The charts clearly illustrate the human-caused rise in carbon dioxide levels in recent years, the simultaneous rise in Northern Hemisphere temperatures, and the correlation between the two.

The author's fascination with policy minutiae has been tamed, and his love of charts and graphs has been put to good use. Like Gore's 1992 book 'Earth in the Balance,' this volume displays an earnest, teacherly tone, but it's largely free of the New Age psychobabble that rumbled through the earlier book. The book does not pretend to grapple with climate change with the sort of minute detail and analysis displayed by three books on the subject that came out earlier this spring ('The Winds of Change' by Eugene Linden, 'The Weather Makers' by Tim Flannery and 'Field Notes From a Catastrophe' by Elizabeth Kolbert), and yet as a user- friendly introduction to global warming and a succinct summary of many of the central arguments laid out in those other volumes, 'An Inconvenient Truth' is lucid, harrowing, and bluntly effective. He has revived the slide presentation about global warming that he first began giving in 1990 and taken that slide show on the road, and he has now turned that presentation into a book and a documentary film, both called 'An Inconvenient Truth.' A Time magazine cover story in April declared that 'the climate is crashing and global warming is to blame.'Įnter, or rather, re-enter, Al Gore, former vice president, former Democratic candidate for president, and longtime champion of the environment.įourteen years ago, during the 1992 campaign, the current president's father, George Herbert Walker Bush, dismissed Gore as 'Ozone Man' - if the Clinton-Gore ticket were elected, he suggested, 'we'll be up to our neck in owls and out of work for every American' - but with the emerging consensus on global warming today, Gore's passionate warnings about climate change seem increasingly prescient. A year ago, the National Academy of Sciences joined similar groups from other countries in calling for prompt action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

And despite efforts by the Bush administration to shrug it off as an incremental threat best dealt with through voluntary emissions controls and technological innovation, the issue has been making inroads in the collective imagination, spurred by new scientific reports pointing to rising temperatures around the world and melting ice fields in Greenland and Antarctica. There has been broad agreement over the fundamentals of global warming in mainstream scientific circles for some time. Lately, global warming seems to be tiptoeing toward a tipping point in the public consciousness. The Planetary Emergency of Global Warming and What We Can Do About It

An inconvenient truth (book)