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Rating: "Nondum matura est, nolo acerbam sumere" (Phaedrus, De Vulpe Et Uva)
But who is Albert (Al) Gore? The author of the film in question is, in fact, the demonstration of how complicated (I dare say contradictory) human behavior can be over the course of a (single) life.
Al Gore is a man who, in his life, after being, as a newly graduated, a reporter in Vietnam writing strongly anti-war articles for years, entered politics, forgetting everything he had -with passion- stated, becoming vice president and establishing himself as "one of the most influential vice presidents in American history", participating in numerous international meetings and public debates; but above all, during his term as vice president, he launched numerous military attacks against Slobodan Milosevic and Saddam Hussein (famous was the 1998 Operation Desert Fox), only to win, almost 10 years later, the Nobel Peace Prize (!!!).
After losing the 2000 elections, supposedly accepting defeat, he dedicated himself full-time to the "Global Warming Problem", and in 2006 released this "An Inconvenient Truth", supposedly to be a spokesperson for "Persecuted scientists, ridiculed, deprived of their work, their salary, simply because what they had discovered revealed an inconvenient truth, which they did not give up supporting".
In reality, the film is much less convincing than I imagined, and my dear Al Gore is much less clever than he seems.
The first part of the film is divided into three points: 1) Global warming is a reality 2) It will be catastrophic 3) It must be our absolute priority. In reality, this part is much less convincing than one might think. First of all, Gore focuses more on the consequences than on the causes; he justifies all the catastrophic phenomena that have occurred in recent years with a senseless graph on CO2 emissions, and nothing else, making the reasoning shaky; by contrast, there is a wide part dedicated to the consequences: Gore, in short, collects all the catastrophic phenomena of the last 5 years and, completely gratuitously, classifies them as causes of global warming, in turn caused by humans. He examines phenomena such as hurricanes, the shrinking of glaciers in mountainous areas worldwide, and various environmental disasters, collected from around the world.
The mistakes that Al Gore makes, however, are three: in some cases, he analyzes events in a too de-contextualized manner, for example, Hurricane Katrina or floods in Europe, declaring them strong warnings of global warming. In reality, statistics show that hurricanes have not increased in number over the last 30 years (Kerry Emanuel - Anthropogenic Effects on Tropical Cyclone Activity ), and that floods in Europe fall within the norm (Bjorn Lomborg, director of the Copenhagen Consensus Centre).
Other times, he argues about phenomena actually occurring, such as the melting of ice in the Arctic, Antarctica, and Greenland, where, however, he is not clear in demonstrating that pollution is the cause of everything.
Sometimes, more simply, he is wrong, being superficial and overly catastrophic in his predictions, such as when he claims that the Netherlands and most coastal cities will be submerged due to a water rise of up to six and a half meters, when the estimate is 38 cm (IPCC report 2008), or when he states that very soon mountain glaciers will disappear, showing some photos/drawings from a couple of centuries ago and those of today; in fact, for some years now, there has been talk of a "Little Ice Age" that occurred between the 1300s and the late 1800s, in which glaciers worldwide expanded down into valleys. Therefore, in this case, it can be stated that there is no real issue concerning glaciers.
But the problem (and the main flaw of the film) is this: nobody doubts that global warming is happening, even if to a lesser extent than he expresses, but our dear Al Gore does not provide sufficient data to prove that what he claims is caused by humans.
The film is occasionally interspersed with moments in which he blatantly propagandizes himself, showing us, throughout his life, how unlucky he was, ridiculed, good, and respectful of the environment. I mean, aside from the fact that the context is not at all appropriate, what utility do these interludes have in the economy of the film? None, pure propaganda.
The worst part of the film is when he starts targeting the Bush government (and I refer back to the initial phrase), and with Americans in general, showing a series of graphs/data and news reports demonstrating how idiotic Bush's collaborators are and Bush himself in managing energy and economic resources. Now, am I crazy, or is this just rhetoric? Towards the end of the film, Al Gore focuses only on America, forgetting that he claimed five minutes earlier that "we are all responsible for global warming", as if to demonstrate that it was a mistake for Americans not to elect him, making a not-so-subtle reference to electoral fraud; but hadn't he accepted defeat?.
In general, the film presents logical flaws; indeed, in the final part, Al Gore presents a series of solutions to the problem, and, curiously, claims that "we have the tools". Alternative energies are being developed, the transportation sector is imposing increasingly strict pollution limits, the thesis of hydrogen as a substitute for oil is developing, and, in practice, it can be stated that the situation is not satisfactory, but we are on the right track.
Catastrophic and Defeatist.
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