Truth is, Gore’s movie is no bore

AN INAUGURAL showing of Al Gore’s film, An Inconvenient Truth, took place at Dublin’s Screen Cinema last week.

It was sponsored by the Green Party who invited representatives of other parties to attend. Being a bit of a cynic when it comes to matters political, I was surprised that so many of them showed up. Pat Rabbitte and the Overseas Aid Minister, Conor Lenehan, were there and the Dublin-based Green TDs were joined by Fiona O’Malley, Eamon Gilmore and Fergus O’Dowd.

But then, coalition with the Greens is a very real possibility after the next general election and it’s in the interests of other parties to cultivate good relations with them. Gore’s film concerns global warming and I wondered what went through the minds of our public representatives as the extent of this intractable problem was laid before them.

Drastic measures will have to be taken, world-wide, if this looming ecological disaster is to be averted. There are some nasty political nettles to be grasped.

The message to politicians should be all the more forceful coming from one of their own, rather than from some media celebrity. Apart altogether from its theme, the film has a special relevance for them.

All political careers, it is said, end in failure. Here, a failed contender for the world’s most important job has dealt with failure by reinvented himself. The former presidential candidate is travelling the world like Saint Paul, preaching the gospel of conservation to anyone prepared to listen.

Gore is far more impressive in the film than he appeared during his ill-fated presidential contest with Bush. Gone is the robotic ventriloquist’s dummy who dished up sound bites prepared by his spin doctors. Instead, we meet a likeable, self-deprecating, if high-powered, individual with a dry sense of humour.

He delivers his message with such clarity and conviction that one can’t help thinking what an excellent president he would make. His career, obviously, peaked too soon. Could he be persuaded to run again? Nixon did, and won.

Episodes from Gore’s past are woven into the film. Growing up on his father’s farm where beef cattle were raised and tobacco was grown, politics was in his genes; Al’s father was also a congressman and a senator for the state of Tennessee.

His elder sister died of lung cancer in 1984, after which tobacco-growing was discontinued on the farm.

In the 90-minute film, Gore talks to audiences in various parts of the world, sequences being linked together to form an extended lecture. The ‘truth’ of the film’s title is that the Earth is heating up alarmingly and this is ‘inconvenient’ because it will mean massive lifestyle changes, particularly by us in the west, if a global catastrophe is to be averted.

The film begins by explaining what global warming is. The processes involved will, no doubt, be familiar to readers of the Outdoors page, but the problem is so serious that it is worth outlining again. The sun’s rays warm the Earth, but much of the heat is radiated back into space, keeping the surface of the planet cool. However, gases such as methane and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere prevent this radiated heat from escaping. The burning of fossil fuels by us has increased the amounts of these gases, more heat is being trapped than in the past and temperatures are rising throughout the world.

Coral reefs are dying and deserts are spreading. The world’s glaciers are disappearing and the ice caps are melting. Temperature rises are not equally distributed; an average rise of 6° C world-wide might result in a 1° rise at the equator but a 12° rise at the poles. The loss of the ice accelerates the warming process; ice-caps reflect sunlight back to space so, when the ice melts, even more heat is absorbed by the Earth.

The sea levels will rise, low-lying countries such as Holland will suffer and some US cities, including New York, will be inundated. Ironically, the prospect of flooding may be no bad thing; it could bring the West to its senses before it’s too late. Flooding would also affect large areas of China, a country which will soon rival the US as a producer of greenhouse gases.

Gore puts his case calmly and in a balanced fashion, using graphs to illustrate the salient points. The temptation to turn the film into a Michael Moore-style lampoon of the Bush administration is resisted. There are swipes at the older Bush, the oil and automobile industries but the current administration is damned, en passant, by the sheer weight of evidence against it. To counter-balance the doom and gloom, there are repeated images of the earth from space, of the polar ice-caps and the river in Tennessee, along the banks of which Gore played as a child.

Looking at the hard facts presented and the rocketing graphs, it is hard to avoid the impression that the warming process is unstoppable. Gore, however, is optimistic. Several north-eastern US states, together with California and Oregon, have started to address the problem, so all is not lost. But can pulling up our collective socks and adopting more Spartan lifestyles realistically address such an enormous problem?

This is not an ordinary movie, to be enjoyed while munching popcorn.

Though not an entertainment, it makes for compelling viewing. It should be seen, not just by politicians, but by all of us.