An Inconvenient Truth Earns an Oscar

UPDATED FEBRUARY 28, 2007

An Inconvenient Truth was released just under one year ago, and since then, Al Gore, or "The Goracle" as he's become known, has hobnobbed with rock-stars and been named as a potential Nobel Peace Prize nominee. On Sunday night, the movie that bolstered his street cred took home an Oscar and the distinction of being the third highest grossing documentary ever.

In that same time, America's climate-resistant political arena finally warmed, one might say, to the idea of reducing carbon emissions. Western governors are banding together to cut greenhouse gas emissions, Texas' largest energy supplier abandoned plans to build 11 new greenhouse-gas-spewing coal-fired power plants (instead it's building only 3) and big business is asking--nay, begging--Congress to set caps on greenhouse gas emissions. Suddenly, the idea that global warming is "the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people," as Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma told the Senate floor in July 2003, is soooo five minutes ago.

A coincidence? We think not.

While the public seemed skeptical prior to the release of the film, there was never a lack of consensus among the scientific community over the fact that humans are causing global warming and that we can do something to reverse it, a constructive message Gore highlights in the his documentary and its accompanying book (which itself has sold 850,000 copies).

So what does he think we should do about it? Well, rent the movie, or buy the book. Following Gore as he traverses the planet, educating the populace about global warming and climate change, An Inconvenient Truth centers primarily around an impassioned, information-laden slideshow presentation, which Gore has given a thousand times over the past few years.

Gore's slideshow does hit viewers with striking footage of global warming's global effects: the rapidly melting snows of Mt. Kilamanjaro in Africa, the disappearing polar ice caps (and the resulting deaths of numerous polar bears looking food and shelter) and the devastation caused by natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina and the droughts in Niger and Sudan, to name a few. But he stops short of turning the presentation into a doom-and-gloom story of what the climate-changed future may hold, like so many other books and movies on the subject do.