Issue 14.07 - July 2006
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Where the Truth Lies 

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At theaters across the US this summer, Americans will learn the truth about global warming from the man who almost became their president. An Inconvenient Truth is the film adaptation of a slide show that Al Gore has presented thousands of times to hundreds of thousands of people around the world. You – and your 10,000 best friends – should see this movie. It is a work of fact, woven into an extraordinary account of a man whose drive to teach increases as he comes to understand his subject more thoroughly. The film is moving, the facts are persuasive, and it would take a willed obliviousness not to leave the theater seeing both the world, and Al Gore, differently. Gore’s friends say he’s the same as he ever was. If that’s true, then we have never truly known Al Gore till now.

An “inconvenient truth,” Gore says, is one we hold “at arm’s length because if we acknowledge it and recognize it, then the moral imperative to make big changes is inescapable.” Global warming is the inconvenient truth that Gore focuses on, but it is not the only one in this film.

About halfway through, Gore cites two studies to explain why so many people remain so skeptical about global warming. The first looked at a random sample of almost 1,000 abstracts on climate change in peer-reviewed scientific journals from 1993 to 2003 and found that exactly zero doubted “that we’re causing global warming.” The second surveyed a random sample of more than 600 articles about global warming in popular media between 1988 and 2002 and discovered that 53 percent questioned “that we’re causing global warming.”

Good journalism likes two sides to every story. Lazy journalism fails to distinguish between objective sources and interested parties – and this issue has interested parties aplenty, from ­industry-funded think tanks to hired PR firms, feeding the press the disinformation it needs to make the story sound balanced. This is the media’s own inconvenient truth – that the institution charged with reporting the facts is so easily manipulated by those whose “salary depends upon [our] not understanding” the facts (to reuse Gore’s favorite Upton Sinclair quote). The result is the perfect storm for obfuscation. You can’t buy the story outright, but you can twist it enough that the truth is no longer recognizable.

This role of spin may also help explain the paradox that judge Richard Posner described in his 2004 book, Catastrophe: “The challenge of man­aging … catastrophic risks is receiving less attention than is ­lavished on social issues of far less intrinsic significance.” The reason? Attention is guided. And when the guides allow themselves to be guided, the result is less attention where it objectively matters and excessive attention only where it pays, either politically or economically. Who has time for catastrophes when there are gays who want to get married?

Gore wants to change how we act by changing how we think about global warming. Yet An Inconvenient Truth can inspire progress only if the audience is responsive. Of course, the audience best prepared to fix global warming – the government – has already been corrupted by the same money that plays the puppet press so well. Likewise with the media’s inconvenient truth: If any of the networks were so impertinent as to report what scientists know about global warming, could it withstand the inevitably well-orchestrated charge of bias? These truths may be inconvenient, but the forces resisting their acceptance are extraordinarily powerful.

There is, however, an inconvenient truth in this film that may well have an effect – the one about Gore himself. As he struggles to teach us what we all must come to understand, many will ask whether this campaign has an obvious sequel. I asked Gore that question after seeing him present the slide show – easily the most powerful and passionate speech I have ever seen by anyone about anything. Gore laughed at the query as if it were a mark of (my) insanity. “Absolutely not,” he insisted. “Never again.”

Yet I suspect that as Gore reflects upon the truth that he spreads, and upon the fact that no one else has either the will or independence to make us focus on the problem as effectively as he, a different inconvenient truth will begin to haunt. If he’s right – if “our ability to live [on this planet] is what is at stake” – how could he not run?

Email lawrence_lessig@wiredmag.com.

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