Movie reviews on Earth Friendly Gardening will be few and far between, mostly because I almost never watch movies. The last one I saw was Fahrenheit 9/11. But another lefty documentary–Al Gore’s movie about climate change, An Inconvenient Truth–sent Curt, our friend Carol, and me to the movies this past Sunday morning so we could get the early morning cheap ticket price.
I highly recommend it to anyone who cares about the environment and especially the climate change issue. The film’s purpose is to explain the (depressing) science of climate change. In layperson’s terms, the Earth is basically sitting on a powder keg while its inhabitants are smoking doobs and tossing down the matches.
But it’s as much about Gore as it is climate change, weaving in (equally depressing) personal circumstances, such as the his sister’s death from lung cancer, his son’s brush with death as a young child, and of course his “loss” of the 2000 election to Wacko the 2nd.
YEAH! Pass the milk duds, baby!
The movie follows Gore as he goes from city to city with his slideshow of doom, tweaking it as he goes. I won’t get into the science of climate change here…but I’ve read that scientists have analyzed his presentation of the facts on climate change and have pronounced it something like 99.9% accurate.
I will remark on one thing thing that I learned that was shocking. (Although really, why am I shocked by anything anymore?) Gore quotes a study that analyzed something like 10% of the peer-reviewed scientific articles that appeared in scientific journals in the last couple of decades. The total number analyzed was something like 970. (This is not the exact numbers, my memory is too faulty for that, but it’s close.) Of those articles, NOT A SINGLE ONE disputed the reality of global warming/climate change.
The same study then looked at the same percentage of articles that appeared in the mass media over the same period of time. MORE THAN HALF OF THE ARTICLES in the mass media disputed the existence of climate change. Soooooo……are mainstream journalists trying too hard to be “balanced?” Or are they being kept in check by their corporate owners? Or are they being swayed by a subtle, behind-the-scenes smear campaign by Big Oil, Big Auto, & the rest of their ilk? Gore likened it to the cigarette ads from the 1950s with headlines like “75% of doctors surveyed prefer to smoke Camels.”
Regardless of the motive, it’s clear that mass media has done a grave disservice to the people of this country, and once again, as someone with a journalism degree, I’m ashamed to be even remotely associated with them.
Al Gore was brilliant, showing a side of himself that he certainly never did when he was campaigning. If he had been as comfortable campaigning as he was giving his climate talks, well..the world would be a better place today. Several times during Gore’s presentation, I thought to myself, “I’m listening to Andy Griffith give a lecture on climate change!” That’s the demeanor that he had in his presentation…fo’ real.
And I admit that a couple of times–in the biographical parts of the movie–a lump caught in my throat–the news coverage of how the election was won, lost, fought in the Supreme Court and eventually lost; Gore smiling graciously at Wacko’s inauguration; Wacko’s chimpy little victorious smirk. I couldn’t help but think how much the current Maniac in Chief has ruined our country (and others) and how much better off we’d be if Gore was our president.
Well, I didn’t say An Inconvenient Truth was a fun movie. Not exactly a date movie, I guess. But still, go if you have the chance. Especially if you have questions about whether climate change is real.
