Name: An Inconvenient Truth
ISBN: 9780743572026

An Inconvenient Truth

This young readers' version of the recent documentary film's companion adult volume cuts the page count by about a third but preserves the original's cogent message and many of its striking visuals. After explaining that his interest in the environment predates even his mother's reading of Silent Spring aloud to him as a teenager, Gore proceeds to document steeply rising carbon dioxide levels in our atmosphere, and then to link that to accelerating changes in temperature and precipitation patterns worldwide. Using easy-to-grasp graphics and revealing before-and-after photos, he shows how glaciers and ice shelves are disappearing all over the globe with alarming speed, pointing to profound climate changes and increased danger from rising sea levels in the near future. O'Connor rephrases Gore's arguments in briefer, simpler language without compromising their flow, plainly intending to disturb readers rather than frighten them. He writes measured, matter-of-fact prose, letting facts and trends speak for themselves but, suggesting that "what happens locally has worldwide consequences," he closes with the assertion that we will all have to "change the way we live our lives." Like the film, this title may leave readers to look elsewhere for both documentation and for specific plans of action, but as an appeal to reason it's as polished and persuasive as it can be.

What Hacker News says

verandaguyOct 2026

In my experience, being a parent is unfortunately a poor predictor of caring and being ready to act on climate change or its effects.

The split seems mostly generational; my parents and other parents around their age seem to not really care (there are still dinner table debates about whether Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth was a scam or not), but as my other-millennial friends are becoming parents, the vast majority of them do care, because this issue has been so front-of-mind for people my age. We're hyperaware of the fact that my country has more wildfires, milder winters, and hotter summers than it did when we all were growing up.

(There may be selection bias at play here; while I don't go out of my way to avoid them, I don't have many friends who deny the issue of climate change).

Many of us are also tracking the second- and third-order effects of these things; crop failures, droughts, and the migration and public services strain that come as a result of this; most frustrating is that the biggest voter blocs won't enact policy that's responsive to this, so when the inevitable (mass, climate-change-driven migration) grows over the coming decades, we'll be unprepared, and we'll either be overwhelmed by the movement of people, or complicit in one of the greatest humanitarian crises in history (and very possibly both).

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jensen123Nov 2015

He does not mention bombs. I'm certainly no expert here, but I think I read in the book An Inconvenient Truth by Al Gore a long time ago, that if you have the ability to build a nuclear power plant, then building a bomb is not very hard.

I'm not terribly keen on living in a world where most of the countries in Africa, the Middle East etc. are able to build nuclear bombs.

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padobsonMar 2015

Climate change is a really big deal. When we've had scientific movements of this magnitude, the face of the movement has always been a scientist (think Copernicus, Darwin, or Einstein).

The face of climate change is jointly Al Gore and the IPCC, which was formed from the environmental portions of the UN.

If the face of climate change was a scientist, I'd be more apt to believe it, and so would millions of other people of a conservative political bent.

An Inconvenient Truth is the seminal work on climate change meant to inform the general population, and a substantial bit of the movie is spent on the 2000 presidential election controversy.

Why in the world would anyone think that Republicans and political conservatives would just readily accept the information put forth by liberal politicians, merited or not?

And if I'm actively looking for the truth, how can I find it? I can't spend my lifetime doing my own research, taking my own measurements, experimenting and publishing papers to find out on my own. It's hard to find any material for lay people that don't have some environmental activist telling me I'm an idiot for no believing all the science Al Gore has already presented me.

Honestly, if human beings end up going extinct because we destroyed our atmosphere with fossil fuels, it'll be as much the gross mismanagement of the politics by environmental liberals that's to blame as every American eating burgers and driving SUVs.

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