There is a problem with Al Gore as a climate change champion: he somehow brings out the worst in a certain group of people – people like Metro Toronto movie reviewer Rick McGinnis.
McGinnis demonstrates in this review that he dislikes Gore, because he’s successful, because he’s rich, because he was a Democrat, because he is passionate and has a conscience – because he got off his butt after “losing” the 2001 election and found something useful to do.
What McGinnies DOESN‘T demonstrate is that he was paying attention when he sat down to review An Inconvenient Truth. For example, McGinnis writes:
The lynchpin of his lecture is a graph that shows the earth’s temperature rising exponentially with the levels of greenhouse gases; even if this now-famous graphic weren’t in dispute, he neglects to mention that levels of atmospheric hydrogen have tended to echo temperature, not the other way around.
Well, first THAT graphic is not in dispute. Second, it doesn’t show temperature rising exponentially, it shows CO2 rising to a degree and at a rate unprecedented in more than 650,000 years. And third where does McGinnis’s “atmospheric hydrogen” come from?
Anyway, if you hate Al Gore so much that seeing him on the screen will distract you completely from the content of his argument, skip the movie. Go, instead, and buy a copy of George Monbiot’s Heat, or Elizabeth Kolbert’s Field Notes from a Catastrophe. If you can listen politely while someone makes a completely reasonable argument, pick up the film; watch it with your kids; and then get with the program.
