A Scientist at the Movies Reviews by Greg Paris

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Title: An Inconvenient Truth

Date Viewed: 6/4/06

Details:

Al Gore

Director: Davis Guggenheim

Score: +

The Review: A must see!

This film is a documentary that intercuts (a) Al Gore's message on global warming, a presentation he's been sharing with the public for perhaps one to two decades, with (b) a lot of traveling close-ups and self-reflective commentary on how he came to deliver the message, (c) some relevant family history, and (d) some not-as-clearly-relevant recent political history. The film version of the message itself -- the "slide show" -- is pieced together from several different venues; it is current, including material from news reports in the early Jan/Feb 2006 timeframe.

According to Gore's own commentary, he has delivered the "slide show" well over 1000 times. He's got the message and the timing down pat, with humor in all the right places -- more attuned to liberal funny bones, perhaps, but that's (more than) OK. Bringing this message to a larger public seems to have become Gore's personal mission, or quest, after (or in parallel with) his mixed record in national politics. It's a worthy mission, but there's an aspect of "preaching to the choir" -- most of the audience will be predisposed to sympathy with the message. Which makes it all the more annoying that this film opened in such limited distribution; it moved out after a few weeks of gaining word of mouth, but it seemed too tentative.

Gore learned his science at the foot of a master, and gladly acknowledges him: Roger Revelle.

Gore closes with a discussion of his three fallacies ("...those things we all know are true but just ain't so" -- Mark Twain), and it's here that he delivered (at least for me) some new information. His first fallacy is the public assumption that there exists a global warming debate and that there are divided and opposing opinions in the scientific community. He successfully laid this chestnut to rest, and in the process opened my eyes to a mostly concealed problem in the public communication of popular science. For all my personal interest in the issue of scientific communication with a lay public, I had missed this problem entirely.

Visit their website www.climatecrisis.net for more details.

(4-Jun-06)

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