You clowns voted for the top clown. Get your rubber noses and big shoes ready the end is near.


Al Gore, Sundance's Leading Man
'An Inconvenient Truth' Documents His Efforts To Raise Alarm on Effects of Global Warming

By William Booth
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, January 26, 2006; Page A01

PARK CITY, Utah -- Has ever a little indie film faced a greater hurdle? Imagine this sales pitch: Babe, it's a movie about global warming. Starring Al Gore. Doing a slide show.

With charts.



Hours before the filming of "An Inconvenient Truth," former vice president Al Gore works with a team to choose the best from among 400 slides and animations from his environmental show.

Improbable? Perhaps. So it's all the more amazing that "An Inconvenient Truth" had its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival on Tuesday night before an enthusiastic audience that gave the former vice president and his movie a big standing O.

Among the film's lessons: Earth's glaciers are melting, the polar bears are screwed, each year sets new heat records. Al Gore sometimes flies coach. He also schleps his own bags.

The morning after his debut as leading man, Gore pronounces this whole Sundance thing "a most excellent time." He is wearing earth tones again. He seems jolly . He brought Tipper and the kids. He is attending parties and posing for pictures with his fans and enjoying macaroni and cheese at the Discovery Channel soiree. He's palling around with Larry David of "Curb Your Enthusiasm," who says, "Al is a funny guy." But he is also a very serious guy who believes humans may have only 10 years left to save the planet from turning into a total frying pan.

The core of the film is a one-man, ever-evolving multimedia slide show that Gore assembled himself. A little-known fact: Since his defeat by George W. Bush in 2000, Gore has traveled the globe with his bar graphs, staging event after event for small, invited audiences. Free of charge. And he's presented one version or another of this slide show, by his own estimation, a thousand times.

The official Sundance Film Festival guide calls the documentary a "gripping story" with "a visually mesmerizing presentation" that is "activist cinema at its very best."

In the film, Gore presents the latest evidence to demonstrate how the accumulation of carbon dioxide and other pollutants of the industrial age are increasing temperatures. In addition to timelines and bell curves and stuff about oxygen isotopes in Greenland ice cores, Gore includes several cartoons, one featuring a Mister Sunbeam trapped by the bullies known as Greenhouse Gases.

Gore argues -- with scientific evidence projected on big screens at his back -- that global warming may soon lead to catastrophic sea level rises, which could inundate cities such as New York (flooding the former site of the World Trade Center), producing scary nonlinear runaway spasms of extreme weather (bigger, badder hurricanes and typhoons), global pandemics and, depending on where you live, torrential rains or decade-long drought. It is not a pretty picture.

But the film's director, Davis Guggenheim (husband of actress Elisabeth Shue), captures another side of Gore, showing the former veep hitting the road, part Cassandra, part Willy Loman, working out of dreary hotel rooms, pecking away on his Apple laptop, crisscrossing the continents to tell his story over and over.

"I'm interested in choices characters make, especially when they hit against an obstacle," says Guggenheim as Gore sits beside him during an interview yesterday morning. "As I got into Al's story, I see a human being who's made some tough, tough choices in his life. After the 2000 election? To go back deeper and deeper into this issue? To decide that it is the most important thing he can do. . . . I see how tireless he is. That, to me, is so dramatic, so inspiring."

The film touches briefly but with emotion on three events in Gore's life and how they inspired his environmental activism: the car accident that almost took the life of his son; his defeat in Florida to Bush; and perhaps most foreboding, the death of his sister, a lifelong smoker, from lung cancer ("That's not one of the ways you want to die," Gore says in the film in a voice-over) and the fact that his family farmed tobacco and didn't stop until after her death. Gore underscores that this is the way people are, that it is hard to change old habits, be it smoking or growing tobacco or emitting carbon dioxide, but that without change, the bell tolls.

The film came about after Laurie David, wife of Larry David, saw Gore's slide show in New York after the 2004 premiere of the mega-budget global-warming feature film "The Day After Tomorrow" (starring Dennis Quaid and Jake Gyllenhaal). Laurie David gathered a team, including Lawrence Bender (producer of Quentin Tarantino films, including "Pulp Fiction") and Jeffrey Skoll, the billionaire eBay founder and movie mogul. They met with Gore. "We said you have to let us make this into a movie," David says in an interview over breakfast.

It took some convincing. The slide show, she says, "was his baby, and he felt proprietary about it and it was hard for him to let go." Now, David says, the filmmakers are in discussion with three or four distributors, hoping for a sale.

"This isn't about box office," David says. "None of us are going to make a dime." What is at stake, she says, "is, you know, the planet."

No I could care less why your fool ass does anything. Go light up a smoke and speed up the process.

Global Warming has happened before without us,
and it will happen again,with or without us.

Edit to add:It's like a pond turning over or
a toilet being flushed.
It's Mom natures way of cleaning house.

Maybe we should listen to him, after all this is the guy that invented the internet.

Thanks TK, I appreciate the head's up. If I get a chance I'll see Gore's presentation.

I was talking to a guy the other night who works at a major insurance company. He said that his company accepts that global warming is happening and they are going to take it's probable effects into consideration in writing policies.

Now that's what I call a real long term point of view.

It is easy to critique a man who goes against the mindless, mainstream, "osterich" philosophy.What was the last original, progressive, thought, our current leader had? Why is passionate, intellectual, long-term thinking a bad thing? I agree that mother nature can heal herself. However, it would seem her best course of treatment would be to thin out the top parasites first. We are destroying her in ways, and a rate we don't even fully realize. What happens when China and South Asia become fully industrialized economies. With Shell, Exxon, etc, drooling at the prospective profits?

Jighead, I agree everyone in the US are the top parasites we have an impact via our consumer lifestyle that is 10x that of the avg. human on earth. Putting your recycled beer cans on the curb every monday does jack. Are you willing to lessen your impact by 9x? What would that look like? It does no one any good to pretend.

Can someone give me an example of "the impact of the average human on earth"? I'd like to know how many times the average my impact is. I doubt it's 10.

And I recycle, my neighbors know it too. The sound in the front of my house of crashing tequila bottles being dumped into the truck on Tuesday mornings has a little melody to it.

Here is one. There are others that show how many earths it would take to sustain the US resource use vs other cultures.

http://www.humboldt1.com/vote/footprints.htm#Calc

http://www.footprintnetwork.org/

They just borrowed from this site. It's easier to use on their site but you can find all of it here. They are all left as they come.

Thanks King, for the link. As Chevy Chase said acting as President Ford in a Saturday Night Live skit, "I didn't know there was going to be any math."

I took the test. I was below the US average, not by much, but below. I had a couple of problems with the test's format. First it was based on populations 9 years earlier, that may be good or bad. The US average was only slightly more that 3 times the world average.........interesting. And the 7 questions didn't ask pertinent things like do you have a garden...grow your own food...catch your own meat, heat your own home with firewood, you know , real Dick Proenekke stuff .

The people above the US average? Bellevue soccer moms.......driving all the time, buying tons of groceries, big houses, big utilities, big vacations, etc.

Nice Dick Proeneke reference. Look There doesn't always have to be an extreme, reactionary solution. A good first step towards reform, might be... ACCEPTING IT AS REALITY!! Why is it even a debate?

Well said Jig, my party platform is reality 101.

- - - BUSH . . . unencumbered by the thought process.

this thread is confusing....tk sets it up as a gore bash but the article does nothing to refute the info in the slide show......and tk has some good points that are true regarding american excess consumption

while it is true that global warming and cooling happened in the past and will in the future.......we are not warming in geological time..... we are warming up the earth like an oven on pre-heat and its being done for the benefit of the super rich and the detriment of the rest of the planet

Snake it seems it used to be fairly common here in the valley. Now a new class of people are moving in building mega houses and trying to turn it into the plateau.

Al Gore is doing nothing but profiting from this. A classic do as I say not as I do Liberal. His big supporter on the film project drives a prius from her 30k sf home in LA to the airport and flies her private jet all over the world. Much like Al himself. I agree completely with Hoh Hum on this.

Ok, Gore may be profiting from this, but ever hear the saying, "lesser of two evils", or " means to an end"? What is wrong with raising awareness, promoting conservation and a sustainable future, along the way? When does our technological prowess, move beyond an archaic petrochemical foundation? Does anyone still use a Commodore 64, or play Pong? I digress...

I guess it would be more acceptable if Gore took a job as a lobbyist for some big industry after getting booted out of politics. I've never really like him, but at least he's giving the appearance of trying to do something positive.

"A classic do as I say not as I do Liberal."

You mean like fiscal conservatives?