An Inconvenient Truth

Gore became interested in global warming when he took a course at Harvard University with Professor Roger Revelle, one of the first scientists to measure carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.[15] Later, when Gore was in Congress, he initiated the first congressional hearing on the subject in 1981.[16] Gore's 1992 book, Earth in the Balance, dealing with a number of environmental topics, reached the New York Times bestseller list.[17]

As Vice President during the Clinton Administration, Gore pushed for the implementation of a carbon tax to encourage energy efficiency and diversify the choices of fuel better reflecting the true environmental costs of energy use; it was partially implemented in 1993.[18]

He helped broker the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, an international treaty designed to curb greenhouse gas emissions.[19][20] The treaty was not ratified in the United States after a 95 to 0 vote in the Senate. The primary objections stemmed from the exemptions the treaty gave to China and India, whose industrial base and carbon footprint have grown rapidly, and fears that the exemptions would lead to further trade imbalances and offshoring arrangement with those countries.[21][22]

Gore also supported the funding of the controversial, and much-delayed satellite called Triana, which would have provided an image of the Earth 24 hours a day, over the internet and would have acted as a barometer measuring the process of global warming.[23] During his 2000 presidential campaign, Gore ran, in part, on a pledge to ratify the Kyoto Protocol.[24]

Gore presents his global warming slide show at the University of Miami

After his defeat in the 2000 presidential election by George W. Bush, Gore returned his focus to the topic. He edited and adapted a slide show he had compiled years earlier, and began featuring the slide show in presentations on global warming across the U.S. and around the world. At the time of the film, Gore estimated he had shown the presentation more than one thousand times.[25]

Producer Laurie David saw Gore's slide show in New York City at a global warming town-hall meeting after the May 27, 2004 premiere of The Day After Tomorrow.[26] Gore was one of several panelists and he showed a ten-minute version of his slide show. [27]

I had never seen it before, and I was floored. As soon as the evening's program concluded, I asked him to let me present his full briefing to leaders and friends in New York and Los Angeles. I would do all the organizing if he would commit to the dates. Gore's presentation was the most powerful and clear explanation of global warming I had ever seen. And it became my mission to get everyone I knew to see it too.

Inspired, David assembled a team, including producer Lawrence Bender and former president of eBay Jeffrey Skoll, who met with Gore about the possibility of making the slide show into a movie. It took some convincing. The slide show, she says, "was his baby, and he felt proprietary about it and it was hard for him to let go."[26]

David said the box office returns weren't important to her. "None of us are going to make a dime." What is at stake, she says, "is, you know, the planet."[26]

David and Bender later met with director Davis Guggenheim, to have him direct the film adaptation of his slide show. Guggenheim, who was skeptical at first, later saw the presentation for himself, stating that he was "blown away," and "left after an hour and a half thinking that global warming [was] the most important issue ... I had no idea how you'd make a film out of it, but I wanted to try," he said.[28]

In 2004 Gore enlisted Duarte Design to condense and update his material and add video and animation.[29] Ted Boda described the tools that went into designing the project: "Gore's presentation was in fact using Apple's Keynote presentation software (the same software Steve Jobs presents from) and did so for a number of reasons. As a designer for the presentation, Keynote was the first choice to help create such an engaging presentation."[30]

Initially reluctant of the film adaptation, Gore said after he and the crew were into the production of the movie, the director, Guggenheim, earned his trust.[31]

I had seen enough to gain a tremendous respect for his skill and sensitivity. And he said that one of the huge differences between a live stage performance and a movie is that when you're in the same room with a live person who's on stage speaking – even if it's me – there's an element of dramatic tension and human connection that keeps your attention. And in a movie, that element is just not present. He explained to me that you have to create that element on screen, by supplying a narrative thread that allows the audience to make a connection with one or more characters. He said, "You've got to be that character." So we talked about it, and as I say, by then he had earned such a high level of trust from me that he convinced me.

When Bender first saw Gore's visual presentation he had concerns about connection with viewers, citing a "need to find a personal way in." In the string of interviews with Gore that followed, Gore himself felt like they "were making Kill Al Vol. 3".[32] Bender had other issues including a time frame that was "grueling" and needed to be done in "a very short period of time" despite many filming locations planned. These included many locations throughout the United States and also included China. "It was a lot of travel in a very short period of time. And they had to get this thing edited and cut starting in January, and ready to screen in May. That's like a seriously tight schedule. So the logistics of pulling it off with a low budget were really difficult, and if there's one person who gets credit, it's Leslie Chilcott, because she really pulled it together."[32]

"Most of my movies take a year and a half, if not two and a half," Guggenheim said. "We all felt like we were on a mission from God just to make it as fast as we could. We just felt like it was urgent. The clock was ticking, and people had to see it."[33]

The producers struggled to find an effective title for the film. "We had a lot of really bad titles," Guggenheim recalled. "One was The Rising. I remember Al talking about whether he should give Bruce Springsteen a call, because he had an album out called The Rising. It had a great triple-entendre, because it was like the sea-level rising and the idea of people rising. So we got excited about that for a while."[33] "There were also some really bad ones like Too Hot to Handle," he added. "Maybe that's not right, but it was something with 'hot,' ya know? We had a lot of hot puns."[33]

Guggenheim remembers asking Gore why climate change was "so hard for people to grasp." To which Gore replied, "Because it's an inconvenient truth, ya know." "[...] In the back of my head, I go, that's the title of our movie," Guggenheim said.

Initially, the title was not a popular choice, even Gore remembers saying "Nah, I don't think so" but Guggenheim "defended it vigorously against other titles." "People thought it was hard to say, people thought it wasn't fun, it wasn't sexy," Guggenheim remembered. "Days before we went to Sundance and had to decide, there was a large group of people who did not like the title."[33]

The majority of the movie exhibits Gore delivering his lecture to an audience at a relatively small theater in Los Angeles. Gore's presentation was delivered on a 70-foot (21 m) digital screen that Bender commissioned specifically for the movie.[32]

While the bulk of the film was shot on 4:4:4 HDCAM, according to director Guggenheim, a vast array of different film formats were used: "There's 35mm and 16mm. A lot of the stuff on the farm I just shot myself on 8mm film. We used four Sony F950 HDCAMs for the presentation. We shot three different kinds of prosumer HD, both 30 and 24. There's MiniDV, there's 3200 black-and-white stills, there's digital stills, some of them emailed on the day they were taken from as far off as Greenland. There was three or four different types of animation. One of the animators is from New Zealand and emailed me his work. There's JPEG stuff."[34]

Guggenheim says while it would've been a lot easier to use one format, it would not have had the same impact. "Each format has its own feel and texture and touch. For the storytelling of what Gore's memory was like of growing up on the farm, some of this 8mm stuff that I shot is very impressionistic. And for some of his memories of his son's accident, these grainy black-and-white stills ... have a feel that contrasted very beautifully with the crisp hi-def HD that we shot. Every format was used to its best potential. Some of the footage of Katrina has this blown-out video, where the chroma is just blasted, and it looks real muddy, but that too has its own kind of powerful, impactful feeling."[34]

The film opened in New York City and Los Angeles on May 24, 2006.[47] On Memorial Day weekend, it grossed an average of $91,447 per theater, the highest of any movie that weekend and a record for a documentary, though it was only playing on four screens at the time.[48]

At the 2006 Sundance Film Festival, the movie received three standing ovations.[49] It was also screened at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival[50] and was the opening night film at the 27th Durban International Film Festival on June 14, 2006.[51] An Inconvenient Truth was the most popular documentary at the 2006 Brisbane International Film Festival.[52]

The film has grossed over $24 million in the U.S., making it the eleventh-highest-grossing documentary in the U.S. (from 1982 to the present).[53] It grossed nearly $26 million in foreign countries, the highest being France, where it grossed $5 million.[54] According to Gore, "Tipper and I are devoting 100 percent of the profits from the book and the movie to a new bipartisan educational campaign to further spread the message about global warming."[55] Paramount Classics committed 5% of their domestic theatrical gross from the film to form a new bipartisan climate action group, Alliance for Climate Protection, dedicated to awareness and grassroots organizing.[56]

The film received a positive reaction from film critics and audiences. It garnered a "certified fresh" 93% rating at Rotten Tomatoes, based on 166 reviews, and an average rating of 7.74/10.The website's critical consensus states, "This candid, powerful and informative documentary illuminates some of the myths surrounding its dual subjects: global warming and Al Gore".[57] At Metacritic, which assigns a weighted average score out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the film has received an average score of 75, based on 32 reviews, indicating "generally favorable reviews".[58]

Film critics Roger Ebert and Richard Roeper gave the film "two thumbs up". Ebert said, "In 39 years, I have never written these words in a movie review, but here they are: You owe it to yourself to see this film. If you do not, and you have grandchildren, you should explain to them why you decided not to,"[59] calling the film "horrifying, enthralling and [having] the potential, I believe, to actually change public policy and begin a process which could save the Earth."[9]

New York Magazine critic David Edelstein called the film "One of the most realistic documentaries I've ever seen—and, dry as it is, one of the most devastating in its implications."[60] The New Yorker's David Remnick added that while it was "not the most entertaining film of the year ... it might be the most important" and a "brilliantly lucid, often riveting attempt to warn Americans off our hellbent path to global suicide."[61] The New York Times reviewer A.O. Scott thought the film was "edited crisply enough to keep it from feeling like 90 minutes of C-SPAN and shaped to give Mr. Gore's argument a real sense of drama," and "as unsettling as it can be," Scott continued, "it is also intellectually exhilarating, and, like any good piece of pedagogy, whets the appetite for further study."[62] Bright Lights Film Journal critic Jayson Harsin declared the film's aesthetic qualities groundbreaking, as a new genre of slideshow film.[63] NASA climatologist James Hansen described the film as powerful, complemented by detail in the book. Hansen said that "Gore has put together a coherent account of a complex topic that Americans desperately need to understand. The story is scientifically accurate and yet should be understandable to the public, a public that is less and less drawn to science." He added that with An Inconvenient Truth, "Al Gore may have done for global warming what Silent Spring did for pesticides. He will be attacked, but the public will have the information needed to distinguish our long-term well-being from short-term special interests."[64]

In "extensive exit polling" of An Inconvenient Truth in "conservative suburban markets like Plano and Irvine (Orange County), as well as Dallas and Long Island", 92 percent rated "Truth" highly and 87 percent of the respondents said they'd recommend the film to a friend.[65] University of Washington professor Michele Poff argued that Gore was successful in communicating to conservative-leaning audiences by framing the climate crisis as apolitical.[66] "Gore's and the environment's identification with the Democratic Party posed a significant challenge to reaching Republicans and conservatives, as well as those disgruntled with politics in general," Poff wrote. "To appeal to such individuals, Gore framed the matter as distinctly apolitical – as an issue both outside politics and one that was crucial regardless of one's ideological leanings. These explicit attempts to frame the issue as apolitical take on further gravitas when we consider how Gore infused the film with reflections of conservative values. Indeed, Gore reached deeply into the value structure of American conservatives to highlight ideals that suggested his cause was not liberal, but rather was beyond politics, beyond ideology."[66]

A small number of reviews criticized the film on scientific and political grounds. Journalist Ronald Bailey argued in the libertarian magazine Reason that although "Gore gets [the science] more right than wrong," he exaggerates the risks.[67] MIT atmospheric physicist Richard S. Lindzen was vocally critical of the film, writing in a June 26, 2006 op-ed in The Wall Street Journal that Gore was using a biased presentation to exploit the fears of the public for his own political gain.[68]

A few other reviewers were also skeptical of Gore's intent, wondering whether he was setting himself for another Presidential run. The Boston Globe writer Peter Canello criticized the "gauzy biographical material that seems to have been culled from old Gore campaign commercials."[69] Phil Hall of Film Threat gave the film a negative review, saying "An Inconvenient Truth is something you rarely see in movies today: a blatant intellectual fraud."[70]

Others felt Gore didn't go far enough in depicting the threat Indigenous peoples faced with the dire consequences of climate change. "An Inconvenient Truth completely ignores the plight of Arctic indigenous peoples whose cultures and landscapes are facing profound changes produced by melting polar ice," argued environmental historian Finis Dunaway.[71]

Following the film, Gore founded The Climate Reality Project in 2006 which trained 1,000 activists to give Gore's presentation in their communities. Presently, the group has 3,500 presenters worldwide.[107] An additional initiative was launched in 2010, called "Inconvenient Youth". "'Inconvenient Youth' is built on the belief that teens can help lead efforts to solve the climate crisis," said Gore. The project was inspired by Mary Doerr, a 16-year-old who trained as presenter for the organization.[107]

University of Scranton professor Jessica Nolan found in a 2010 study published for Environment and Behavior that people became more informed and concerned about climate change right after seeing the film but that these concerns didn't translate into changed behavior a month later.[108] On the contrary, in a 2011 paper published in the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, University of Oregon professor Grant Jacobsen found in the two months following the release of the film, zip codes within a 10-mile (16 km) radius of a zip code where the film was shown experienced a 50 percent relative increase in the purchase of voluntary carbon offsets.[109]

In a July 2007 47-country Internet survey conducted by The Nielsen Company and Oxford University, 66% of those respondents who said they had seen An Inconvenient Truth stated that it had "changed their mind" about global warming and 89% said it had made them more aware of the problem. Three out of four (74%) said they had changed some of their habits because of seeing the film.[104]

Then-President George W. Bush, when asked whether he would watch the film, responded: "Doubt it." "New technologies will change how we live and how we drive our cars, which all will have the beneficial effect of improving the environment," Bush said. "And in my judgment we need to set aside whether or not greenhouse gases have been caused by mankind or because of natural effects and focus on the technologies that will enable us to live better lives and at the same time protect the environment". Gore responded that "The entire global scientific community has a consensus on the question that human beings are responsible for global warming and he [Bush] has today again expressed personal doubt that that is true." White House deputy press secretary Dana Perino stated that "The president noted in 2001 the increase in temperatures over the past 100 years and that the increase in greenhouse gases was due to a certain extent to human activity".[110]

Several United States Senators screened the film. New Mexico Democratic Senator Jeff Bingaman and Nevada Democratic Senator Harry Reid saw the movie at its Washington premiere at the National Geographic Society.[111][112] New Mexico Democratic Senator Tom Udall planned to see the film saying "It's such a powerful statement because of the way the movie is put together, I tell everybody, Democrat or Republican, they've got to go see this movie."[112] Former New Mexico Republican Senator Pete Domenici thought Gore's prominence on the global warming issue made it more difficult to get a consensus in Congress. Bingaman disputed this saying, "It seems to me we were having great difficulty recruiting Republican members of Congress to support a bill before Al Gore came up with this movie."[112]

Oklahoma Republican Senator Jim Inhofe, then-chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, didn't plan to see the film (which he appears in), and compared it to Adolf Hitler's book Mein Kampf. "If you say the same lie over and over again, and particularly if you have the media's support, people will believe it," Inhofe said, adding that he thought Gore was trying to use the issue to run for president again in 2008.[112] In contrast to Inhofe, Arizona Republican Senator John McCain, did not criticize Gore's efforts or the movie, which he planned to see.[112] Tennessee Republican Senator Lamar Alexander, said "Because (Gore) was a former vice president and presidential nominee, he brings a lot of visibility to (the issue)," Alexander said. "On the other hand it may be seen as political by some, and they may be less eager to be a part of it." Alexander also criticized the omission of nuclear power in the film. "Maybe it needs a sequel: 'An Inconvenient Truth 2: Nuclear Power.'"[112]

In September 2006, Gore traveled to Sydney, Australia to promote the film. Then-Australian Prime Minister John Howard said he would not meet with Gore or agree to Kyoto because of the movie: "I don't take policy advice from films." Former Opposition Leader Kim Beazley joined Gore for a viewing and other MPs attended a special screening at Parliament House earlier in the week.[113] After winning the general election a year later, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd ratified Kyoto in his first week of office, leaving the United States the only industrialized nation in the world not to have signed the treaty.[113]

In the United Kingdom, Conservative party leader and future Prime Minister David Cameron urged people to watch the film in order to understand climate change.[114] In Belgium, activist Margaretha Guidone persuaded the entire Belgian government to see the film.[115] 200 politicians and political staff accepted her invitation, among whom were Belgian prime minister Guy Verhofstadt and Minister-President of Flanders, Yves Leterme.[116] In Costa Rica, the film was screened by president Óscar Arias.[117] Arias's subsequent championing of the climate change issue was greatly influenced by the film.[118]

The Competitive Enterprise Institute released pro-carbon dioxide television ads in preparation for the film's release in May 2006. The ads featured a little girl blowing a dandelion with the tagline, "Carbon dioxide. They call it pollution. We call it life."[119]

In August 2006, The Wall Street Journal revealed that a YouTube video lampooning Gore and the movie, titled Al Gore's Penguin Army, appeared to be "astroturfing" by DCI Group, a Washington public relations firm.[120][121]

As part of a nationwide "Sustainable Schools Year of Action" launched in late 2006, the UK Government, Welsh Assembly Government and Scottish Executive announced between January–March 2007 that copies of An Inconvenient Truth would be sent to all their secondary schools. The film was placed into the science curriculum for fourth and sixth-year students in Scotland as a joint initiative between Learning and Teaching Scotland and ScottishPower.[126]

In May 2007, Stewart Dimmock—a lorry (HGV) driver, school governor from Kent, England, and member of a right-wing group called the New Party—challenged the UK Government's distribution of the film in a lawsuit, Dimmock v Secretary of State for Education and Skills, with help from political ally and New Party founder Viscount Monckton,[127][128] who notably pointed out "35 serious scientific errors".[129] The plaintiffs sought an injunction preventing the screening of the film in English schools, arguing that by law schools are forbidden to promote partisan political views and, when dealing with political issues, are required to provide a balanced presentation of opposing views.

On October 10, 2007, Justice Michael Burton, after explaining that the requirement for a balanced presentation does not warrant that equal weight be given to alternative views of a mainstream view, ruled that it was clear that the film was substantially founded upon scientific research and fact, albeit that the science had been used, in the hands of a "talented politician and communicator", to make a political statement and to support a political program.[130] The judge ruled that An Inconvenient Truth contained nine scientific errors and thus must be accompanied by an explanation of those errors before being shown to school children. The judge said that showing the film without the explanations of error would be a violation of education laws.[131]

The judge concluded "I have no doubt that Dr Stott, the Defendant's expert, is right when he says that: 'Al Gore's presentation of the causes and likely effects of climate change in the film was broadly accurate.'" On the basis of testimony from Robert M. Carter and the arguments put forth by the claimant's lawyers, the judge also pointed to nine "errors", i.e. statements the truth of which he did not rule on, but that he found to depart from the mainstream scientific positions on global warming.[131][132][133] He also found that some of these departures from the mainstream arose in the context of alarmism and exaggeration in support of political theses.[134][135] Since the government had already accepted to amend the guidance notes to address these along with other points in a fashion that the judge found satisfactory, no order was made on the application.

Each side declared victory. Government Minister of Children, Young People and Families, Kevin Brennan stated: "We have updated the accompanying guidance, as requested by the judge to make it clearer for teachers as to the stated Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change position on a number of scientific points raised in the film."[136] Plaintiff Dimmock complained that "no amount of turgid guidance" could change his view that the film was unsuitable for the classroom. A spokesman for Gore said: "Of the thousands of facts in the film, the judge only took issue with just a handful. And of that handful, we have the studies to back those pieces up."[137]

In January 2007, the Federal Way (Washington State) School Board voted to require an approval by the principal and the superintendent for teachers to show the film to students and that the teachers must include the presentation of an approved "opposing view".[138] The moratorium was repealed, at a meeting on January 23, after a predominantly negative community reaction.[139] Shortly thereafter, the school board in Yakima, Washington, calling the film a "controversial issue", prevented the Environmental Club of Eisenhower High School from showing it, pending review by the school board, teachers, principal, and parents.[140] It lifted the stay a month later, upon the approval by a review panel.[141]

In the United States, 50,000 free copies of An Inconvenient Truth were offered to the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA), which declined to take them. Producer David provided an email correspondence from the NSTA detailing that their reasoning was that the DVDs would place "unnecessary risk upon the [NSTA] capital campaign, especially certain targeted supporters," and that they saw "little, if any, benefit to NSTA or its members" in accepting the free DVDs.[142] In public, the NSTA argued that distributing this film to its members would have been contrary to a long-standing NSTA policy against distributing unsolicited materials to its members. The NSTA also said that they had offered several other options for distributing the film but ultimately "[it] appears that these alternative distribution mechanisms were unsatisfactory."[143]

David has said that NSTA Executive Director Gerry Wheeler promised in a telephone conversation to explore alternatives with NSTA's board for advertising the film but she had not yet received an alternative offer at the time of NSTA's public claim. She also said that she rejected their subsequent offers because they were nothing more than offers to sell their "commercially available member mailing list" and advertising space in their magazine and newsletter, which are available to anyone.[144] The American Association for the Advancement of Science publication ScienceNOW published an assessment discussing both sides of the NSTA decision in which it was reported that "David says NSTA's imprimatur [i.e. endorsement or sanction] was essential and that buying a mailing list is a nonstarter. 'You don't want to send out a cold letter, and it costs a lot of money,' she says. 'There are a thousand reasons why that wouldn't work.'"[145]

A The Washington Post editorial called the decision "Science a la Joe Camel", citing for example that the NSTA had received $6 million since 1996 from Exxon Mobil, which had a representative on the organization's corporate board.[146] David noted that in the past, NSTA had shipped out 20,000 copies of a 10-part video produced by Wheeler with funding provided by ConocoPhillips in 2003. NSTA indicated that they retained editorial control over the content, which David questioned based on the point of view portrayed in the global warming section of the video.[144]

Former ACT New Zealand Member of Parliament Muriel Newman filed a petition to have New Zealand schoolchildren be protected from political indoctrination by putting provisions that resembled those in the UK to the Education Act. The petition was in response to concerned parents talked with Newman after An Inconvenient Truth was shown in schools in 2007. The parents were apparently worried that teachers were not pointing out supposed inaccuracies in the film and were not explaining differing viewpoints.[147]