An Inconvenient Truth by Al Gore

(a 2006 documentary film)

The documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” is an impressive demonstration of one man's

crusade, American Ex-Vice President Al Gore, to persuade people of the dangers posed by
global warming and the impending disaster mitigation measures. Humanity, according to Al
Gore, is sitting on a ticking time bomb, and if most scientists are correct, the Earth will witness
the largest destruction process ever in 10 years, with storms, droughts, and epidemics forming a
deadly chain that will lead to the extinction of life on Earth.

“An Inconvenient Truth”, brings into attention Al Gore’s convincing argument that we
should act now to save the Earth. Each of us can change their lifestyle and come up with a
solution.

Gore showed the 10 warmest years on record had all occurred in the previous 14 years,
and 2005 was the hottest of them all - a year in which "more than 200 cities and towns" in the
Western United States set all-time heat records. And in the east there were a lot of cities that did
the same thing, including, incidentally, New Orleans. In 2003 in Europe, they had that massive
heat wave that killed 35,000 people. India didn’t get as much attention, but the same year the
temperature there went to 122 degrees Fahrenheit.

Global warming is a global phenomenon caused by many things like: the accumulation of
CO2 and other greenhouse gases in the earth’s atmosphere, the man’s activities e.g. air pollution
from fossil fuel burning, deforestations, dumping garbage, traffic and industrial pollution and by
the population (more people means more food and more methods of transportation). Air
pollution includes greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide. Greenhouse gases cause the climate
to warm by trapping heat from the Sun in the Earth's atmosphere. Greenhouse gases are a natural
part of Earth's atmosphere, but their increasing amounts in our atmosphere since the early 1900s
are causing the climate to warm. The increase comes from vehicle exhaust, pollutants released
from smokestacks at factories and power plants, emissions from agriculture, and other sources.
Global warming has a significant impact on hundreds of plant and animal species around the
world. “Birds are laying eggs earlier than usual, plants are blooming earlier and mammals are
breaking hibernations sooner” (“An inconvenient truth”). This phenomenon will have serious
impacts on the environment and on the society.

One of the most remarkable aspects of the paleoclimate record is the strong
correspondence between temperature and the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere
observed during the glacial cycles of the past several hundred thousand years. When the carbon
dioxide concentration goes up, temperature goes up. When the carbon dioxide concentration goes
down, temperature goes down. A small part of the correspondence is due to the relationship
between temperature and the solubility of carbon dioxide in the surface ocean, but the majority
of the correspondence is consistent with a feedback between carbon dioxide and climate. Now an
important point: In all of this time, 650,000 years, the CO2 level has never gone above 300 parts
per million. Today, CO2 levels are higher than they have been in at least 3 million years. And
although they still account for only 0.04% of the atmosphere, that still adds up to billions upon
billions of tons of heat-trapping gas. For example, in 2019 alone, humans dumped 36.44 billion
tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere, where it will linger for hundreds of years. So there are plenty
of CO2 molecules to provide a heat-trapping blanket across the entire atmosphere. In addition,
“trace amounts of a substance can have a large impact on a system,” explains Smerdon.
Borrowing an analogy from Penn State meteorology professor David Titley, Smerdon said that
“If someone my size drinks two beers, my blood alcohol content will be about 0.04 percent. That
is right when the human body starts to feel the effects of alcohol.”

“Similarly, it doesn’t take that much cyanide to poison a person,” adds Smerdon. “It has
to do with how that specific substance interacts with the larger system and what it does to
influence that system.”

In the case of greenhouse gases, the planet’s temperature is a balance between how much
energy comes in versus how much energy goes out. Ultimately, any increase in the amount of
heat-trapping means that the Earth’s surface gets hotter.

With global warming, we can make predictions and then take measurements to test those
predictions. One prediction (a pretty obvious one) is that a warmer world will have less snow and
ice. In particular, areas that have year-round ice and snow will start to melt. Alpine glaciers are
large bodies of ice that can be formed high in mountains, typically in bowls called cirques. The
ice slowly flows downwards, pulled by gravity, and is renewed in their upper regions. A sort of
balance can occur where the loss of ice by melting or flowing at the bottom is equal to the gain
of snow and ice by precipitation. As the Earth warms, the melt line moves upwards so that the
glacier melts faster and faster at the bottom, shortening the glacier and reducing its mass.
Ultimately, the melted water flows into streams and rivers and ends up in the oceans,
contributing to accelerating sea level rise. Everywhere on Earth ice is changing. The famed
snows of Kilimanjaro have melted more than 80 percent since 1912. Glaciers in the Garhwal
Himalaya in India are retreating so fast that researchers believe that most central and eastern
Himalayan glaciers could virtually disappear by 2035. Arctic sea ice has thinned significantly
over the past half century, and its extent has declined by about 10 percent in the past 30 years.
NASA's repeated laser altimeter readings show the edges of Greenland's ice sheet shrinking.
Spring freshwater ice breakup in the Northern Hemisphere now occurs nine days earlier than it
did 150 years ago, and autumn freeze-up ten days later. Thawing permafrost has caused the
ground to subside more than 15 feet (4.6 meters) in parts of Alaska. From the Arctic to Peru,
from Switzerland to the equatorial glaciers of Man Jaya in Indonesia, massive ice fields,
monstrous glaciers, and sea ice are disappearing, fast.

When we think of carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere, we tend to presume that it is

constantly on the rise. Whilst this is true in general, if we look closer, we see that the amount
actually fluctuates over the course of days, seasons and years. During the day or in spring and
summer, plants take up more carbon dioxide through photosynthesis than they release through
respiration [1], and so concentrations of carbon dioxide in the air decrease. Then at night or
during autumn and winter, plants reduce or even stop photosynthesizing, releasing carbon
dioxide back into the air. This is often called the natural carbon cycle. But this cycle is affected
by the carbon dioxide that humans add to the atmosphere when they burn fossil fuels. As Earth’s
atmosphere warms up due to global warming, plants bloom earlier and are active for longer,
especially at mid- and high-latitudes.

There was a college professor named ‘Roger Revelle’ who was the first person to have
the idea to measure the amount of carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere. He drew the
connection between the larger changes in our civilization and this pattern that was now visible in
the atmosphere entire planet. He projected into the
future where this was headed unless we made some adjustments and it was as clear as day. After
the first seven, eight, or nine years they can see the pattern was developing. But I why does it go
up and down once each year? He explained that if you look at the land mass of the earth, very
little it is south of the equator. The vast majority of it is north of the equator. And most of the
vegetation is north of the equator. When the northern hemisphere is tilted toward the sun as it is
in our spring and summer, the leaves come out and they breathe in the carbon dioxide and the
amount in the atmosphere goes down. When the northern hemisphere is tilted away from the sun
as it is in our fall and winter, the leave fall down and exhale the carbon dioxide and the amount
in the atmosphere goes up again. It’s as if the entire earth once each year breathes in and out.

The effects of the global warming can be significantly felt worldwide. As have been said
in the movie, ‘Europe has just had a year very similar to the one we’ve had where they say nature
has just been crazy crazy, all kinds of unusual catastrophes like a major hike through the book of
Revelations. Flooding in Asia, Mumbai, India this past July (2005): 37 inches of rain in 24 hours,
by far the largest downpour that any city in India has ever received. A lot of flooding in China
also. Global warming paradoxically causes not only more flooding, but also more droughts. This
neighboring province right next door had a severe drought at the same time these areas were
flooded. One of the reasons for this has to do with the fact that global warming not only
increases precipitation worldwide, but it also relocates the precipitation. Focus most of all on this
part of Africa just on the edge of the Sahara. Unbelievable tragedies have been unfolding there
and there are a lot reasons for it. Darfur and Niger are among those tragedies. One of the factors
that has been compounding this is the lack of rainfall and the increasing drought. This is Lake
Chad, once one of the largest lakes in the world. It has dried up over the last few decades to
almost nothing. That has been complicating the other problems that they also have. The second
reason why this is a paradox: Global warming creates more evaporation of the ocean that seeds
the clouds, but it also sucks moisture out of the soil. Soil evaporation increases dramatically with
higher temperatures. And that has consequences for us in the United States as well.’ United
States also set an all time record for tornadoes. Higher temperatures will continue to cause the
melting of ice in Greenland and Antarctica. The level of sea will increase and that can cause
catastrophes of unimaginable proportions. Global warming will affect agriculture and also will
affect human’s health. There may be more heat-related illnesses in hotter summers, and
increased breathing problems caused by reducing air quality. There may be more extreme
weather conditions, for example: storms, tsunami, floods and droughts will have severe impact.

This proves that this is a moral issue. It is our time to see this issue. And ‘It is our time to
rise again to procure our future’ as Al Gore said. This problem is as clear as a day and we totally
should see this coming and the future of this problem. We must act now, or it’ll be too late. As
Winston Churchill said, “In its place we are entering a period of consequences”, and if we do not
act now, the effects will be even bigger and hotter than anyone can imagine. A change is needed
in the way we live our lives; we need to save the earth before it becomes too late.
References:
Abraham, J. (2018, April 18). Glacier loss is accelerating because of global warming. The
Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-
cent/2018/apr/18/glacier-loss-is-accelerating-because-of-global-warming

An Inconvenient Truth. (2007). Retrieved July 25, 2021, from

https://is.muni.cz/el/1423/jaro2017/BSS177/um/Gore_Inconvient_Truth_Transcript.pdf

Carbon dioxide levels are rising: is it really that simple? | Copernicus. (2019, May 28).
Copernicus. https://atmosphere.copernicus.eu/carbon-dioxide-levels-are-rising-it-really-
simple

Fecht, S. (2021, March 17). How Exactly Does Carbon Dioxide Cause Global Warming?
State of the Planet. https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2021/02/25/carbon-dioxide-cause-
global-warming/

Glick, D. (2021, May 3). The Big Thaw. Environment.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/big-thaw

Temperature Change and Carbon Dioxide Change | National Centers for Environmental
Information (NCEI) formerly known as National Climatic Data Center (NCDC). (n.d.).
T.Ly/JdMu. Retrieved July 25, 2021, from https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/global-
warming/temperature-change