ON May 28, 2004, former vice president Al Gore presented a slideshow on global warming at a town hall meeting, coinciding with the opening of “The Day After Tomorrow,” a film that depicts the disruption of the North Atlantic Ocean circulation and its catastrophic effects, leading to a new ice age.
Film producer Laurie David saw his slide presentation and was so inspired by it that she thought of adapting the presentation into a film.
The film documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” that began as a slideshow was released in 2006. It first premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on Jan. 24, 2006, before debuting in United States theaters on May 24, 2006. The film, directed by Davis Guggenheim, was a critical and commercial success, winning two Academy Awards for Best Documentary Feature and Best Original Song.
Twenty years later, fewer people now question the science of human-related climate change. With typhoon season now upon us, we must be aware of how warmer ocean temperatures are likely contributing to stronger typhoons that intensify more rapidly.
In a recent interview with ABC News at his family farm Caney Fork in Tennessee, Al Gore was asked if the film still holds up.
“Unfortunately, yes,” he said, “and the scientists were dead right on all the important elements of it.”
A majority of the science in “An Inconvenient Truth” has come to pass. The last 11 years have been the hottest 11 years not only in memory but on record.
“And it really is insane that we are continuing to use the sky as an open sewer,” Al Gore said, “and we’re trapping so much heat every day. It’s equal to the amount that would be released by 800,000 Hiroshima-class atomic bombs exploding every day on the earth.”
“Using the sky as an open sewer” is a metaphor describing the irresponsible practice of dumping harmful emissions, like greenhouse gases, into the atmosphere. The practice is based on the dangerous assumption that the air has an infinite capacity to absorb our waste without consequence.
Yet why have some critics lambasted the documentary?
Critics did a little cherry-picking, Gore explained, “like how many years before the Arctic is ice free? “But the main elements, as the scientific community has been very generous to confirm, are right.”
In “An Inconvenient Truth,” Gore talks about warming oceans causing hurricanes to be more destructive.
Today, we have seen an increase in rapid intensification in hurricanes. Climate scientists have linked the phenomenon to warming ocean waters.
Asked if he still believed that the climate crisis is a moral and spiritual issue, not a political one, he said, “Absolutely. And I put it in the context of all of the other morally based challenges that humanity has confronted — the abolition of slavery, the women’s rights and women’s suffrage.... We are hurting ourselves by pretending that it’s not real and that we don’t need to do anything about it.... The cancellation of sensible programs and the elimination of regulations to reduce this pollution makes the situation worse now than it’s ever been. We’re seeing unthinkable changes.
But things are looking up. “If you look at all of the new electricity generating capacity newly installed last year, 2025, people are surprised to learn that the amount made up by renewables and rooftop battery is 94 percent of the total. That’s wild.”
In May, for the first time in US history, solar power overtook coal in power generation.
He was asked about artificial intelligence too, since AI is in everyone’s mind these days, and its impact on the environment.
“It’s cause for deep concern but not panic.... The emissions of all of the AI data centers put together in the world are way less than the emission from uncovered landfills.”
Since Gore’s film debuted, we have seen the average temperature of the planet going up. We are driving it.
But Gore has hope: “I have a lot of faith in human nature at its core. You look around the world and you see many bad things going on, but most people are not like that. I have a lot of confidence that over time we are going to come to a consensus around the world that we just have to save this.”
We share Gore’s hope, and it is not a naive hope. Because right-minded people know that saving the environment, saving this Planet, saving the only Earth we know, cannot be anything but saving ourselves.