An Inconvenient Truth

 When I think of Al Gore, two things pop into my head; the highly debated 2000 election and the slander he gets for the things he does by politicians. When the professor told us we were watching his documentary, I was unsure what to think. Prior to viewing, I knew who Al Gore was and that he was an environmentalist but that was all. I had mixed feelings about what was going to be played, whether I would believe him, enjoy his documentary, or even stay awake. Nonetheless, the documentary was the complete opposite. The man behind my mental enigma grasped me, and kept me interested. He was funny, and had a certain aura around him that was felt through the screen. He talked about global warming and the extent to which humans have destroyed our natural environment. Being an engineer, I wanted facts, graphs, material details to prove the phenomena he talked about. He provided a plethora of all of these; pictures, correlations, graphs, facts, and many more things that tore me up inside. One of the best graphs he showed was the temperature over time graph, that cleared showed how hot our planet is truly becoming. Instead of trying to stay awake, I was trying to contain my anger that I had inside for my fellow man. I do my best to be environmentally friendly; not litter, turn of the lights, and ask people to do the same but the data he showed me proved that things are only growing exponentially worse. From every single picture he provided, it made em feel like our future is more bleak than ever imagined. I wanted it to stop, to stop hearing about what was happening and to go fix it. To leave where I was and march to Washington to make action, to write letters to whoever would listen, to force Exxon-Mobil to change their destructive ways. Other parts of the world are becoming just as disgusting as we are; China opens an insane amount of coal-burning fossil-fuel-using mother-nature-killing power plants every week and I believe they will be the new United States in nature destroying policies. Not saying that we have come a long way from 20 years ago, we are making progress yes, but there is so much more that can be done. As the movie concluded, my disgust, anger, and sadness for the human race rolled off my skin into the air. However, one thing that did calm me slightly was how the end of the movie provided ideas for humans to do to reduce our impact on mother earth. As a result, when class was over, I was still disgusted and angry, but a lot less sad; they may be hope for us after all.