Of course, there have been mixed feelings about watching this film, both because I have never been much of a fan of Al Gore, and because I have never been a fan of global warming. There has been so much evidence contradicting the data Al Gore presents for global warming that I found it hard to take him seriously. I tried not to be too condescending while watching this film, and I tried to keep an open mind while listening. It was difficult, though, not to see through his appeals to emotion to distract from the missing data. The concept he seems not to be grasping is the idea that not everything lasts forever. Glaciers move and melt. It just happens. It upset me that he took such a roundabout and essentially wrong way to present his misleading data, providing no solutions. He accuses without providing real solutions for the problem. Yes, the carbon levels went up with the rapidly increasing population of earth. What, then, is the remedy? To limit the amount of children we have? To kill off a couple thousand? WHile the issues he brings up are correct in the sense that they're supposed to make us aware of how we treat our environment, his presentation of them makes any skeptic cringe.
He has a point, though. It's true, we ought to be taking care of our world. God gave man dominion over the world and everything in it, and we should honor that. Gore, however, gives very few solutions (you'll hear me say this a couple of times, because it really bugged me). He requests that we change our entire lifestyle. An admirable cause, but, in short, a little unrealistic. Anyone who bothered to study psychology as I was forced to last semester would know to ask for one step at a time, to begin small in order to achieve a greater goal.
How in the world am I to explain this? I admire the passion to change the world, but surely a man as smart as Al Gore ought to realize that requiring the world to change simply because of a few cleverly unlabeled graphs and a story about his sister who smoked and died of lung cancer isn't going to succeed. The goal is to make us aware of the fact that we do, indeed, leave our mark on the environment. But what Al Gore does not answer is how we're supposed to go about doing this in our daily lives in a society which does not take the environment into account while creating their products. Gore seems to point the finger at the government and America as the ones to blame, a classically Bulveristic approach. Instead of coming up with a plan to start small and accumulate momentum, he seems content to politely express his disappointment with the Bush administration for not taking his values as seriously as he does. He also seems to think (rather naively, I think) that if only he were in control, America would simply . . . change. Perhaps if he had been elected, he would be surprised by American resistance to change.
An admirable cause. A sloppy presentation. Inaccuracy pointing correctly. This is An Inconvenient Truth at its best.
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