An Inconvenient Truth

• 1. Introduction

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  Al Gore walks onto a small Los Angeles stage, opens with a joke, and then proceeds to rattle the audience for ninety minutes. "I am Al Gore," he says. "I used to be the next president of the United States of America." The laughter settles. What follows is not a speech. It is a reckoning. An Inconvenient Truth, the 2006 documentary directed by Davis Guggenheim, captures Gore's illustrated lecture on global warming. He had already shown it more than a thousand times in cities across the world. A film based on a slideshow sounds, on its face, like a very bad idea. How it became one of the highest-grossing documentaries in American history, earned two Academy Awards, and reshaped how millions of people thought about the planet is a story worth tracing from the beginning. What drove a former vice president to spend years presenting graphs to whoever would listen? Who convinced him to let a camera crew in? And what happened once the lights went up?

• 2. A Decades-Long Mission

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  Gore's concern about the climate did not begin with a political calculation. It began in a Harvard classroom with Professor Roger Revelle, one of the first scientists to systematically measure carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. That education left a mark that Gore carried into elected office. In 1981, when he was a member of Congress, Gore initiated the first congressional hearing on global warming. His 1992 book, Earth in the Balance, reached the New York Times bestseller list while he was still running for vice president. As VP during the Clinton administration, Gore pushed for a carbon tax designed to reflect the true environmental cost of energy use. It was partially implemented in 1993. He helped broker the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, an international treaty to curb greenhouse gas emissions, only to watch the Senate reject it in a 95-to-0 vote. The primary objections centered on exemptions granted to China and India. He also backed a satellite called Triana, which would have beamed a live image of Earth across the internet around the clock, acting as a barometer for global warming. The project was controversial and repeatedly delayed. Each of these efforts hit a wall. And then, in 2000, Gore lost the presidency itself. He later described that loss as a "hard blow" that, eventually, brought his environmental mission "into clear focus."

• 3. How the Film Got Made

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  Producer Laurie David was sitting in a New York City audience on the 27th of May, 2004, watching the premiere of the climate disaster film The Day After Tomorrow. Gore was one of several panelists that night. He showed a ten-minute version of his slideshow, and David was stopped cold. "I had never seen it before, and I was floored," she said. She immediately asked Gore to let her present his full briefing to audiences in New York and Los Angeles. David assembled a team that included producer Lawrence Bender and former eBay president Jeffrey Skoll. Getting Gore on board took some persuading. The slideshow, David noted, "was his baby, and he felt proprietary about it and it was hard for him to let go." Davis Guggenheim was brought in to direct. He, too, was skeptical at first. Then he sat through the presentation. "I was blown away," he said. "I left after an hour and a half thinking that global warming was the most important issue... I had no idea how you'd make a film out of it, but I wanted to try." The production schedule was brutal. Guggenheim said his films typically take one and a half to two and a half years. This one had to be edited and cut starting in January and ready to screen in May. Filming locations stretched across the United States and into China. Guggenheim said the crew "felt like we were on a mission from God just to make it as fast as we could." The person who held it all together, multiple team members agreed, was co-producer Lesley Chilcott.

• 4. The Slide Show Itself

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  Gore had been making climate presentations since 1989, originally using flip-chart illustrations. By the time Guggenheim arrived, the material had grown into a Keynote presentation on a 70-foot digital screen that Bender commissioned specifically for the movie. In 2004, Gore enlisted Duarte Design to condense, update, and animate the material. The presentation was built using Apple's Keynote software, the same platform Steve Jobs used for product launches. But the slide show was never static. Chilcott said Gore arranged slides during flights, tailoring the talk to each specific audience and location. When he arrived in a new city, he often already had photographs from a local wildfire that had erupted two days earlier. The scientific backbone was substantial. Gore presented the Keeling Curve, which tracked the long-term rise of atmospheric CO2 measured at the Mauna Loa Observatory. He showed before-and-after photographs of retreating glaciers, including the Grinnell and Boulder Glaciers in Patagonia. He cited Antarctic ice-core data from researchers at the Physics Institute of the University of Bern and the European Project for Ice Coring in Antarctica, which showed CO2 concentrations higher than at any point in the previous 650,000 years. He also cited a 2004 survey by Naomi Oreskes of 928 peer-reviewed scientific articles on global climate change published between 1993 and 2003. Every article either supported the human-caused warming consensus or made no comment on it. Gore used a clip from the Futurama episode "Crimes of the Hot" to explain the greenhouse effect. That detail says something about how the show was calibrated: rigorous enough for scientists, accessible enough for television audiences.

• 5. What Scientists Said

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  When the film was released, the Associated Press contacted more than 100 climate researchers to assess its accuracy. All 19 climate scientists who had either seen the film or read the companion book said Gore had accurately conveyed the science. William H. Schlesinger, dean of the Nicholas School of Environment and Earth Sciences at Duke University, said Gore "got all the important material and got it right." Robert Corell, chairman of the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, recalled watching the presentation and telling Gore afterward, "I'm absolutely blown away. There are a lot of details you could get wrong. I could find no error." Michael Shermer, founder of The Skeptics Society, wrote in Scientific American that the slideshow "shocked me out of my doubting stance." Lonnie Thompson, an Earth Science professor at Ohio State University whose research on retreating glaciers featured in the film, said it had "tremendous value" as a university-level introduction to the issues. A handful of scientists did identify specific points that needed updating or qualification. The film's treatment of the connection between hurricanes and global warming was the most debated. Brian Soden, a professor at the University of Miami, called Gore's use of Hurricane Katrina imagery "inappropriate and unnecessary," arguing there were more solidly established warming impacts available. Gavin Schmidt, a NASA climate modeler, thought Gore handled it carefully enough, noting that Gore "never in the movie" said a specific storm was caused by global warming. Eric Steig, writing on the climate science platform RealClimate, said the science was "remarkably up to date" and that the film "rests on a solid scientific foundation."

• 6. The Film's Title and Release

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  Finding a title nearly derailed the project. Guggenheim recalled that one early contender was The Rising, and that Gore himself considered calling Bruce Springsteen to check whether the album of the same name would be a conflict, noting its "triple-entendre" about sea levels rising and people rising. There were, Guggenheim admitted, a lot of puns involving the word "hot." The actual title came from a moment when Guggenheim asked Gore why climate change was so difficult for people to grasp. Gore replied, "Because it's an inconvenient truth, ya know." Guggenheim said that phrase went straight to the back of his head as the answer. Even then, the title faced resistance. Days before the Sundance deadline, a large group of people still disliked it. Guggenheim defended it. The film premiered at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival, where it received three standing ovations. It also screened at Cannes and served as the opening night film at the 27th Durban International Film Festival on the 14th of June, 2006. It opened in New York City and Los Angeles on the 24th of May 2006, playing on only four screens. On Memorial Day weekend, it averaged $91,447 per theater, a record for a documentary at the time. The film ultimately grossed over $24 million in the United States, making it the eleventh-highest-grossing documentary in the country from 1982 forward. In foreign markets, it earned nearly $26 million, with France alone accounting for $5 million.

• 7. Awards and Backlash

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  At the 79th Academy Awards, An Inconvenient Truth won Best Documentary Feature and Best Original Song for Melissa Etheridge's "I Need to Wake Up." It was the first documentary to win two Oscars and the first to win in the original song category. After Guggenheim accepted the award, he invited Gore to the stage. Gore's speech ended with a line that echoed the film's close: "The will to act is a renewable resource." Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change jointly won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for their work drawing attention to global warming. The related spoken-word album, featuring Beau Bridges, Cynthia Nixon, and Blair Underwood, won Best Spoken Word Album at the 51st Grammy Awards. Not everyone was welcoming. Oklahoma Republican Senator Jim Inhofe, then chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, compared the film to Adolf Hitler's book Mein Kampf. President George W. Bush, when asked whether he would watch it, said simply: "Doubt it." Then-Australian Prime Minister John Howard refused to meet with Gore during his September 2006 Sydney visit, saying, "I don't take policy advice from films." A year later, Australia's new prime minister, Kevin Rudd, ratified the Kyoto Protocol in his first week in office, leaving the United States as the only industrialized nation not to have signed the treaty. In the United Kingdom, a school governor named Stewart Dimmock filed a lawsuit challenging the government's plan to distribute the film to secondary schools. High Court Justice Michael Burton ruled in October 2007 that the film was substantially grounded in scientific fact but contained nine specific errors that required accompanying guidance notes before the film could be shown to schoolchildren.

• 8. Legacy and Impact

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  In a July 2007 survey conducted by the Nielsen Company and Oxford University across 47 countries, 66 percent of respondents who had seen the film said it "changed their mind" about global warming. Eighty-nine percent said it made them more aware of the problem, and three out of four said they had changed some of their habits as a result. A 2011 paper published in the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management found that in the two months after the film's release, zip codes within ten miles of a theater showing it experienced a 50 percent relative increase in voluntary carbon offset purchases. The film inspired producer Kevin Wall to conceive the 2007 Live Earth festival. Italian composer Giorgio Battistelli wrote an operatic adaptation called CO2, which premiered at La Scala in Milan in 2015. Gore founded The Climate Reality Project in 2006. It trained 1,000 activists to deliver his presentation in their own communities. The group eventually grew to 3,500 presenters worldwide. German Environment Minister Sigmar Gabriel bought 6,000 DVDs to distribute to German schools. Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero sent 30,000 copies to Spanish schools in October 2007. The National Science Teachers Association in the United States declined 50,000 free copies, a decision that drew scrutiny after it emerged the organization had received $6 million from ExxonMobil since 1996. A sequel, An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power, was released on the 28th of July 2017, after years of discussion among the original producers. NASA climatologist James Hansen offered perhaps the most lasting framing of the original film's significance: "Al Gore may have done for global warming what Silent Spring did for pesticides."