Review: An Inconvenient Sequel

Eleven years ago in his Oscar-winning documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore famously presented the science and dangers of climate change via a sobering slide show. Now the former vice president is back with An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power, which opens nationwide on 4 August.

If An Inconvenient Truth was designed to educate the public, An Inconvenient Sequel seeks to mobilize it, encouraging individuals to be advocates for tackling climate change at the local, state, and national levels. “If good people are given the opportunity to do the right thing, they will,” said producer Jeff Skoll at the recent Washington, DC, premiere. To spur viewers to action, the film highlights ways to reduce carbon emissions and offers insight on how global agreements, such as the 2015 Paris climate pact, come together. It also creates a sense of urgency by arguing that time is running out to change our habits.

That urgency was partly reflected by the audience for the DC screening, which included Senator Bill Nelson (D-FL), House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), and former Maryland senator Barbara Mikulski. They watched a film that doesn’t skirt the political struggle climate advocates face in the US. It includes a March 2007 hearing of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works in which Gore is cross-examined—and continually interrupted—by Senator Jim Inhofe (R-OK), a climate denier. Gore sighs and says that although he doesn’t know how to persuade Inhofe to accept the vast amount of evidence that the climate is changing, he is still willing to try.

To advocate for action, Gore focuses on recent extreme weather events that have been linked to the changing climate. He had caught flak for his prediction in An Inconvenient Truth that the 9/11 memorial in New York City was at risk of flooding. “People said, ‘That’s ridiculous. What a terrible exaggeration,’” Gore recalls in the new film. Yet in 2012, Hurricane Sandy proved him right. An Inconvenient Sequel also cites a 2015 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences paper that found that a decade-long drought in Syria contributed to the country’s political instability. Will such human-induced tragedies happen more often? A chart in the film, adapted from a figure in a global temperature analysis by NASA climate scientist James Hansen and colleagues, suggests the answer is yes. Over time the bell curve plotting temperature anomalies in the Northern Hemisphere summer shifted so far to the right that the researchers had to add a darker shade of red.

Although Gore didn’t manage to persuade Inhofe, the film also features a more successful meeting with high-ranking officials in the Indian government. “America has [had] 150 years of using fossil fuels, and now it’s running out of coal and is switching to renewables,” says one minister. “Why shouldn’t India have 150 years to do the same?” Gore’s reply is brief and to the point: “Have you seen the Sun today?”

Gore has hit on the most effective political tactic for persuading developing countries to tackle carbon emissions: Rather than talk about the good of the planet, stress the beneficial side effects of clean air and water. Of course, some good, old-fashioned bargaining chips are useful too. To help persuade India to join the Paris agreement, Gore gets the CEO of Solar City to license the latest solar-cell design to India—royalty-free.

The movie chronicles other encouraging steps from recent history. It profiles the Deep Space Climate Observatory , the Earth-observing satellite launched in 2015 that Gore helped conceive when he was vice president. In addition to housing a series of detectors to measure ozone, aerosols, and space weather, the satellite has a high-resolution camera to take pictures of the planet in real time. The goal was to be able to issue regular updates of the Apollo “Blue Marble” photograph that helped galvanize the environmental movement. Gore also visits Dale Ross, the Republican mayor of Georgetown, Texas, who persuaded his town to go 100% renewable. At moments like this, Gore regains his optimism; other times, such as when Donald Trump is elected, Gore is visibly deflated. (Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Paris agreement occurred too late to be included in the film; Gore told screening attendees that he’s thankful the US can’t legally pull out of the accord until the day after the 2020 presidential election.)

Gore likes to connect the dots for the audience in his climate talks. So it seems apt that the opening and closing scenes of the film depict the Greenland ice sheets, whose drips of meltwater can be thought of as sand falling through an hourglass. We are rapidly running out of time, but it might not be too late.