In early 2007, I posted perhaps my shortest review ever. A single sentence that read, “This is perhaps the scariest movie I have ever seen. Everyone needs to see it. Everyone. That means you Mr. President.”
The pretentiousness of this review does not escape me at the present moment. Who did I think I was directing a comment towards the President? And how could I declare a movie the ‘scariest’ without stating why. “Everyone needs to see it.” Young Max, did you not feel the need to develop that argument, at all?
There are a few explanations here. First of all, I was busy studying abroad in Florence, Italy. That is why my review is in early 2007, not in mid-2026 when the documentary actually came out. Second, this is an admittedly hard movie to analyze. It is so simple and straightforward, that my main description of it would be its obviousness. I'm not sure I added all that much with movie-analysis at the time. There is much more to say now because the documentary is about the future, and its merits rises and falls with its predictive ability.
It is a powerpoint slideshow. Al Gore, at that point in his post-2000-election life, had been touring the world giving a lecture on global warming. The documentary filmmaker behind this movie, Davis Guggenheim, took that lecture and filmed it in a movie studio with a live studio audience. In between certain slides, he presents a sort-of interview with Al Gore that is more biography than science report. The movie is half powerpoint science lesson and half Al Gore biography.
Al Gore has a tendency to preempt a particular topic with phrases like “for lots of complicated reasons” and then focus on a simplistic version of the basic science principals he is trying to illustrate. It is especially apparent that this is not a lecture by a scientist directed at other scientists. It is a lecture by a politician directed to the general public. The most important part, the actual cause of global warming, takes only a few minutes to go through and half of that is a cartoon. But the thing is, the cause of global warming, it is kind of simple. Greenhouse gases, like carbon dioxide, trap more heat from the sun than non-greenhouse gases. The more CO2 in the atmosphere, the more heat is trapped, and the hotter the atmosphere will be.
It is the effects of that basic principle that are complex. And the complexity of those effects themselves pale next to the complexity of the possible solutions to the problem. The movie, perhaps wisely, focuses on the possible effects and barely mentions until the last ten-fifteen minutes any possible solutions.
People remember most of all Al Gore’s adventures on the scissors lift. He presents two line charts covering the last 600,000 years. One is carbon in the atmosphere measured in parts per million or ppm (this data comes from Antarctica ice cores). The second is the overall temperature of the atmosphere, which during this time, included several ice ages. Al Gore points to the most recent ice age and comments that Cleveland, Ohio had a mile of ice over it at the time. Then he gets on his scissors lift to show what scientists believe the ppm will be in 2050 if the trends continue. It will be more than double the highest it has ever been in the last 600,000 years and that doubling occurs in such a minuscule amount of time relative to the size of the chart that the line shoots up, literally off the chart, almost at a vertical angle. If that was the most memorable visual, his next words, are the most memorable quote:
“Now the so-called skeptics look at this say ‘so, that seems perfectly okay’. Well, again, if on the temperature side, if this much on the cold side is a mile of ice over our heads, what would that much on the warm side be?...Ultimately, this is not really a political issue so much as a moral issue. If we allow that to happen, it is deeply unethical.”
The performance of Al Gore, and it is a performance, is at its strongest when he makes this particular point. He pivots quite unexpectedly and suddenly from a kind of joking and “shaking-my-head” at the global warming critics, to a downright serious allegation of immorality directed at everyone. Indeed, the cut is so jarring right before “it is deeply unethical”, that I suspect it might be an entirely different take.
But really understand what Al Gore is saying here. He doesn’t say certain apocalyptic things will happen. (Global Warming, per this documentary at least, is not like an asteroid strike like, say, Adam McKay’s Don’t Look Up). Al Gore doesn’t know what will happen if CO2 gets to 500 ppm. What he is saying is that, given the difference between an ice age and a not-ice age, we would be worse-than-fools to find out.
Looking back at this movie, it is actually quite notable how little of specific predicting Al Gore does. When he does get specific, he has his own hits and misses. There still is snow on Mount Kilimanjaro, but the other glaciers were receding and still are receding. (Boy, we just got an extremely severe flash flood in Nepal from the melting of a glacier in the Himalayas). Alot of the predictions haven't come to pass, but just haven't happened yet. Antarctica and Greenland haven't entirely melted resulting in 20 feet of ocean level rise, but they are in the process of doing so. Keep in mind, that his timescale is 2050, not 2026.
But overall, this isn't about making exact predictions. He is just presenting scientific bullet points with the inference of their implications. The hotter it is over water, the more water evaporates, the larger the clouds, the larger the storms (Hurricane Katrina?). The hotter it is over land, the more water evaporates, the drier the land, the larger the fires (Sahel starvation?). If sea levels rise, and Bangladesh is at sea level, where will all of its millions of people move to?
The science parts are particularly interesting, so much so that you sometimes wonder why the movie is cutting in so frequently to talk about Al Gore’s life. Some of it is relevant. For instance, he knew the scientists in the 1960s and 1970s that were first starting to measure the Earth’s atmosphere. So, his biography is a good way to present information about the first scientists. Other parts, like his failed 2000s election or his son landing in the emergency room due to an automobile accident, are not so much on point. One would be forgiven, in 2006, for suspecting that this documentary was as much of a political advertisement for Al Gore in some prospective election as it was about global warming. Well, it turns out Al Gore never did run for office again, so a better explanation at this point is that Davis Guggenheim wanted to ground the emotion of the story in character, which is a legitimate artistic choice and frequently occurs in documentaries of all kinds. There is one particular facet of Al Gore’s biography that does seem especially relevant. His family grew tobacco and his eldest sister smoked cigarettes. Then she developed lung cancer and died of it. As a result of a crisis of conscience, he informs us that his family stopped growing tobacco. More than anything, this confession softens Al Gore's view towards the rest of us. His family was mistaken on the science of a particular well-known and controversial issue, but upon new information, they changed their behavior. The taking of this bitter medicine is something Al Gore, in solidarity, demonstrates for the rest of us.
The most telling feature of the documentary though is how utterly lacking the proposed solutions are. (Not knowing much less about the world 20 years ago, I hardly understood the futility). We were nowhere close to figuring this out in 2006. The end credits tell the audience to recycle and turn off lights in rooms they aren’t using. That’s a joke. On an individual level, there isn’t anything that anyone can do besides virtue signaling. It means absolutely nothing for one particular person to be carbon neutral. This is a world-wide issue that requires a world-wide solution. And the vague outline of a solution only really became apparent and/or believable in the last five years. The complete collapse of the cost of solar power makes it extremely competitive with power based on fossil fuels. The current Iran War will further provoke a switch to solar power (and with it more peace in general. Imagine the knock-on effects of not having to kow-tow to hostile and authoritarian regimes hoarding oil). And once we have more than enough solar power, we will be able to and must start removing carbon from the atmosphere. There is too much of it already, so it simply will not be enough to stop adding more. Limiting carbon emissions without replacing the same with just as cheap or cheaper alternative sources of power was never going to work. In 2006, even though the USA and other Western countries have greater per capita emissions, the growth in emissions of developing economies would naturally eclipse any limitation of carbon the West could ever impose on itself. And you can’t lecture dirt poor countries into not developing their power grids. It is arguable that global warming, even with its most detrimental effects, would be preferable to a third-world country remaining in medieval times.
But no matter how ungraspable the future effects of the changing climate or the solutions for the same were in 2006, the basic point of Al Gore ultimately prevails. He drives it home with an illustration taken from an early 1990s conference that debated the cost-benefits of doing anything about global warming. The illustration is of a weighing scale with a pyramid of gold bars on one side. Hmm, tasty, muses Gore. On the other side is the planet. How could one possibly be more important than the other? And how could our plan of action be nothing?
And finally, Al Gore presents us with the following thought experiment. What will future generations think about the choices we made once we knew about the implications of global warming? What would they think of the political polarization on the topic best exemplified by the dramatic MAGA growth of Florida in the past twenty years, a development willfully defiant of the most obvious consequences of global warming? As for liberals, how will they be remembered when, at a time of urgency, they were obsessed with deeply unimportant identity politics? What will future generations think indeed.
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