Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1233 in DVD
• Released on: 2008-01-01
• Rating: Exempt
• Format: PAL
• Original language: English
• Subtitled in: English, American Sign Language
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 93 minutes

Amazon.co.uk Review
It’s not a horror film, but An Inconvenient Truth is certainly one of the scariest DVDs you could own. Presented in a straightforward format by former US Vice President Al Gore--think Royal British Institute lecture delivered with a Tennessee drawl--it sets out its compelling argument about climate change both methodically and entertainingly. Global warming is a real danger, argues Gore, and human civilisation is the root cause of it. A dizzying and shocking array of facts relating to carbon emissions, the population explosion and the disintegration of the polar icecaps all add weight to his thesis. Moreover, we’re already witnessing some of the effects of global warming around the world, with an increasing amount of storms, droughts and other natural disasters, more in the past few years. But Gore doesn’t present these facts merely to terrify the viewer. Instead, they’re meant to shock us out of complacency and into action. Indeed, the film ends with some very simple ways we can all contribute to averting this impending global catastrophe. And that, argues Gore, is the point of An Inconvenient Truth. We have the ability to change our ways, what we lack is what Gore describes as "the political will." It is his hope that this film will begin to change all of that. --Ted Kord

Synopsis
A movie based on a PowerPoint presentation by a former presidential candidate may not sound exciting, but once AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH hits its stride viewers may be surprised how compelling the subject matter proves to be. While many high-ranking political figures continue to argue about global warming, Al Gore has plunged headlong into a serious wake-up call for the planet with a series of lectures about the problem. It's on one of these lectures that this movie from director Davis Guggenheim is based. Guggenheim breaks up Gore's delivery by illustrating his points with film footage, much of which features the former Democratic nominee exploring the globe as he examines the effects of global warming. Gore's speech is neatly divided between calm recitations of the facts about the issue and several stories of a personal nature. His skills as an orator are considerable, and it's hard not to be alarmed by most of what he has to say. Indeed, as Gore relates tales of melting polar icecaps, rising global temperatures, and the reluctance of political leaders to do something about the problem, the film takes on an air of hopelessness and doom, especially as no easy solutions are offered. Gore's advice is for individuals to take steps to reduce their own inadvertent poisoning of the atmosphere, and to persuade others to do likewise. It's a powerful message, and one that is likely to remain in non-cynical minds long after the film comes to a conclusion.

Customer Reviews

Impressive and surprising
Whether you're a fan of Al Gore or not, he isn't really the issue here. He does a great job presenting the various forms of overwhelming evidence for global warming and mankind's link to it, but he doesn't do it in a political or spiteful way. He shows global temperature and atmospheric carbon patterns, and he shows that our last 20 years have been the highest by a longshot over the previous 600,000 years. Frankly, before seeing the film, I'd heard a lot of information about global warming being a myth, but this film dispels that notion with many independent pieces of evidence.

Even more importantly, it goes to show why we should care that global warming is occurring. As you may have seen in the trailer, if global warming continues at its current rate, the earth's coastlines will be flooded displacing tens of millions of people, it will increase the strength and frequency of hurricanes and tornadoes, it will irrevocably kill off many of the worlds glaciers, it will dry up lands interior to the coastline (like our heartland), and it will disrupt/kill species after species from polar bears to birds. These changes could occur in as short a time as ten to fifty years from NOW.

Lastly, he finishes with ways in which we can affect a change. It would be easy to see this film, get depressed about all the state of affairs, and throw up one's hands in despair, but the film offers us ways, big and small, to help reverse global warming's effects right now.

I urge you to see this film, you will not regret it.

Slick but Alarmist
A very slick production - but then Al Gores claims that he has done more than 1,000 of these "slide shows" so it should be. He starts with those beautiful pictures of the Earth taken by the Apollo missions, including the famous "Earthrise" (over the Moon) taken 40 years ago today. This is part of a series of images designed to suggest that the world is beautiful but fragile, an impression intended to dispose viewers to sympathising with his case. Gore is an effective and engaging presenter, although some may find his personal reminiscences both a little cloying and a little disingenuous in the way that they are used to support his argument. He does provide many examples of warming - principally glacial retreat and the melting of permafrost - but makes no effort to present real evidence to prove that this is caused by CO2. He does use an enormous graph in the course of one presentation showing temperature and CO2 levels from ice-core data, but correlation is not causation, and the use of the data set has been criticised on the ground that it in fact shows CO2 rises lagging, not leading, temperature changes. Hurricane Katrina was a godsend to him, providing much useful imagery, even though the reason it was a calamity was primarily poor maintenance of the dykes and secondarily inadequate federal response - such a hurricane could have hit New Orleans in any year, irrespective of any argument that warming causes more violent hurricanes. There have been many criticisms of distortion and exaggerations, e.g. in the speed with which se-level rises may occur, which Gore suggests will happen very much more quickly than the IPCC "co-authors" of this film do in their Assessment Reports.

If there is one possible "untruth" that I would recommend that viewers might like to check out it is the views attributed to Gore's old Harvard mentor, Professor Revelle. He was Gore's inspiration and one of the first researchers into global climate change, but there is evidence that at the time of his death he was rather more cautious about arguing a link between CO2 and global temperatures than his protégé - see Booker and North 2007.

The recommendations that Gore makes at the end of the film are relatively modest, and many - including energy conservations and getting his fellow Americans to drive more energy efficient vehicles - we should be doing anyway. This film should be required reading for anyone interested in global warming, but unless you view it as necessary propaganda in the cause it should not be viewed without a degree of scepticism. I would very much recommend watching "The Great Global Warming Swindle" at the same time to see the opposing view.

Everyone needs to see this
We all think we know a little about climate change, but this outstanding, entetaining and terrifying documentary by the man who should be president will truly open your eyes. I can't recommend it highly enough, this is life changing stuff. I myself was,like most, sailing along happily and not worrying too much about our planet until I saw this and I am a changed man for it. Do it for the planet and your children, see this movie and become a better human being, it's that good.