An Inconvenient Truth, directed by Davis Guggenheim, is a 2006 documentary film about former United States Vice President Al Gore's campaign to educate citizens about global warming. Since the film's release, it has been given credit for raising international public awareness of climate change and reenergising the environmental movement. Al Gore explains that global warming is the catastrophe which threatens all life in earth, and goes through the motions of explaining how the atmosphere works, leading to temperature rises on Earth. Due to the increase in temperature, ice caps are melting, and sea levels are increasing – conditions that lead to very serious danger concerns for the human race.
“Climate change is really not a political issue, so much as a moral one", describing the consequences he believes global climate change will produce if the amount of human-generated greenhouse gases is not significantly reduced in the very near future. He voices his opinion in a way that is slightly biased, playing on the facts and statistics to get his point across. There are charts and graphs, and ‘before-and-after’ photographs of the polar icecaps, compared to what they were 30 years ago. This coupled with the facts and statistics, makes the audience feel the alarm of global warming on our planet, and feel the need to raise awareness of it.
The documentary ends with Al Gore saying that if we take action, the effects of global warming can be reversed. He addresses the audience to learn certain methods and he finishes the film by saying:"Each one of us is a cause of global warming, but each one of us can make choices to change that with the things we buy, the electricity we use, the cars we drive; we can make choices to bring our individual carbon emissions to zero. The solutions are in our hands, we just have to have the determination to make it happen. We have everything that we need to reduce carbon emissions, everything but political will. But in America, the will to act is a renewable resource."
As designers, global warming and its impact is important to our creations. We design for the people, and human movement over time dictates our criteria. This is especially true since in the last two decades, people are being more aware of sustainability, and this is further encouraged by companies both small and large to accommodate these beliefs.
