An Inconvenient Truth Formal Response

After watching Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth for the second time, I felt like I understood it better this time around. In this documentary, Al Gore gives a lecture about our climate in jeopardy through a very detailed slide show. Gore starts out by describing what global warming is. As Gore goes through this slide show he gives many examples of how global warming is affecting our us and our planet. He also shows what is going to be happening to the planet in years to come if this issue does not come to an end. By the end of Gore’s film he closes with talking about how people need to start acting instead of watching our planet be destroyed. That people need to take action immediately to bring the carbon emission down.

The film’s overall argument is to stop the pollution on our planet. He explains this in two ways. One being a very complicated way scientists would see it and the other way was a cartoon picture explaining it, which was more understandable. Throughout the film, Gore gives examples of what global warming will do to our planet. He uses specific examples on Earth that have already been affected. He talks about how the ocean temperatures have been getting warmer which creates more storms and hurricanes.

Gore also tells the audience personal experiences that some how fit in with what he is trying to put across to his viewers. One of the first examples he used was his son getting hit by a car. His son was hospitalized for a very long period of time, not knowing if he would survive. Finally, his son started breathing on his own and made it through. This is what made Gore want to be involved in the whole global warming act. His son he loved so much almost died, and he couldn’t let other people feel the same way if their loved ones started getting sick and dying just because of what the Earth is doing. I thought this was very effective in appealing to the emotions of the readers. Listening to this story, it makes the audience feel really remorseful about what happened which eventually flows into wanting to fix our planet so no one has to go through something like that.

Overall, I thought Al Gore as himself being the speaker gave him a lot of creditability throughout his lecture. Most people know who he is because of his background as a politician and him almost being the President of the United States. This makes the audience aware that he is definitely well educated and knows what he is talking about. He even had clips about his run for presidency during his lecture. Which he then turned into how he would take his work into a new direction to the environment. Throughout his slide show he had citations of where all of his information had come from. I also responded to him well because of his good voice and tone throughout the whole presentation. He had a very informational tone as well as a tone for a level of concern about our planet, and that this situation is really important to address. As a whole, Al Gore really gets his point across using the different rhetorical strategies of logos, pathos and ethos.