Gore as Lecturer

At its crux, An Inconvenient Truth is a lecture, much like any college lecture, except it's not. I want to spend a little time discussing the documentary as a lecture.

Some college lectures are entertaining. The reason? The content is not too hard to follow. A good history lecture is a story, and you can enjoy it without having to worry about dates and such that you might care about writing a final essay (hopefully not, as dates make for boring essays).

The more abstract the topic, the harder it is to be entertaining a lecture. It's possible, but either the audience needs to be savvier about what's being taught, or the entertainment comes from material outside the actual content, say, from jokes. If Richard Feynman is discussion Maxwell's equations, well, there's only so much he can do before he has to delve into math. Which isn't to say that that can't be entertaining or informative, but only to a select audience.

Al Gore seems like a good student. He had good grades. He likes science and technology. He gets others to explain things in ways he can understand, then passes that information to others.

To be effective, Gore does a lot of tricks. First, he has a ginormous screen (I learned this adjective from Lance). It is frickin huge. And wide! Really, really wide. It's basically a screen for a wide film.

Second, he uses his graphs effectively. Rather than, say, have a graph that's stuck on the screen, he has it slowly animate left to right so you can clearly see the trend. But it's far more effective as an animation.

He pulls out interesting videos, from a Simpson's clip, to rarely scene footage of the Earth rotating as one of the Voyager (or was it Pioneer) heads away from earth. Not only do you see this, he tells you that you are privileged to see it, as so few others have seen it. Now that's clever. You're being brought into the brotherhood (or sisterhood of the travelling pants).

Like a preacher, he hammers certain points a lot. For example, how bad is global warming. He's already shown you that carbon dioxide emissions have been going up. He shows images of ice cores from the North and South pole where they have shown that CO2 levels have never been as high as they are now, and the relative temperature differences. But he continues to repeat this point in different ways.

He shows glaciers from thirty-forty years ago that once were massive but are now tiny. He shows lakes that were once monstrous, but are now nearly gone. He shows what happens if Greenland completely melted, how it would raise world water levels high enough to flood Manhattan, much of Florida, much of the Netherlands, how fresh water injected into the Atlantic can prevent the cycle of water from circulating possibly inducing an ice age.

Over and again, he says are you skeptical? How many scientists in peer review journals say there's no global warning? None. Yet, policy makers with no training in science cross out reports because it makes them look bad. That can't possibly be the truth, right?

Gore uses humor (really!). He talks about the balance between money and global health. He shows a picture of this balance with gold on one side, and the Earth on the other. He says "mmm, mmm, mmm...gold!". It's wonderful. Love it! Gold on one side, and on the other side....the entire Earth!

At one point, he gets into a cherry picker to show you a chart that goes up and up and up. It's a dramatic way to make a point, especially on a large ass screen like the one Gore is using.

His lectures have been kept up-to-date. Despite giving this talk, by his estimation, a thousand times, he has scenes of Katrina, and numbers that show typhoons and hurricanes are at an all-time high, and maybe events like Katrina are not rarities but a direct cause of global warming. That's powerful stuff. Our everyday actions of going to and from work of just living don't seem like much when compared to the entire Earth, and what about those developing countries? Aren't they far more polluting than we are? Gore doesn't simply recycle his old talk. If there's something relevant right now, he adds it to his presentation.

But the kicker is this. It seems like we're doomed from his talk. How can we possibly do anything that matters to fix problems. Yet, he says we can. Perhaps the least effective political stance you can take, but one has the impact to change the Earth. It makes other concerns seem petty. And, yet, it doesn't. There are companies that would rather destroy the Earth to make an extra buck. They deny it's happening, and as long as their isn't conclusive proof, it's time to make money.

It's true, Gore isn't going to delve into heavy science and solve equations, and that his lecture is to stir people to action, but isn't that what the best lectures do?

If you want to learn something about lecturing, sit and analyze what he does to present the material.

(To be fair, this is a presentation, and the drama works because he doesn't take any questions, something I wouldn't advocate. But it works more dramatically if he simply presents everything).