In Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, visual media is used almost exclusively to convey to the audience the issue, problems, and solutions to global warming. I found that in the three main spans of the documentary (the issue, problem, and solution spans) that Gore used certain types of visuals to get the point across to his audience.

At the beginning of the documentary when Gore is describing what global warming is, he uses a short cartoon to portray the issue. This cartoon is just one of the many things that Gore employs for comic relief on a very serious issue. I believe Gore used this as an introduction to the issue span. The cartoon gives a quick summary of what causes global warming in a humorous manner using a familiar setting to most audience members. Although the cartoon does not give substantial facts, it does gloss over some points that Gore goes over more in depth throughout the issue and problem spans of the documentary. From this visual aide, Gore expands on the definition of global warming, what causes it, and why most scientists believe that it exists. After expanding on the issue of global warming, Gore uses more visual aides to describe the problems at hand.

Gore focuses the most amount of time on the problem span in the documentary than the other three spans. During this part of the film, he shows a series of images and videos that give the audience visual evidence that global warming is an issue and depict the reasons why it is an issue. Some of these images include time series pictures of glaciers and snow on mountains melting, animals that will be endangered because of changing climates, and victims from Hurricane Katrina.

The one image that I think Gore strategically uses as both portraying the issue/problem of global warming and as a means of pathos is the image of New York City if the polar caps melted and flooded. I think Gore included this image to stir the patriotism in Americans into taking action against global warming. By including this image in this section of the film, Gore is assuming that the audience, namely Americans, value our territory, especially where the World Trade Center Memorial is. By playing on people’s values and patriotism, Gore believes that he will be able to bolster the audience to act. This is an important part of this documentary and allows Gore to lead into the solution span.

In one of the final images of the documentary, Gore shows the audience a pie chart that displays the CO2 levels as of now. He then proceeds to say what the impact would be if everyone in the U.S. changed to a more environmentally-friendly lifestyle. He includes such changes as using ethanol, lowering your thermostat 2-degrees, or changing to a compact fluorescent light bulb to reduce your carbon footprint. With each of these things, the amount of CO2 that is displayed in the graph is lowered until at one point it is below the level of CO2 at which we should be.

Although the main part of the film does not expand on the solutions to global warming, this visual portrays in a small part the solution span of the documentary. Gore does not identify all solutions available in the main part of the documentary, but shows most of them in the credits at the end and gives the audience a website to find out more about what they can do to reduce their carbon footprint. The pie chart allows for a simple visual summation of what the information in the credits and on the website have and it also shows the impact of what these things do to the overall environment. This image is a powerful illustration for the conclusion of the film because it sums everything that he talked about throughout. He has already told the audience what the issue is, what the problems are that affect the issue, and now he is showing what the audience (well, those who are convinced that global warming is a problem) can do to solve the problem.

Of the three spans, I think that Gore uses visual media the best in the problem span. I think this is the section that he felt that he needed to spend the most time on because of the skeptics who say that global warming isn’t a problem. By providing logical conclusions based off of empirical evidence, using pathos to stir the audience into action, and using visuals to capture both of these, I think Gore was able to captivate his audience and hopefully get them to act.