International Relations Assignment

An Inconvenient Truth Review

This documentary was released on 24th May 2006. It is based on the journey of the former
USA Vice President Al Gore of Global Warming.
Al Gore says that he has been trying to tell this story for a long time but he felt like he had
failed to get the message across. He had been in politics for a long time but then he started
giving Seminars on Global Environment Change.
Al Gore believes that there are good people in politics who hold this environmental issue at
arm’s length because if they acknowledge it & recognize it then the moral imperative to
make big changes is inescapable.
Gore’s talk of his presentation mainly starts with the introduction of two school teachers that
played a major role in Al Gore’s life – one he didn’t like that much & the other was a hero to
him.
The school teacher whom Gore did not like very much taught his class geography using the
world map. One day, in his 6th grade, one of his classmates pointed out to the outline of the
east coast of South America & then pointed out to the outline of the west coast of Africa &
asked the teacher whether these two outlines ever fit together. The teacher said “Of course
not. That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard!”
But with the technology we have today, we know that continents aren’t big enough to not
move & that they did move thousands of years ago.
“What gets us into trouble is not what we don’t know it’s what we know for sure that just ain’t
so.” Al Gore uses this quote by Mark Twain in this documentary to relate it to Global
Warming. What people normally assume is that the Earth is so big that we can’t possibly
have any lasting harmful impact on the earth’s environment. However, this just ain’t so.
This assumption was true hundreds of years ago but now it is not since the thin width of the
atmosphere makes it highly vulnerable to damage or exploitation. A friend of Gore described
the atmosphere around the Earth as being as thin as the varnish coating a globe. Hence, the
atmosphere is thin enough for us to be able to change its composition & that is the basic
science of Global Warming. What happens is that solar radiation in the form of light waves
passes through the atmosphere. Most of this radiation is absorbed by the earth & warms it.
Some energy is radiated back into space by the earth in the form of infrared waves. Some of
this outgoing infrared radiation is trapped by the Earth’s atmosphere & warms it & this is
good as it keeps the temperature of the Earth constant to make Earth livable.
The problem arises when pollution thickens up this thin layer of atmosphere. As a result of
this, more of the outgoing infrared is trapped inside the atmosphere that heats up the
atmosphere worldwide. Gore calls this the traditional explanation to Global Warming.
He then also shows a funnier version of The Simpson’s explanation of Global Warming, titled
“None Like It Hot.” As Susie’s ice cream melts, Bart explains to her that the culprit is Global
Warming & it works when Greenhouses Gases don’t let Mr. Sun go back after he comes to
visit the Earth to brighten the latter’s day. The Greenhouse Gases then beat up Mr. Sun that
leads to rotting corpses of Mr. Suns heating up the Earth’s atmosphere. Our politicians
combat with Global Warming by dropping giant ice cubes in the sea to make the atmosphere
cooler. The ice cubes keep on getting bigger as greenhouse gases keeps on increasing.
Gore then talks about the teacher who was a hero to him - Roger Revelle. The first one to
propose measuring the amount of CO2 in the earth’s atmosphere. Roger hired Charles David
to take measurements for decades.
They started measuring C02 in 1958. They did this by sending weather balloons up every day
in the middle of the Pacific.
Roger showed his class the results of the experiment only after a few years. He drew
connections between the changes in our civilization & the pattern that was now visible in the
atmosphere of the entire planet. He then projected the results into the future to show where
the level of CO2 in the atmosphere was headed, unless we made some adjustments. This
pattern kept on going up & down & Roger explained this phenomenon through the fact that
land mass is very less in the southern hemisphere & more in northern hemisphere with most
of the vegetation being in the north of the equator. The level of C02 in the atmosphere is low
when the northern hemisphere is tilted towards the sun as the plants breathe in CO2 so level
in atmosphere falls but it is high when the northern hemisphere is tilted away from the sun
as leaves fall & exhale CO2 so the level rises in the atmosphere. It’s like the Earth breathes in
& out each year.
However, by the middle 60s, the amount of CO2 started going up. Gore went to congress in
the middle of 1970s to help organize the first hearings on Global Warming & he called Roger
as he thought it would make a huge impact to the hearing but sadly it did not.
In 1984, Gore went to the senate to address this issue as well. He wrote a book the following
year, ran for president in 1988 mainly to raise awareness on Global Warming. In 1992, he
went to the White House & passed a version of a carbon tax. In 1997, he went to Kyoto to
help get a treaty that was so controversial in the US. In 2000, his opponent pledged to
regulate CO2 but that pledge was never kept. All this time, the main thing was that CO2 just
kept on going up. It was relentless.
He showed photos of how mountain caps & glaciers have had their snow melted over these
years. These included Mount Kilimanjaro in Africa, Grinnell Glacier, Columbia glacier, Glacier
AX010 in Nepal, Adamello-Mandron Glacier in Italy, Tschierva & Rhone Glaciers in
Switzerland, Glaciers in Peru & Glaciers in Argentina.
He explained that 40% of the people will face a severe water shortage in the next half
century if glaciers keep retreating & melting away every year. This is because 40% of the
world’s drinking water comes from rivers & springs that fill up with glacier water.
The most interesting part of the documentary that fascinated me the most was “Ice has
stories to tell”. Gore’s friend Lonnie Thompson digs quadrilles in the ice & studies them.
When snow falls, it traps little bubbles of atmosphere & through these Lonnie studies the
amount of CO2 in the atmosphere in the year that snow fell. Furthermore he can study &
differentiate the different isotopes of oxygen in those bubbles & create a thermometer that
can tell the precise temperature of the Earth in the year that that snow fell.
He showed data of the temperatures of earth over the last 650,000 years alongside the CO2
concentration in the atmosphere for the same time period & it was evident that these two
quantities were very closely linked. Through this data we could see the 7 ice ages the earth
has encountered. What’s interesting is that in all these 650,000 years, the CO2 level has
never gone beyond 300 ppmv.
But as of today, the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere has exceeded the 300 ppmv
mark & has reached almost 400 ppmv. And it is expected to go off the charts in the next 50
years.
This is not more of a political issue but an ethical issue, & if we allow this to happen, it is deeply
unethical.
The most important relationship that Gore emphasized on was that when there is more CO2,
the temperature gets warmer because it traps more heat from the sun inside the atmosphere.
He had a lot of faith in his democratic system & he believed that this issue will startle the
congress but to his dismay, it didn’t. Instead a lot of authorities and politicians ridiculed him
and called his campaign the biggest hoax for the Americans. Even when scientists were
forced and persecuted by various authorities to outright lie about facts in order to prove
Gore wrong, he did not give up.
Despite the huge blow that Gore got by losing presidential elections against George W. Bush,
he made the best of it and brought into clear focus the mission he had been pursuing all
along.
3rd April 1989. His 6 year old son had a terrible accident that left him in a serious condition.
This event turned Gore’s world upside down & shook it until everything fell out. He started
thinking, “How should I spend my time on this earth?”
He went to Antarctica, North & South Poles & Amazon, places where scientists could help
him understand parts of the issue he didn’t really understand in depth.
The possibility of losing what was most precious to him made him realize that he had gained
an ability that maybe he didn’t have before but when he felt it, he felt that he could really
lose it, that what we take for granted might not be here for our children.
Sir Winston Churchill, 12th November 1936 – “The Era of Procrastination, of Half-Measures, of
Soothing & Baffling Expedients, of Delays, is coming to its close. In its place, we are entering a
Period of Consequences.” Gore quoted this to make us realize how we tend to oversee the
warnings of hurricanes that leading scientists & researchers of the world give to us.
The documentary then discussed how temperatures of the earth in recent years have been
going up tremendously & the 10 hottest years on record have been recorded in the last 14
years only – 1990, 1991, 1995, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2001, 2002, 2003, & 2004 with 2005 being
the hottest of them all.
Ocean temperatures from 1940 to 2003 have been varying up & down across a range like
they normally do but recently these temperatures shot up so quickly just as computer
models had predicted a couple of years ago.
When oceans get heated up, they lead to greater storms. And in the last couple of years the
number of storms have gone up drastically alongside the number of tornadoes that have hit
various parts of the USA. Many typhoons have also hit Japan, Brazil & Caribbean. 2005 can be
called the Year of hurricanes. As the water temperature increases, the wind velocity
increases & the moisture content of the wind increases this leads to even stronger
hurricanes that result in horrendous consequences.
Another consequence of these changes in temperatures & CO2 concentrations is that more
precipitation comes but all at once – in one event. This can be seen in the flooding across
different nations of Europe; Mumbai & China in Asia. This doesn’t only cause excessive
precipitation but also increases drought (sucks moisture from land) & relocates precipitation.
Examples of these include the states of Niger & Darfur & the drying up of Lake Chad.
Another major consequence of Global Warming is the damage to the Arctic. The biggest ice
shelf there cracked into half, which astonished the scientists. The Permafrost is thawing that
is affecting houses built on it & the plantation that has its roots in it.
This major shift in the temperatures and CO2 concentrations has not only affected the
climate and the seasons, but has also had drastic effects on the habitat of animals and the
prevalent diseases in our generation.
Diseases such as Ebola, Dengue, Arena Virus, SARS, etc. were nowhere to be found but as the
seasons occur at different times now due to changes in the climate, unusual activities have
led to such unfortunate consequences.
Another phenomenon that I was particularly astonished by was the melting away of the ice
shelves in the Antarctic Peninsula. The discovery of the pools of melting water at the Larson
Shelf indicate the massive destruction this Global Warming has caused to our Ice Bodies.
Moreover, if these ice bodies like West Antarctica and Greenland, keep melting away, as
predicted for the future by researchers, we would face a horrific scenario. The states of
Florida, San Francisco, Netherlands, Beijing, Shanghai, Calcutta & Manhattan would be
flooded with over a million people being displaced from their hometowns.
The documentary then shows a segment of one of Gore’s sessions in China where he says
“Separating the truth from the fiction & the accurate connections from the misunderstandings
is part of what you learn here. But when the warnings are accurate & based on sound science
then we as human beings, whatever country we live in, have to find a way to make sure that
the warnings are heard & responded to.”
We are witnessing a collision between our civilization and the Earth and there are 3 factors
that are causing this collision – population, technological development & our way of thinking.
Through studies, Gore explains that we are pressuring the Earth especially through
developing nations by increasing the population at an uncontrollably high rate. He also
discusses how the advent of technology should make us think differently so as to sustain our
environment in the present.
Except for the US and Australia there are a number of countries that come under the Kyoto
Protocol but now as the awareness of Global warming has reached more people, many US
states have started taking the initiative to follow the Kyoto Protocol.
Apart from all this, the documentary showed how family oriented Al Gore is. His childhood
upbringing comprised of living at Fairfax hotel for 8 months of the year & the remaining 4
months on his farm. As a kid, it took him a while to learn the difference between play &
work. He learnt a lot on the farm with his father and he valued that time very much.
Later on in the documentary, he talked about how his sister, Nancy Gore, died of lung cancer
and how his family stopped growing tobacco because of this event. He was very attached to
his elder sister as she was his protector, his friend.
Al Gore ends this documentary stating Stephen Pacala & Robert Socolow words, “Humanity
already possesses the fundamental scientific, technical & industrial know-how to solve the
carbon & climate problems…”
We have everything we need. All that is required from us is to do the right thing because
doing so will create more job opportunities and more wealth which will eventually lead us
forward.
Each one of us is a cause of Global Warming but each one of us has a choice to change that
through the things we buy, the electricity & automobiles we use.
We have all the resources we need, all we require is determination.
This documentary made me reflect on a number of things that left me in astonishment. It
had all the elements to engage an audience into it. It was crafted in a way that ensured the
successful transmission of the message that never got across to the people in the 1980s.