The science and technology subject that I chose to explore for this significant and ever-evolving breadth area is former Vice President Al Gore’s 2006 documentary An Inconvenient Truth: A Global Warning. Al Gore has been a long-time speaker and against global warming, and has advocated toward environmental energy efficiency and alternate fuel resources. In the years following his time in the White House, Gore focused significant time traveling throughout the world presenting the adverse effects related to global warming. This led to the creation of his documentary An Inconvenient Truth” A personal evaluation of this film considers the issue of the earth’s rising temperatures, the arguments and implications of global warming, how this topic challenged and broadened my understanding of science, and what significant elements I have taken away from viewing the film.
This film is strongly connected to the Science/ Description breadth area because of its exploration of the earth’s construction and how humanity affects our planet, and many of the earth’s natural processes. According to the film, “The greatest venerable part of the Earths ecological system is the Atmosphere” (An Inconvenient Truth). One of the film’s global implications is that humans have the capability to irresponsibly damage the thin and protective layer of the Earth’s atmosphere called the Ozone. Each year, the Ozone is being thickened by pollutants causing more radiation from the sun to be trapped in the Atmosphere. In turn, the atmosphere steadily warms, hence the term, global warming. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) argues that these pollutants, such as Carbon Dioxide, are from human gas emissions, like transportation, industrialization, and waste (EPA, 2012). Each year, the CO2 levels are increasing because of pollutants and cause further issues, such as flooding, melting glacier ice caps, animal extinction, disease, and more. As the world’s population continues to rise to over seven billion people, more of the earth’s resources are strained and the environment suffers.
Personally, I found Al Gore’s film enlightening. The arguments presented in the film both broadened and challenged my views about this popular scientific topic. The documentary presented a lot of interesting facts about the relationship between global warming and the rise of the human population on earth. Nevertheless, it is my contention that some of the facts presented in his documentary are exaggerated and do not reflect both sides of this argument. The film’s statistics and data provided warming trends, but did not mention much about parallel cooling trends or heating and cooling issues that were not reactive to rising CO2 levels and human pollutants. In some of my previous scientific studies, I have learned that humans are only responsible for 3.4% of CO2 gases released into the atmosphere, and that the rest is natural. Further, because of