This document provides a summary and analysis of Al Gore's 2006 film "An Inconvenient Truth" about the dangers of climate change. It discusses how the film helped communicate climate science to a general audience through compelling visuals and emotional storytelling. While some critics argued the film was too politicized, most reviews were positive and studies found it significantly boosted public concern about climate change. The film was largely responsible for raising widespread public awareness of human-caused climate change in the United States.

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RUNNING HEAD: COMMUNICATING CLIMATE CHANGE
Successes and Failures of Communicating Climate Change in An Inconvenient Truth
Alistair Jones
Baylor University
December 4, 2014

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Abstract
In 2006, Al Gore released the novel and the accompanying film An Inconvenient Truth, in which
he detailed the dangers of manmade climate change, in an attempt to raise public awareness of
the issue. In the years since, various authors have attempted to determine what sort of an effect
that it had on the public debate on climate change, and the degree to which Gore politicized the
debate. This paper is designed to study the communication style of An Inconvenient Truth as a
part of Al Gore’s overarching pro-environmental politics and the impact that it, and he, had on
the communication of climate change to the general public.
Keywords: An Inconvenient Truth, climate change, communication, Al Gore

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Can the manner in which information is delivered to an audience change the way people
behave? Looking at the way in which advertising for commercial products translates to better
profits for companies indicates that the answer is yes. However, this effect can also be used to
help educate people and, in some cases, can help foster a change in governmental policy. This
impact is most readily seen in the 1962 book Silent Spring, by Rachel Carson, wherein she
demonstrated the poisonous legacy of pesticides, from which sprung forward a ban on DDT and
a new department within the federal government, the Environmental Protection Agency.
Throughout Earth’s history, the climate has warmed and cooled in alternate periods.
However, in the decades since the Industrial Revolution, an accumulation of carbon dioxide in
the Earth’s atmosphere has created the greenhouse effect, which has been shown in increasingly
hotter monthly temperature (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, 2014).
However, this changed in the last years of the 20th century, with the debate on climate change
being renewed once again by scientists. In 2006, Al Gore, former vice president of the United
States, published a book titled An Inconvenient Truth: The Planetary Emergency of Global
Warming and What We can Do About it, as well as a companion film with the shortened title An
Inconvenient Truth (AIT). Through them, Gore wished to impart upon the American people a
warning about the reality of climate change and humanity’s part in its unnatural acceleration.
Though he faced a great difficulty in communicating scientific information to a non-scientific
audience, Al Gore’s AIT overcame this difficulty to help produce one of the most effective works
that has helped shape the debate about humans, and their influence on natural climate change.
In an interview he gave in 1989, Al Gore stated that his fascination with the environment
started in his youth, particularly the novel Silent Spring, the creation of Earth Day, and the Club
of Rome report on climate change (Dionne, 1989). In the years since, Dionne noted, he has

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become a major environmental activist, particularly in his years in Congress, where he joined
what would be eventually called the Democrats’ Greens, which saw “issues like clean air, clean
water, and climate change as the key to future victories,” for Democrats. When Bill Clinton won
the Presidency in 1992, Al Gore continued his environmentalism, launching the GLOBE
program, which sought to use the Internet to increase student awareness of environmental issues,
and, unsuccessfully, pushed the Kyoto protocol, which sought to reduce greenhouse gas
emissions (Noon, 2006; Gore, 1997).
When AIT was released to the general, Gore had no idea of the success that it would see,
ultimately earning over 42 million dollars worldwide in the Box Office (Box Office Mojo Staff
“An Inconvenient Truth,” 2007). It would also go on to screen at the multiple film festivals,
gaining accolades for its storytelling (Reuters Staff, 2006). It was also nominated for, and won an
Oscar for best documentary feature, and the other for best original song, becoming the first
documentary to win two Oscars (Gorman, 2007). It was also well received by critics, with one
even comparing AIT to Silent Spring (Remnick, 2006; Hansen, 2006;). It was also well received
across the political spectrum, particularly in conservative Plano, Texas and Orange County,
where 60 percent rated it to be excellent, 87 percent said that they would recommend it to a
friend, and 92 percent rated “Truth” highly, far above the industrial average (Garofoli, 2006).
However, several critics argued that An Inconvenient Truth was a politicized account of Gore’s
life, with one critic going so far as to claim that it was “an intellectual fraud” (Cannelos, 2006;
Hall, 2006).
One of Gore’s main challenges in writing An Inconvenient Truth was reducing the
complicated mathematics of climate change science to terms that were simple enough that people
without a scientific background could understand it. To accomplish this, Gore (2006) combines

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text, graphs, famous images like William Anders’ Earth Rise, and comparison pictures of places
like the Rhone glacier in the early 20th century and the 21st century to drive home the physical
impact that climate change has on the environment. The film takes this one step further by
utilizing animations to demonstrate certain points, including the greenhouse effect (Bender,
Burns, David, et al., 2006).
Scientists who viewed the film, including John W. Nielson-Gammon (2008), wrote that,
while the basic premise of Gore’s work was correct, there were some points, including his
argument about temperatures being the highest recorded in 1000 years and the idea that melting
sea ice would cause catastrophic rising in sea level were either corrected by further scientific
research, or misleading. Furthermore, Nelson-Gammon notes Gore’s argument was missing the
inclusion of widely accepted models and the role they play in understanding climate change,
though he concedes that the possible reasoning for such exclusion, including the level of
difficulty of the material, made sense.
Another scientist, Eric Steig (2008), notes that two of Gore’s examples regarding glacier
retreat as a result of warming climate and the idea that one can see the effect of the Clean Air Act
in Antarctic ice core samples are false, as the glacier retreating is likely due to a change in
precipitation and it is impossible to see the effect of a law on physical substances, though he
concedes that the fundamentals of climate change are correct. David Legates (2008), however,
breaks with this trend, arguing that the entire basis of Gore’s work regarding the hydrologic
cycle is based on alarmism, using such examples as the flooding of the Yellow River in China as
proof, though Legates notes that the Yellow River has a historical record of flooding, long before
Industrial Revolution. This conclusion leads to Legates decrying the entirety of his work as a
piece of political propaganda, unworthy of being considered a scientific document.

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Before the release of AIT in 2006, climate change was mentioned in the form of
congressional testimony from scientists who cited statistics with very little personal emotional
reflection or in press accounts. A study, conducted just two months after the release of AIT,
suggested these means of attempting to give information to the public had a detrimental effect
on public perception of the crisis (Weber, 2006). Beattie, Sale, and McGuire (2011) theorized
that the very long-term nature of climate change inhibited the panic response of many people.
However, others (Lin, 2011) argue that AIT was so successful was because it managed to make
an emotional connection with the audience, transforming the thought process from the third-
person effect, where people believe that mass media messages affect others rather than
themselves, to a first-person effect, where people are believe that messages will affect them
more than others.
Political affiliation also affects one’s views on climate change. Self-identifying
Democrats and liberals believing in and attempting to correct climate change while self-
identifying Republicans and conservatives tend to ignore climate science, it is slightly harder to
locate where this ideological split comes from. As Aaron McCright and Riley Dunlap (2011)
note, climate change was always a politicized topic since its introduction, being heavily
contested by the capitalist order endorsed by conservatives and industrialists, while being
generally accepted by progressives. They also note that the conservative contestation stems
from their belief that desirable and inevitable progress can only be achieved through unfettered
industrial capitalism and that policy on climate change would be a direct threat to economic
growth and the free market, whereas the liberal acceptance stems directly from their desire to
reduce the danger of climate change to the populace.

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Joe Romm (“Study debunks,” 2012), a writer for ThinkProgress, reported on a study
released the following year regarding public opinion and climate change. The study found that
the greater the media covered climate change, the greater public concern grew, while also
finding that mentioning AIT significantly boosted public perception of the urgency with which
climate change needed to be addressed. Romm notes that prior to 2009, Republicans had
supported cap and trade system for carbon, pointing to Mitt Romany’s 2005 agreement to limit
carbon emissions, and Newt Gingrich‘s endorsement in 2007 of a cap-and-trade system for
carbon emissions (“Bombshell and Dud,” 2012). As noted by the Council on Foreign Relations
(CFR), this trend continued in the 2008 presidential election, when John McCain, the
Republican candidate for President went on record supporting a successor to the failed Kyoto
Treaty and a cap-and-trade system. By contrast, according to the CFR the vast majority of
Democratic candidates, including future president Barack Obama, were not only willing to
acknowledge the existence of climate change, but they were also willing to allow the federal
government to engage in practices intended to limit carbon gases.
Romm (“Bombshell and Dud,” 2012) also examines public opinion polls taken by
Gallup, one of the United State’s most reliable and well-known polling entities regarding public
perception of climate change. Specifically, he looks at the poll regarding climate change and
political affiliation, and what he found amazed him. As he notes, Gallup reported that, until the
presidential election of 2004, the number of people who reported that they believed that
reporting of climate change was either correct or underestimated rose above 60 percent while
those who found it to be overestimated was at 30 percent. Romm notes that this number dipped
in 2004 and 2005, coming back to 2003 levels, before dropping to their lowest levels in 2009,
with 57 percent reporting that media coverage of climate change was either correct or

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understated and 41 percent reporting that coverage was overstated. Politically, he found that the
number of Democrats, Independents, and Republicans who stated that the coverage of climate
change was exaggerated followed suit, rising from 2001 to 2004, dropping in the aftermath of
the 2004 election, and then rising again by 2009. Romm indicates that the fact that belief in the
exaggeration of climate change was lower in 2007 than it was in 2004 suggests that climate
politics was already polarized before Gore’s movie was. To further prove his argument that
Gore never made the climate change debate about Democrat versus Republican, but rather about
the people as a whole, Romm points to the WE movement, an effort by Gore to bring together a
bipartisan effort to effect change on climate change.
In 2013, less than 6 months after Hurricane Sandy struck New York Yale University and
the Center for Climate Change Communication at George Mason University administered a
poll. As is reported by James Marsden (2013), 58% of Americans reported a belief in global
warming, but also blame humans for the acceleration of the threat, with 85% claiming to have
experienced extreme weather within the last year. Marsden also found that 52% of Republicans
and Republican-leaning independents affirmed the existence of climate change and 62% stating
that the United States should take action to respond to climate change. It found that Republican
Party leaders are slower to respond than the base.
Climate change is a very difficult topic to communicate because of the science involved.
Al Gore’s AIT managed to successfully bridge the gap between scientist and the public to great
applause, though some criticized the movie because of Gore’s history. Despite this, AIT is
making important headway in the way in which America is handling the climate change crisis,
particularly with the younger generation.

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