An Inconvenient Truth is a 2006 American documentary film directed by Davis Guggenheim about former vice president of the United States Al Gore's campaign to educate people about global warming. The film features a slide show that, by Gore's own estimate, he has presented over 1,000 times to audiences worldwide.
The idea to document Gore's efforts came from producer Laurie David, who saw his presentation at a town hall meeting on global warming, which coincided with the opening of The Day After Tomorrow. Laurie David was so inspired by his slide show that she, with producer Lawrence Bender, met with Guggenheim, and Co-Producer Lesley Chilcott, to adapt the presentation into a film. Premiering at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival and opening in New York City and Los Angeles on May 24, 2006, the film was a critical and commercial success, winning two Academy Awards for Best Documentary Feature and Best Original Song. The film grossed $24 million in the US and $26 million in other countries' box offices, becoming one of the highest grossing documentary films in the United States.
Since the film's release, An Inconvenient Truth has been credited for raising international public awareness of global warming and reenergizing the environmental movement. The documentary has also been included in science curricula in schools around the world, which has spurred some controversy due to some of the data it used.
A sequel to the film, titled An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power, was released on July 28, 2017.
Synopsis An Inconvenient Truth presents in film form an illustrated talk on climate by Al Gore, aimed at alerting the public to an increasing "planetary emergency" due to global warming, and shows re-enacted incidents from his life story which influenced his concerns about environmental issues. He began making these presentations in 1989 with flip chart illustrations; the film version uses a Keynote presentation, which Gore refers to as "the slide show".
The vice president opens the film by greeting an audience with his well-known line about his campaign in 2000: "I am Al Gore. I used to be the next president of the United States of America." He is shown using his laptop to edit his presentation, and pondering the difficulty he has had in awakening public concern: "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."
Gore then begins his slide show on global warming; a comprehensive presentation replete with detailed graphs, flow charts and stark visuals. Gore shows off several photographs of the Earth taken from multiple space missions, as Earthrise and The Blue Marble. Gore notes that these photos dramatically transformed the way we see the Earth, helping spark modern environmentalism.
Following this, Gore shares anecdotes that inspired his interest in the issue, including his college education with early climate expert Roger Revelle at Harvard University, his sister's death from lung cancer and his young son's near-fatal car accident. Gore recalls a story from his grade-school years, where a fellow student asked his geography teacher about continental drift, whether the coastlines of South America and Africa might fit together; in response, the teacher called the concept the "most ridiculous thing [he'd] ever heard." Gore ties this conclusion to the assumption that "the Earth is so big, we can't possibly have any lasting, harmful impact on the Earth's environment." For comic effect, Gore uses a clip from the Futurama episode "Crimes of the Hot" to describe the greenhouse effect. Gore refers to his loss to George W. Bush in the 2000 United States presidential election as a "hard blow" yet one which subsequently "brought into clear focus, the mission [he] had been pursuing for all these years."
Throughout the movie, Gore discusses the scientific consensus on global warming, as well as the present and future effects of global warming and stresses that global warming "is really not a political issue, so much as a moral one," describing the consequences he believes global warming will produce if the amount of human-generated greenhouse gases is not significantly reduced in the very near future. Gore also presents Antarctic ice coring data showing CO2 levels higher now than in the past 650,000 years.
The film includes segments intended to refute critics who say that global warming is unproven or that warming will be insignificant. For example, Gore cites the retreat of nearly all glaciers caused by melting over recent decades, showing nine cases, such as the Grinnel and Boulder Glaciers and Patagonia. He discusses the possibility of the collapse and melting of a major ice sheet in Greenland or in West Antarctica, either of which could raise global sea levels by approximately 20 feet (6m), flooding coastal areas and producing 100 million refugees. Melt water from Greenland, because of its lower salinity, could then halt the currents that keep northern Europe warm and quickly trigger dramatic local cooling there. It also contains various short animated projections of what could happen to different animals more vulnerable to global warming.
Call to action The documentary ends with Gore arguing that if appropriate actions are taken soon, the effects of global warming can be successfully reversed by releasing less CO2 and planting more vegetation to consume existing CO2. Gore calls upon his viewers to learn how they can help him in these efforts. Gore closes the film by saying:
During the film's end credits, several calls to action pop up on screen suggesting to viewers things at home they can do to combat global warming, including "recycle", "speak up in your community", "try to buy a hybrid vehicle" and "encourage everyone you know to watch this movie."
Background
Origins
Gore became interested in global warming when he took a course at Harvard University with Professor Roger Revelle, one of the first scientists to measure carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Later, when Gore was in Congress, he initiated the first congressional hearing on the subject in 1981. Gore's 1992 book, Earth in the Balance, dealing with a number of environmental topics, reached the New York Times bestseller list.
As Vice President during the Clinton Administration, Gore pushed for the implementation of a carbon tax to encourage energy efficiency and diversify the choices of fuel better reflecting the true environmental costs of energy use; it was partially implemented in 1993.
He helped broker the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, an international treaty designed to curb greenhouse gas emissions. The treaty was not ratified in the United States after a 95 to 0 vote in the Senate. The primary objections stemmed from the exemptions the treaty gave to China and India, whose industrial base and carbon footprint have grown rapidly, and fears that the exemptions would lead to further trade imbalances and offshoring arrangement with those countries.
Gore also supported the funding of the controversial, and much-delayed satellite called Triana, which would have provided an image of the Earth 24 hours a day, over the internet and would have acted as a barometer measuring the process of global warming. During his 2000 presidential campaign, Gore ran, in part, on a pledge to ratify the Kyoto Protocol.
The slide show
Following his defeat in the 2000 presidential election by George W. Bush, Gore returned his focus to the topic. He edited and adapted a slide show he had compiled years earlier, and began featuring the slide show in presentations on global warming across the US and around the world. At the time of the film, Gore estimated he had shown the presentation more than one thousand times.
Producer Laurie David saw Gore's slide show in New York City at a global warming town-hall meeting after the May 27, 2004 premiere of The Day After Tomorrow. Gore was one of several panelists and he showed a ten-minute version of his slide show.
Inspired, David assembled a team, including producer Lawrence Bender and former president of eBay Jeffrey Skoll, who met with Gore about the possibility of making the slide show into a movie. It took some convincing. The slide show, she says, "was his baby, and he felt proprietary about it and it was hard for him to let go."
David said the box office returns were not important to her, and that what was at stake was the planet, saying "none of us are going to make a dime."
David and Bender later met with director Davis Guggenheim, to have him direct the film adaptation of his slide show. Guggenheim, who was skeptical at first, later saw the presentation for himself, stating that he was "blown away," and "left after an hour and a half thinking that global warming [was] the most important issue ... I had no idea how you'd make a film out of it, but I wanted to try," he said.
In 2004 Gore enlisted Duarte Design to condense and update his material and add video and animation. Ted Boda described the tools that went into designing the project: "Gore's presentation was in fact using Apple's Keynote presentation software (the same software Steve Jobs presents from) and did so for a number of reasons. As a designer for the presentation, Keynote was the first choice to help create such an engaging presentation."
To complicate matters, Gore was constantly updating what he called his slide "genome." During production, "Chilcott says he arranged slides during their flights, tailoring the presentation to both its audience and location. When he came to a town to give the talk, Gore "would already have photos from a wildfire that happened two days ago," she says, and he was constantly updating the climate science to reflect the most current data.
Initially reluctant of the film adaptation, Gore said after he and the crew were into the production of the movie, the director, Guggenheim, earned his trust.
Production When Bender first saw Gore's visual presentation he had concerns about connection with viewers, citing a "need to find a personal way in." In the string of interviews with Gore that followed, Gore himself felt like they "were making Kill Al Vol. 3". Bender had other issues including a time frame that was "grueling" and needed to be done in "a very short period of time" despite many filming locations planned. These included many locations throughout the United States and also included China. "It was a lot of travel in a very short period of time. And they had to get this thing edited and cut starting in January, and ready to screen in May. That's like a seriously tight schedule. So the logistics of pulling it off with a low budget were really difficult, and if there's one person who gets credit, it's Lesley Chilcott, because she really pulled it together."
"Most of my movies take a year and a half, if not two and a half," Guggenheim said. "We all felt like we were on a mission from God just to make it as fast as we could. We just felt like it was urgent. The clock was ticking, and people had to see it."
Chilcott said, "All the logic of, take your time making the film, do it the correct way, travel to a million film festivals, get feedback, revise — that was all out the window."
Title The producers struggled to find an effective title for the film. "We had a lot of really bad titles," Guggenheim recalled. "One was The Rising. I remember Al talking about whether he should give Bruce Springsteen a call, because he had an album out called The Rising. It had a great triple-entendre, because it was like the sea-level rising and the idea of people rising. So we got excited about that for a while." "There were also some really bad ones like Too Hot to Handle," he added. "Maybe that's not right, but it was something with 'hot,' ya know? We had a lot of hot puns."