Science Movie Reviews

Science movie reviews

An Inconvenient Truth
In this video, An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore makes a statement about global warming and what our world would be like if we continue what we are doing now. If we change our ways of life and do what’s best for the environment, we could change this whole global warming thing around.
At the beginning, he talked mostly about the Earth and what is its most vulnerable part. The image that started the modern day environmental movement is called the Earth Rise. He then talked about his friend taking pictures of the Earth in different angles and tried to make a complete world that has no clouds so people could see the whole thing. Afterwards, he started to say some things about the Earth’s atmosphere and how it’s the most helpless part of the world. In order to preserve it and make it more defensive, we need to keep it clean and stop most of our polluting. Compared to the Earth, the atmosphere is really thin. The atmosphere also can trap infrared radiation; that has a good and bad effect to it. The good effect is that it keeps the Earth livable and keeps the planet at constant range temperatures in different areas. But since we are constantly polluting the air, the atmosphere keeps getting thicker, making it hold more radiation in. When more radiation is trapped in the atmosphere, the more effect it has on the so-called global warming.
The rising of heat from the radiation is changing the water cycle. More water is being evaporated and some land areas now do not have and water left in the soil and it is causing the vegetation not to grow there anymore. In addition, about 40% of people depend on glacial melt for their drinking water and since the glaciers are melting, their water supply is getting low. When people go up to the glaciers and other ice masses, they study the ice by pulling chunks out with drills and they can tell when the ice fell and what the temperature was when it did. On some of the mountains, there are layers and they tell people the melting and freezing processes. Studying ice is important because they can tell how much CO2 was in the air when it froze and it can show the development of the CO2 levels.
During the winter, the CO2 levels go up but it’s the opposite with the summer. When Al Gore showed the graph with those levels on it, it continued to go up. There were points when the line went down, but that was because each year the line goes up and down, which indicates that a full rotation around the sun has been made. When we are closer to the sun, the level goes down; when we are farther away, the level goes up. He also showed a list of years and the top ten hottest years occurred in the past fourteen year when this video was created.
The weather is also affected by global warming because never has a hurricane happened in the southern Atlantic until 2004. And going back to the water cycle, when more water gets sucked up out of the soil, there are more floods in other places and droughts in others. This is a bad sign and people should know this so they can try and stop it from occurring even more.
At one points, the United States was covered in ice. Over time it melted away and more water came into the ocean. Since Europe gets it heat from the “ocean conveyer” in the Atlantic, when the water from the glacier on the land melts, it goes into this conveyer and the coldness from the glacier water blows up onto the land of Europe and caused an ice age. There are no more glaciers in the United Sates, but there is one bigger chink of ice that could cause another ice age: Greenland. If Greenland melts, I could shut off the “conveyer pump” and Europe would freeze. If another big chunk of ice melts, known as Antarctica, the water levels could go up to twenty feet higher from just the west part of Antarctica. The land that many people live on would be covered in water and less land would be available for people. And since the population continues to skyrocket, the Earth will become more packed and not enough land would be available for the animals and humans to live peacefully.
To finish off this part for this movie, Al Gore said that more people can pollute the air and more technology would be created to help with that factor. If people don’t do something about all of this right now, what will our world turn into?

The Great Global Warming Swindle
In this video, it states that man-made global warming is not true. It’s more of a political movement. People make up weird and “terrifying” stories about the world melting and freezing because of global warming. They do this because their jobs depend on it. About ten thousand people have jobs based on global warming.
The main point to understand in this movie is that the climate is always changing and barely anything is from humans. Before the little ice age, there was a medieval warm period. Before the warm period, there was a Holocene. The most heat was around the 1990s-1905.
The people that believe in global warming blame industries. The postwar economic boom- was during a decrease in temperature after 1905. That was when they had the most industries created. That does not prove anything about industries releasing CO2 into the air and causing global warming.
Some more facts on global warming are that CO2 makes up about 0.05% of the air. If global warming was real, it would be hotter up at the top of the atmosphere, but it is colder. Global warming is not happening because of the CO2 levels and greenhouse gases. It is not man-made at all.
Studies show that as the temperature goes up, so does the CO2 levels. Therefore, CO2 is a product of temperature. The CO2 is mainly coming from the ocean. As the ocean releases it, the ocean absorbs more and stores it; that all depends on the temperature.
The sun is the main reason for the temperature rising, not the CO2. The graph of CO2 and the temperature didn’t match up. The graph of the sun and the temperature did match up, however; this gave more proof that global warming is not man-made. One scientist announced that the more sunspots on the sun there are, the warmer it is. As the solar activity moves, so does the temperature. The sun affects the Earth in many ways.
People say that they see the ocean doing something completely different the year before and it changed majorly because of the temperature rising. People also thought that even the smallest of climate change into warmer temperatures would cause more deadly insect-borne diseases like malaria. But is this all true? Scientists say that it could take hundreds of thousands of years to have the atmosphere completely affect the deep ocean. One scientist said that mosquitos thrive in the cold air, which means that malaria, even if the temperature went up a lot, would not be a concern. They also said that the saying “mosquito species that transmit malaria do not usually survive where the mean winter temperature drops below 16-18 degrees Celsius” is not true.
People around the world are trying to save the economy and use environmental friendly ways to get electricity and energy. There are some groups that are trying to stand up and say use wind and solar energy, not coal and oil. There are many poor people who cannot afford that type of energy and people are getting more concerned about that. They are mostly concerned about Africa. There are people there who can’t even use electricity and they are expected to not use coal and oil and are starting to give up on the African dream of developing.
In addition, Margret Thatcher wanted to use nuclear power instead of coalminers. To her, energy was a political problem. She was determined not to have an oil crisis. That is when she started to promote nuclear power; she did not trust coal or oil and kept on saying more and more reasons why they need to have nuclear power. The press later on started to say things to help get rid of polluting things. They started to create and join environmentalist groups to help save the world. Someone mentioned that they should ban chlorine, but some people say it is against their nature to ban something from the periodic table.
Next people started to use man-made global warming issues as campaigns. This created many political issues and fights.
At the end of this movie, it stated that because of all the belief of CO2 causing global warming, it is putting pressure on the industries and making it hard for the developing world to develop at all.

My Opinion
At first I did believe in man-made global warming. I thought that is was mainly the cars’ exhaust that was polluting the air and making the temperatures rise. When we watched the movie with Al Gore, it made me believe in it more. It had plenty of facts that stated why it’s our fault for all the ice melting and the temperature rising.
All the facts and pictures were proof that we need to do something. For example, someone in the world should make the best car engine in the world that doesn’t pollute the air whatsoever and I would become president somehow and make everyone trade their old engines for the new ones. It seemed like a great idea that would make our country less pollutant, but it was too farfetched.
After watching An Inconvenient Truth, I had the mostly same thoughts as before. People tried to get me to believe it wasn’t true and to quit worrying about it, but this movie made me worry even more. Then I heard that most of the facts Al Gore used in the video was false, I started to give up on the whole idea.
When we started to watch the other movie, my new opinion formed: global warming is not from humans, but from the temperature rising naturally. The facts and graphs in The Great Global Warming Swindle were more realistic and had plenty of backup information to help support it. This movie also had more scientists that had information about how global warming was not caused by humans. This helped me believe that it’s not from CO2 even more. Al Gore didn’t have that many scientists to back him up. The second video to me just seemed more believable than the first for quite a few reasons. I do not believe in man-made global warming anymore because of The Great Global Warming Swindle for three reasons: more proof; more facts; and more minds were put together to create one big, believable movie.
When I think of the whole idea of global warming, it is mostly thought of as a bad thing. I think that happens to most people because there are not many good statements said about global warming. That could be a key point on what people think about global warming and that’s how they form their opinions. That is what happened to me. People also form their opinions on what they hear about things. Al Gore’s movie talked about the negative effects of global warming and hardly anything about the good of it. When people hear more negative things about a topic than positive things, it helps them make up their mind.
My mind was made up that global warming was bad and nothing could stop it, but we can slow it down. I once agreed with Al Gore that it is a bad thing, but the other movie didn’t really say anything negative about global warming. After hearing what scientists had to say about this topic, I changed my mind and my whole view on global warming. It is not a bad thing; it is just a natural thing that we can’t control. There is, however, a little concern in the back of my mind that keeps telling me that global warming is bad and will greatly influence the future. So now about 85% of me believe that it’s not man-made, but that other 15% is still a concern about the future of this planet and the things living on it.
That is my opinion.