"An Inconvenient Truth" and graphs

[indigo_rose99]

I am watching Gore's film on the Discovery Channel.  I have to admire his amazingly good use of graphs!  Every graph is simple, clearly labeled and fits perfectly into his talk.  Even when he puts two graphs on top of each other, it is obvious which y-axis goes to which line.   Each graph builds on the information discussed in the previous graphs.  He talks about trends and outliers.  He puts graphs about the last 20 years into the context of millions of years of variation.  He keeps to his message and uses only graphs that do not muddle his point.

Wow.

I aspire for my students to use graphs HALF this well.

Comments

[fraeuleinchen.livejournal.com]

I obviously viewed the film from a different (non-statistician, non-mathematician) perspective, but I was totally bowled over. Gore is great!

Theatrical Documentary

[thereisnomagic.livejournal.com]

From wikipedia:

"Earning $49 million at the box office worldwide, An Inconvenient Truth is the fourth-highest-grossing documentary film to date in the United States (in nominal dollars, from 1982 to the present), after Fahrenheit 9/11, March of the Penguins and Sicko.[5]"

I saw this in the theater. It was indeed great. Potential corrections:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthnews/3310137/Al-Gore%27s-%27nine-Inconvenient-Untruths%27.html

[clubjuggler.livejournal.com]

I really like the movie but I was extremely unsatisfied with one aspect of it: at no point does Gore cite any of his sources! This bothered me greatly when the movie first came out because I had actually researched one of the things he claims (about hurricanes, but it's been a few years now and I've forgotten the exact assertion) and Gore was wrong. Since I knew he was wrong in that one thing, I wanted to research for myself to see which things were correct and which weren't, but I couldn't because references and movies don't go well together. :-(

(I haven't bothered to read his book, but from what I hear, it doesn't have references either. :-( )