Focus the Nation

For my focus the nation activity I viewed Al Gore’s Film an Inconvenient Truth. The film was a mixture of montages about Al Gore’s life and clips from his slide show that he does to make more people aware of the dangers of global warming. I learned several things about global warming by watching this film particularly how dangerous things are becoming. The piece of the film that I found the most interesting was when Al Gore talked about how major scientists are being forced to conclude that global warming is theory and not fact. This really opened my eyes because I had heard the argument many times that global warming is just theory and that is not yet proven. However, it seems that major experts are being censored in order to benefit other sections of the government. If the idea of global warming was more widely accepted around this country I feel like much more progress can be made to help stop it. Another section of the film I found particularly interesting was when Al Gore talked about how fast the artic poles were actually melting. He showed a diagram of an area of Antarctica that was not suppose to melt for fifty years but had already almost completely broken up. This was because of pools of melting ice drilling deep holes into ice sheets. This causes the entire sheet of ice to be much less stable. With all that ice melting the water is going to have to go somewhere and flooding worldwide seems like it might not be far away. Another interesting thing I learned from this film was just how dangerous Greenland is to our hemisphere. If Greenland melts rapidly there is a possibility that the cold water would have an effect with the gulfs and streams in the Atlantic Ocean. If those streams change do to a temperature change it could have devastating effects on the world with the possibility of another ice age. My biggest disappointment with the film was that Al Gore did not show enough ways that people could change these devastating effects from happening.
Within social sciences there are several ways to get students to focus on global warming solutions. Perhaps the best way is to approach this from a Political Science angle because Politicians frequently focus on the environment. A good way to apply this to a lesion would be to ask students to research politicians environmental backgrounds and plans and ask them based off that information who they felt has the best environmental policy. Geography would also be a good subject to used to help students better understand global warming.