formal response

Formal Response
An Inconvenient Truth is a persuasive documentary about Earth and global warming. In this film Al Gore shares data and facts which are angled to prove global warming. He really brings attention to the issue and wants people to realize how we are affecting the planet in a negative way. He describes global warming as a “moral issue” that can only be fixed through the power of our decisions.


His thesis is exposing global warming, showing it as a problem and to persuading people to take initiative against it. Al Gore appears fairly credible but I really thought he did a good job of providing a logical argument. He uses a great amount of different numbers, charts and graphs. A graph I found interesting was the one that showed the CO2 levels in the atmosphere for the last tens of thousands of years. It showed a great rise in C02 levels in just the last 40 years which was jaw dropping. His college professor was apparently the first person to suggest measuring these levels in the atmosphere back in the 1970’s. The pictures he uses of the ice caps and glaciers melting more dynamically each and every year are very surreal. It really grabs at your emotions, and even more so when he talks about polar bears drowning. This isn’t something that directly affects any of us directly but it is sad and depressing to hear of these creatures struggling to survive. Throughout the majority of the film he comes in and out of emotional draw, pathos, and logic, logos. The main purpose of his pathos is to make us feel bad about our environmental ignorance.


I found it very interesting when he shared his stories of his son’s accident and the whole tobacco story. I suppose the ideology behind it kind of made sense in the way that we take things for granted. Like Earth, and how ignorance of something such as tobacco can lead to losses that you don’t wish for. I didn’t really like the way he used his son’s near death experience and his sister’s death to get us to side with him on an emotional level. It’s not something that I’d see myself ever doing and I found it to be pretty random. He does a good job of making himself credible, ethos, in how he doesn’t consider himself a part of the government and how his passion of this issue was brought about. The government’s economic weight against fixing global warming and reducing CO2 emissions makes them not seem like they don’t have our best intentions at hand. So for him to exclude himself from that group helped him I believe. When he brought up president Bush and the 2000 election, I didn’t really like that because that made global warming appear as a political party issue and that contradicts his statement of global warming being a “moral issue.”