An Inconvenient Truth - A review

An Inconvenient Truth, was a very inspirational effort by former US Vice president Al Gore’s campaign to educate the people of the world about the various looming threats that question our survival on Planet Earth…most importantly…Global Warming. His main objective was to completely rubbish the common misconception that "the Earth is so big; we can't possibly have any lasting, harmful impact on the Earth's environment."

Gore, through this documentary, has found an effective way to put the message across. At no point does he lose the audience’s attention and also adds a comic element to do so despite the fact that the issue he’s addressing is very grave. For instance, he narrates an incident from his schooling days when his teacher rubbished his classmate’s question about continental drift as ‘ridiculous’ but ultimately went on to become a science advisor in the then administration. He ties this to the fact that people assume our planet to be so big that they can’t visualize something as bizarre as movement of the continents to have ever happened just the way they think they do not contribute in any appreciable way to environmental crisis. At the same time, he talks about his college professor, Roger Revelle who was the first person to have the idea to measure the amount of carbon dioxide in the earth's atmosphere. The measurements he showed the class after his many experiments proved startling to Gore and is what sparked his interest in the issue. Gore presents to us many charts and statistics collected by environmental scientists all over the world that speak out that Global Warming is very much a reality. For instance, he shows us pictures of receding glaciers and warns us about the possibility of the collapse of a major ice sheet in Greenland or in West Antarctica, either of which could raise global sea levels by approximately 20 feet, flooding coastal areas and producing 100 million refugees.

He talks about how he lost his sister to cancer and almost lost his son in a near-fatal accident. He says these incidents brought into his focus how we take things for granted and how much losing something precious to us would hurt us. He says this suffering is what our future generations would have to endure if we do not find means to put an end to environmental degradation. He says this makes the issue a MORAL one and thereby concludes by showing us all the small ways in which we can help and charting out how much of a difference it would make for us to accept this truth, inconvenient as it may be, and doing our part to sustain life on this beautiful planet.