Review: An Inconvenient Truth

I just watched the Al Gore movie An Inconvenient Truth and feel compelled to write a review from a science teacher's perspective. Before I do, however, I'd like to say that I'd love to hear from any of you who aren't science people that have seen it (or if you haven't, watch it first and then read my review so I don't taint your perspective). Though I love knowing science, in cases like this it means I can't accuratly read how the "average" person will perceive things on scientific topics, such as global warming.

First thing I have to say about the movie is that its political. I don't care what anyone says, the movie clearly depicts Gore as the chapion of the world and basically any republican president during my life time as bad. Yes, I realize that the republican party has traditionally taken a less environmentally friendly approach to politics, but in my opinion, if the focus of the video is truely changing the causes of global warming, then getting into past polatics is irrelevant.

Along with my first thought is another that closely follows it: this movie accuratly reflects my view of Al Gore: egotistical and a bit haughty. There are many scences, especially in the beginning, where it shows Gore doing things that make him look good, popular, and amazing. I've alwasy thought he was a bit arrogant (I have an eye for that), but this just confirmed it.

Ok, now for the movie itself and the science behind it. I thought it did a great job of giving a non-scientific description of global warming. Gore did spend time going into some science (some if which was innaccurate, though not in a significant way), but not really giving evidence that a scientist would be interested it -- let me rephrase that: he didn't give the level of detail required of a scientific argument. He presented lots of data, but didn't give all the details around the data and there were times when it was clearly taken out of context or re-created, and w/o seeing the original, you don't know if the graphs were drawn in such a way as to emphasize their point, possibly skewing the perspective slightly.

I must say, though, the moive did a really good job w/ the most important and, in my opinion, most convincing bit of data that supports human causes to global warming, which is the graph of historic temperatures over the last few hundred thousand years and how it's so highly correlated with the concentration of CO2 in the air. That creates a really nice picture of what's going on and why scientists are convinced of the link between human activity and global climate change.

One final comment overall: the presentation looked really nice. The slides were all really clean and the talk was tailored really clearly and flowed really well. I didn't find it boring or dull. It was very visually stimulating and enhansed. Gore spoke very clearly and it was easy to follow what his main points were.

In short, An Inconvenient Truth takes some scientific evidence (and some data that really isn't scientifically convincing evidece) and uses it, plus some antecdotes, to create a complelling emotional argument/case for the reality of global warming. While there is nothing wrong with this type of argument, I would have like to see more solid science. This is not a movie I would show in my class for two reasons: 1) its highly political and that has no place in a science classroom, and 2) I would prefer to stick to the data, not interpretations of the data and not data out of context.

So there you have it, those are my cusory thoughs about the movie. If you'd like more details, don't hessitate to ask.