An Inconvenient Truth is a documentary. I"m not sure if it's a documentary about global warming or a documentary about Al Gore who often gives a speech about global warming. Either way, it's interesting, and scary.
Most of the film is Gore giving a speech and if you remember the 2000 election that might be enough to put you off, but don't let it. He's very engaging, think Steve Jobs engaging. In fact I wish there was more of him. I suspect the creators were afraid that if it was just a speech it would scare people off, so interspersed with the speech are clips about Al Gore, mostly about him growing up on a farm that raised cattle and tobacco. However the speech is really good and these clips are uninteresting and redundant. The one about the 2000 election was particularly out of place.
The speech is has a number of pictures comparing current conditions with those of several decades ago. Glaciers that melted, mountains that are no longer snow capped, etc. He explains a bit of how scientists know these things but doesn't get particularly technical. He shows some scientists getting ice cores from antartica and that they can compute temperatures from the various kinds of (isotopes?) of oxygen. By far the most compelling bit of evidence was a very wide graph of global temperatures for the last 650,000 years. It covered a wide stage and he walked the whole length showing a repeated pattern of ice ages. Then at the far right was today, not only was it the hotest, it was by far and away the hotest, like 3 times hotter than it's ever been. There wasn't really a scale on it but the visual aid he uses to the make the point was very compelling. You can't see this and think there's nothing to worry about.
From what I understand his science is pretty good even if some of the details are a little fuzzy. E.g., while the snow a top Kilamanjaro is melting it's not clear if it's due to global warming or some other reasons. He does juxtapose some things and lead you to believe one thing without really saying it. Like talking about Katrina after talking about worsening storms (it's not proven that Katrina was a result of global warming). Though I'm not sure if this was Gore's intention or a result of editing the film. Apparently it's is clear to all reputable scientists that the climate is changing and we're the cause. He overlayed a temperature graph with a CO2 graph and it lined up very well.
The movie was good, well worth seeing. There's more info at the film's website. It made me want to see his lecture first hand. In fact I wish you could download the presentation from the website and not just some stupid desktop images. And oh yeah, Al Gore uses a Mac. Specifically a PowerBook and the presentation was done in Keynote not PowerPoint.
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