We then examine how the director of AIT, Davis Guggenheim, shaped Gore’s image within the film. To address these questions, we first consider forces already in play in media coverage of Gore in the 2000 presidential campaign, years before the release of AIT.
#Al gore an inconvenient truth drivers#
If, as many suggest, Gore and An Inconvenient Truth were among the drivers behind the rise in concern registered from 2005 to 2008, do they also share some responsibility for the recent decline in that concern? And more importantly, what lessons can be drawn for the next concerted effort to communicate climate change?
And American opinion is now also more polarized than before: more than two-thirds of Democrats believe “the effects of global warming have already begun to happen,” versus just one-third of Republicans. Levels of CO 2 are higher, but, according to the most recent polls, levels of public concern may actually be lower. A Google search for “an inconvenient” and “op-ed” yielded almost 400,000 results, including “An Inconvenient Leak,” “An Inconvenient Peace Prize,” “An Inconvenient DVD,” and, of course, thousands of different and even opposing “Truths.”īut the inconvenient truth of this fifth-year anniversary is that we are back where we started - and possibly even behind where we were - in 2006. Outside of the U.S., Der Spiegelin a January 2011 article speculated that Gore might be the “messiah” who could revive momentum on climate change. (That regrettable choice of words will be addressed shortly.) And asked who might play the role of Churchill in the belated WW II-scale effort on climate change he predicts in his book The Great Disruption, Paul Gilding, the former head of Greenpeace International, named only Gore.Īs for the AIT film itself, the title has become part of the global cultural lexicon. And in the very next week, in his Climate Shift report, American University communication professor Matthew Nisbet identified Gore as one of the causes of the political polarization now obstructing action on climate change. Gore delivered the major keynote address on the opening night of the most recent Power Shift, the gathering of college-age climate activists in Washington, D.C., in April. Gore haunts Cool It, Ondi Timoner’s late 2010 documentary about Bjorn Lomborg, the cost-benefit skeptic of UN FCCC efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. A retrospective analysis examines how the film and the former vice president have weathered the climate policy storms in the years since.įive years after its May 28, 2006, theatrical release, An Inconvenient Truth (hereafter AIT) and its “star” still play leading roles in American and even international discussions of climate change. Memorial Day weekend 2011 marks the fifth anniversary of the release of the Al Gore film An Inconvenient Truth, by any measure a milestone in climate change communications.
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