversial 2000 election results.

If Bush’s image machine has him in ever more butch poses — clearing brush in a cowboy hat, strolling the deck of an aircraft carrier in a crotch-enhancing flight suit — then Guggenheim depicts Gore as the warrior of the laptop. He’s seen typing on planes, in deserted hotel coffee shops and in the back of town cars, occasionally staring pensively into the distance. It may not be as virile, but the way in which the doc contrasts the former political rivals is deliberately stark. On one side is grinning, heckuva job, good ole boy George W. Bush; on the other is wise, hard-working elder statesman Al Gore.

Since 2000, Gore has gained a few distinguished pounds around his middle and, more notably, a sense of humour. He’s a terrific lecturer, in the style of a keen academic rather than a slick politician. His speech has the patness of repetition, but that doesn’t dampen his genuine passion. Gone is the stuffed shirt, scolding pedantry that made him the smart but unlikable presidential candidate of 2000. Here, he’s confident, worldly and charming — a geeky, but beloved professor. Even his voice has mellowed into the honeyed drawl of his Tennessee roots.

Without the handlers and consultants and the pressure of appealing to soccer moms and NASCAR dads, Gore is finally free to speak his mind. Paradoxically, he now seems all the more presidential. His talk ends with a rousing call to arms — he cites the abolishment of slavery, female suffrage, the civil rights movement, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of apartheid as examples of the tremendous achievements of a united global community. For sheer inspiration, it comes close to rivaling JFK’s “ask not what your country can do for you” inauguration speech.

According to Gore, the knowledge and technology exist to slow and even reverse the damage of global warming. The only thing lacking is political will. But, Gore adds, “political will is a renewable resource.”

Spoken like a true candidate.

An Inconvenient Truth opens June 2 across the country.

Rachel Giese writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

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