And here's the other side of the story.

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Product Description

Former Vice President Al Gore's New York Times #1 bestselling book is a daring call to action, exposing the shocking reality of how humankind has aided in the destruction of our planet and the future we face if we do not take action to stop global warming. Now, Viking has adapted this book for the most important audience of all: today's youth, who have no choice but to confront this climate crisis head-on.

Dramatic full-color photos, illustrations, and graphs combine with Gore's effective and clear writing to explain global warming in very real terms: what it is, what causes it, and what will happen if we continue to ignore it. An Inconvenient Truth will change the way young people understand global warming and hopefully inspire them to help change the course of history.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #86510 in Books
• Published on: 2007-04-10
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 192 pages

From School Library Journal
Starred Review. Grade 5–8—This young readers' version of the recent documentary film's companion adult volume cuts the page count by about a third but preserves the original's cogent message and many of its striking visuals. After explaining that his interest in the environment predates even his mother's reading of Silent Spring aloud to him as a teenager, Gore proceeds to document steeply rising carbon dioxide levels in our atmosphere, and then to link that to accelerating changes in temperature and precipitation patterns worldwide. Using easy-to-grasp graphics and revealing before-and-after photos, he shows how glaciers and ice shelves are disappearing all over the globe with alarming speed, pointing to profound climate changes and increased danger from rising sea levels in the near future. O'Connor rephrases Gore's arguments in briefer, simpler language without compromising their flow, plainly intending to disturb readers rather than frighten them. He writes measured, matter-of-fact prose, letting facts and trends speak for themselves—but, suggesting that "what happens locally has worldwide consequences," he closes with the assertion that we will all have to "change the way we live our lives." Like the film, this title may leave readers to look elsewhere for both documentation and for specific plans of action, but as an appeal to reason it's as polished and persuasive as it can be.—John Peters, New York Public Library
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
*Starred Review* In this youth-focused adaptation of Gore's 2006 adult book and Oscar-winning documentary, Gore and O'Connor (credited as "adaptor") distill the material, creating an eye-opening story that targets kids' concerns. Gone are the political passages that begin with phrases such as "During the Clinton-Gore years . . ." The language is basic--vector in the adult book becomes "life forms that can carry"--and offers clear definitions of such terms as greenhouse gases and persuasive, accessible arguments for how the climate crisis has developed and what can be done to address it. The sturdy pages are filled with color photographs and charts, and the images are riveting. Like the pictures, the personal stories bring the facts close, and in addition to the urgent science, Gore's book shows how mentors can change lives. In his moving introduction, Gore speaks about how reading Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1962) when he was 14 years old shocked him into environmental awareness, which developed further during his studies with pioneering scientist Dr. Roger Revelle at Harvard. Gore's research continues to raise controversy, but few, if any, books for youth offer such a dynamic look at the climate issues threatening our planet. Gillian Engberg
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Booklist, starred review
[Few], if any, books for youth offer such a dynamic look at the climate issues threatening our Earth.

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Customer Reviews

A Useful Falsehood
In his book, 'An Inconvenient Truth', Al Gore writes about a
"hockey-stick" graph, with "global average temperature" on
one axis, and time on the other axis. "GLOBAL WARMING" IS
SCIENCE FICTION. Temperature varies from point to point.
What people call temperature, is what mathematical
physicists refer to as a value assigned to a point in a
temperature field. There are potentially an infinite number
of readings one may obtain in a given region of space. But
to assign a single temperature reading to a given region of
space is misleading. For example, putting a thermometer
under a bed, beside a window, or on top of a radiator in a
given room may give you a different reading, with or without
you in it. A temperature reading should only be assigned to
a single point, and not a space. For to assign a single
temperature reading to a region of space, such as a room, or
a city, is misleading. The earth is a very big place. For
example, on a hot day in India, it may be a cold night in
Canada. A global average temperature reading is essentially
meaningless since there appear to be a countless number of
places, or points, upon the earth, or slightly above the
earth, where a temperature reading might be taken. If your
population size is infinite, or vast, how large should your
sample size be in order to obtain a meaningful statistic,
such as an average? If you cannot determine what the global
average temperature is today, or was yesterday, why would
you claim global warming is taking place? Why would
academics, or politicians, lie? ("Fifty thou a year, buys a
lot of beer." - Timbuk 3).


The 'Kyoto Accord' will help establish the creation of a
global economic planning agency. Have you noticed that the
manufacturing sector in North America has been disappearing
has factories are closed "here", only to open up "there"?
The Wealth of a Nation is determined by what that nation can
produce. The Living Standard of a Nation is determined by
what that nation can consume. Don't confuse WORK with INCOME.
They who advocate "enviro-mentalism" are not really concerned
with weather patterns, but are interested in economics. If
they really cared about helping the global poor, would they
not open up factories overseas without closing them
domestically? Instead, they are behaving as if transportation
costs are negligible. Do not most Americans live within 30km
of their jobs?


Consider, as another example, the irrational belief that
enviro-mentalists (such as Al Gore) are advocating, that it
is possible to save electricity by not using it. A magnet
rotating inside a coil of wire will generate an electrical
current in that wire: engineers call this INDUCTION.
A TURBINE is essentially a giant magnet placed inside a giant
coil of wire: In order to generate electricity, the giant
magnet must be rotated, according to scientists. (Where
these giant magnets come from, is another story.) In theory,
the pressure of steam, water, or air against the vanes of a
wheel turn the magnet inside the turbine, generating
electricity; In nuclear power plants, nuclear energy is used
to heat water, converting the water into steam, and the
resulting steam pressure is used to operate the turbines which
provide households with available electricity. The turbines
are not going to stop producing electricity, just because you
stop using it. By definition, the only way you can SAVE
ELECTRICITY is BY STORING IT, as in a rechargeable battery.
If you are a customer of a hydroelectric company, you can save
money by not using electricity. However, if you choose not to
use the electricity which the turbines generate, that
electricity will be wasted, like an untappped natural gas leak.
Gasoline is made from oil: Conserving gasoline makes more
sense than conserving electricity, so why don't "they" ban
landscaping (lawn mowers)?


In the name of "enviro-mentalism" a philosophy of "act local,
think global" is emerging, which in practise means the creation
of a local "slave labour" population and a "no-fly list",
restricting travel for some. An elite "work" force of "symbol
analysts" is emerging, university-educated "citizens" who will
manage the "locals". Imagine a dog with a leash around his
neck, which leash is attached to a stick in the ground. The
owner/manager tells the dog, "You are free to roam. as you are
able (allowed) to". That is the future that enviro-mentalists
are advocating: The new economy is about serving females, and
offering males (the boyim) opportunities to serve females. The
future looks a lot like the past, only without the black oil
and the gasoline-powered lawnmowers. The future is FEMDOM.
Fight the future. Resistance is not futile. Ever read the
play, Lysistrata?

Here's an Inconvenient Truth for Gore: in this Book, he misuses his Son's near-death Accident to hawk Global Warming Alarmism!!!
The distresses with Gore's propaganda book for global warming are manifold. The first and worst sin Gore commits is he's NOT FAIR AND BALANCED in his struggling argument that global warming is real, caused by man, and the single-biggest threat facing the world. If Gore was FAIR AND BALANCED in his presentation, he could persuade more readers to give him the benefit of the doubt. Gravely for him, his presumptuous, one-sided and absolutist/elitist argument for global warming--where he brainwashes the reader to believe that global warming is 100% fact through arrogant declaration but no foundations--actually sours the reader and makes Gore appear as a fanatical, ideological DEMAGOGUE with an agenda and shabby credibility.

The most flagrant trespass in Gore's book is it's constructed to indoctrinate grade school/high school kids in the Religion of Global Warming. This is indisputable if we look at the layout of Gore's propaganda: it's short on text, full of colorful graphs, size 30 fonts on some pages, and full of pictures. With this shortcoming of substance, it's clear Gore's slideshow-turned-book was NEVER designed to make an intelligent argument about global warming's allegedly looming threat. It was designed to proselytize impressionable kids at the K-12 levels to believe in the Religion of Global Warming.

The predicament of failure of substance is found everywhere in Gore's propaganda book. He never has many sources to credibly validate the legitimacy of graphs and projections he cites!!!! Even gloomier for Gore's trustworthiness is that his sources come from biased, agenda-driven organizations whose "statistics" you cannot trust--if you're being intellectually honest, which the majority of sycophant-reviewers here refuse.

For instance, a purportedly "authoritative" chart claiming to show 2005 was the hottest year EVER in the history of humankind was conducted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, an ideological group sponsored by the UN!!!! Their whole mission statement is to prove that global warming is to be blamed on human activities, so any statistics emerging from their partisan group must be discounted. However, unfair and unbalanced Gore has the insolence to cite this statistic as "authoritative."

Another misconstruction in Gore's argument of ideology is to blame man and global warming for Africa's abysmal problems with genocide and civil wars!!!! Despite the insanity of this supposition, Gore shamelessly alleges that this is so, yet if we analyze his thinking, it can easily be discreditable. Gore's accusatory misconstruction is we (read: US and the West) are single-handedly to blame for the murderous genocide and afflictions in Africa because of our alleged contribution to global warming!!!!

Gore charges the US "helped manufacture the suffering in Africa," as he bases this antagonistic accusation on the supposition that US greenhouse gas emission caused the drying up of Lake Chad--which he then misuses to account for the genocide in Darfur!!!! To any intellectually honest person, of course, the ethnic cleansing and civil war in Darfur are mainly caused by Muslim Janjaweed fighting the non-Arab rebels who are in turn fighting the Sudanese government. With self-hating, anti-American allegations like these, Gore's credibility itself suffers.

Yet another, equally heavy reprimand Gore deserves is for the irrational conclusions and methodology he continually abuses to arrive at his presumption that the scientific community has a consensus that global warming's manmade. In example, Gore mendaciously cites a Science magazine study of every massive, peer-reviewed article on global warming from scientific journals and magazines. He cites this utterly dissolute study to pretend to prove that there's consensus among EACH AND EVERY SCIENTIST ON THE PLANET that global warming is manmade. However, killing Gore's believability is the mortifying fact that said Science magazine study only reviewed TEN PERCENT of every available article on global warming. With this contemptible restriction on what a proper population sample of articles would be, Gore assumingly and pitifully declares that there is basically complete, 100% consensus on the fiction that every single scientist on earth is in unison about global warming.

If this is reliably the case, as Gore forges it to be, then why in the hell are there so many scientists who outright dispute Gore's BS allegations?!?! Some prominent critics of global warming are French geophysicist Claude Allegre; director of the Office of Climatology at Arizona State University Robert Balling Jr.; Associate Professor of Geology and Environmental Science at University of Auckland Chris de Freitas; and so on and so forth. These scientists only scratch the surface; for a more comprehensive list of authorities discrediting global warming, simply do a Google search or check Wikipedia.

Gore's book stumbles in its ineffective struggle to convince the reader of the conclusiveness of global warming. Instead, Gore and his fellow, global-warming co-conspirators simply incriminate themselves as ideologues menacingly dismissing the REAL, BIGGEST threat to the world: Islamic terrorism. Gore often speaks of his kids' kids hating our current generation for not addressing global warming, but they'll likely hate our generation more if we succumb to Gore's advice and pursue the unreliability of global warming while ignoring terrorism!!!!

A Convenient Lie
This book is badly written and poorly reasoned, a shallow, tendentious screed that promotes environmental apocalypticism at the expense of common sense and sound policy. Gore seems to think that until recently, the Earth's climate was stable and that CO2 emissions are driving temperatures to unprecedented levels. In fact, the world is still quite a bit cooler than it was during the Middle Ages, when greenhouse gas emissions were neglible. When people realize how much Gore's absurd proposals would cost, and that they would accomplish little more than to drive American industry into the arms of the Chinese, even those who are conned by his reasons will have second thoughts.