An inconvenient truth: beware the politician in fleece clothing

Al Gore's film delivers a stunning lesson on global warming. It should also alert Britons to the danger of voting on personality Jonathan FreedlandWednesday September 13, 2006The Guardian
A model of political communication ... Al Gore in An Inconvenient Truth
I am ashamed to say it took a movie to make me realise what, above all others, is surely the greatest political question of our time. An hour and 40 minutes in the cinema watching Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, which opens in Britain this weekend, is what finally did it.
Sure, I had heard the warnings and read the reports: for two decades environmental activists have been sounding the alarm. But, I confess, none of it had really sunk in the way it did after seeing An Inconvenient Truth. I can think of few films of greater political power.



It should be a perfect yawn. A souped-up lecture delivered by a middle-aged, thwarted politician who was best known for being dull and wooden. Yet the film somehow gets right to your gut. Methodically, using graphics, photographs and the odd bit of computer animation, the former US vice-president sets out the case that the climate is changing, with human activity the most obvious culprit. By the time he's done, you accept that we're facing a planetary emergency, you agree that global warming is the greatest threat confronting the human race - and you desperately want to do something about it.
It is a model of political communication. Gore assumes no knowledge and starts right at the beginning. He has a brief, childish cartoon to explain that the thin layer of atmosphere that surrounds the Earth - like the coat of varnish on a wooden globe - is being thickened by vast quantities of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. The thicker that layer becomes, the more heat gets trapped in, so raising the Earth's temperature. In the simplest of nutshells, he explains what the climate crisis is all about - a basic step too many green advocates take for granted.
He supplies the numbers, with graphs showing the steady increase in CO2 in the atmosphere and the accompanying rise in temperature. To convey how high the current CO2 figure stands, he walks along, tracing a line projected on to the screen behind him that goes back some 600,000 years. Then he has to be raised by hydraulic lift to reach today's number. He announces that of the 21 hottest years ever measured, 20 have come within the last 25 years. And the hottest of the lot was 2005.
But what brought gasps from the audience were photographs of glaciers, then and now. Once clear, beautiful ice, they have turned, in a matter of years, into blue water or dry dust, from Peru to Italy. The evidence of a world warming up appears before your very eyes.
And, Gore explains, there are consequences. Some doubted it, but that was before the world took a "nature hike through the Book of Revelation", with floods in Europe as well as tornadoes and hurricanes across America, culminating in Katrina last year.
The devastation of that event confirmed what the scientists had concluded a while earlier: that global warming was making hurricanes more powerful and destructive. But it also supplied the missing piece of the climate change argument. Many, especially in the US, were prepared to accept that carbon emissions are making temperatures higher; they could even see how that would affect nature - glaciers, plants and the like. But they were still sceptical about what that had to do with human beings. With Katrina as the precedent, Gore shows them. And he explains that as glaciers melt, sea levels will rise, eventually flooding land from Florida to Shanghai, Holland to India. In Calcutta and Bangladesh, he says, 60 million people would be displaced. In Manhattan, Ground Zero would be ground no longer. The site of the World Trade Centre would be under water. More gasps.
The range of emotions this prompts begins with shock, then anger - directed by Gore at those corporate interests that, with their political servants, have sought to keep this inconvenient truth from the public, especially in the United States. The stand-out case is that of Philip Cooney, a former lobbyist for the US oil industry, who wound up - despite no scientific training - as chief of staff of the White House's environment office. From that perch, he set about rewriting papers by government scientists, turning firm conclusions into doubtful possibilities. He literally got out his pen and changed "is" to "may". He was caught and left the Bush administration - taking a job at ExxonMobil the next day.
But Cooney is just an unusually blatant example of what is an ongoing campaign by Big Oil to cast doubt over climate change, much as Big Tobacco did over the dangers of smoking. The oil companies fund spurious pressure groups which, in turn, persuade the media to cast global warming as a matter of debate. The reality, notes Gore, is that of 928 peer-reviewed scientific papers on the topic in the last decade, the percentage that express doubt over the cause of global warming is zero.
But soon that anger gives way to determination to act. The former vice-president is aware that Americans in particular could move "from denial to despair", believing first that there is no danger and then that there is nothing that can be done about it. Gore tries to be more upbeat than that, ending his movie with a rapid - probably too rapid for non-American audiences - guide to action.
It worked on me. Four months after I saw the film, I find myself looking at the world through its lens. I now notice office buildings at night, aglow with electric light; or hotel rooms abroad, frigid with 24-hour air-conditioning even when empty. I see the planes ripping through the sky, and read about the roaring economic expansion of China, building a new coal-fired power station every five days. I see all this and I fear for our planet.
The film leaves a more direct political thought. You watch and you curse the single vote on the US supreme court that denied this man - passionate, well-informed and right - the presidency of the United States in favour of George W Bush. You realise what a different world we would live in now if just a few hundred votes had gone to Al Gore (rather than, say, Ralph Nader) that fateful day.
But you also remember what that election turned on. The conventional wisdom held that Gore and Bush were so similar on policy - Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee, the pundits said - that the election was about personality. On that measure, Bush had the edge. Sure, he couldn't name any world leader, but the polls gave him a higher likeability rating. If you had to have a beer with one of them, who would you choose? Americans said Bush, every time.
Even that was not enough to give Bush a greater number of votes: remember, Gore got more of those. But it got him closer than he should have been. And the world has been living with the consequences ever since.
Perhaps Britons should bear that in mind at our next election. If the choice is between David Cameron and Gordon Brown - and, given the events of last week, that is now a serious if - then polls will show, as they have already, Cameron ahead on the affability index. Brown, like Gore before him, will seem stiff, unnatural, oddly robotic, a creature of 24/7 politics, unable to speak fluent human. Cameron, like Bush, will be charming and easy. He won't make odd grimaces when he speaks.
But we should ask ourselves: is this any basis for choosing a leader? Surely we should choose the man of substance, no matter how he looks in a fleece or how breezily he can talk about his iPod. America made that mistake already and we are all paying the price. Let's not repeat it.
freedland@guardian.co.uk
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