An Inconvenient Truth

Today I went to see Al Gore’s movie, An Inconvenient Truth. I didn’t really know what to expect, but I had heard a lot of positive buzz about the film and the IMDB rating is 8.2, which is off the chart.

The movie is a documentary and is more like sitting through a PowerPoint presentation than actually watching a movie. In fact, the vast majority of the movie is watching Mr. Gore actually giving a presentation to an audience somewhere. Although that might sound a bit boring, the movie grabbed and held my attention from beginning to end.

Have you ever seen any of those movies like The Day After Tomorrow or Armageddon where the world narrowly escapes complete destruction? Well, this one is basically like the scene where the brilliant scientist first tells the President that everyone on earth is going to die in like 72 hours unless we can do something about it.

The two differences are: we’ve got a little more than 72 hours to deal with the problem, and this ain’t no movie folks!

Gore presents what seems like an overwhelming amount of scientific data to illustrate, and prove, that global warming is affecting the planet in such a way that will have disastrous consequences for hundreds of millions of people. In fact, he argues that we are already beginning to see the results and that they may begin to come faster and faster as time goes by.

I should say, I’m no tree hugger. I’ve got a big ass truck in the driveway that gets 12.9 miles to the gallon and I’m a world class capitalist. But no matter your political affiliation you simply can’t argue with the data presented. In fact, after watching about the first half of the movie I wanted to jump out of a window (after going up about 20 stories first, of course).

It isn’t until near the end that Gore provides some inspiration that allows us all to see that there is still time to stop what otherwise feels almost inevitable.

Now, during this movie at least 5 or 6 couples/families got up and walked out at various times. I can only assume it was because they were bored and were perhaps expecting something different. Regardless of political affiliation I don’t think anything was said that would give people a reason to take the attitude that it was all propaganda or BS, so I don’t think they left for that reason. Still, it’s worth a mention because that’s more people walking out of this flick than all others I’ve seen in my life combined.

Bottom line is, watch the trailer below and then go see the movie. It scared the crap out of me, and I hope it does you too so that perhaps we can reverse some of the damage we’re doing and keep our world inhabitable a little longer.