When Davis Guggenheim’s environmental documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” appeared in 2006, it was a widely-embraced wakeup call in which former Vice President Al Gore shook us all as violently as he could. The fact that Gore’s courtly impassivity rarely gave away any deep emotions worked in the film’s favor: The impact came from incontrovertible images and scientific statistics rather than easily-dismissed sentiment.
Guggenheim earned an Oscar, and Gore won a Nobel Peace Prize, but there were plenty of naysayers anyway. Glenn Beck, for one, compared Gore to Holocaust mastermind Joseph Goebbels. Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe called him “full of crap.” And Donald Trump gleefully mocked him when the temperature dropped in wintertime.