
When An Inconvenient Truth was released more than 10 years ago, the most criticized scene of Al Gore's climate change documentary was the flooding of downtown New York City from sea level rise and storm surge.
Well, as the former vice president explains in the first official clip of An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power, that prediction came true.
The new film, which premiered last week at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, is a follow-up to the groundbreaking 2006 documentary. It follows Gore's efforts around the world to influence international climate policy and galvanize support for the climate change movement.
The overall message is more hopeful compared to its predecessor, emphasizing how solutions for climate change are already at hand.
"It has much more emphasis on the solutions," as Gore explains in the clip below. "Compared to 10 years ago, the solutions are widely available now and are in many cases cheaper than continuing to burn dirty fuel that causes the problem in the first place."
The response to the new film has been positive so far. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the screening was met by two standing ovations.
"Now we are undergoing a time of challenge, but we are going to prevail," Gore told the crowd during a Q&A after the screening. "I'm not going to give all the evidence of why I'm so confident. Always remember that the will to act is a renewable resource."
"We will win," Gore added. "No one person can stop this movement. We want this movie to recruit others."
The original Oscar-winning film sparked a major environmental movement, prompting millions around the world to start asking questions about our warming planet. While a lot of progress has been made, from advances in climate science to the renewable energy boom, there's still a lot of work to be done—especially since Donald Trump, a notorious climate denier, is now the most powerful person in the world. Incidentally, Gore unveiled the clip on the same day of the presidential inauguration.
Gore made headlines last month when he met with Trump and his daughter Ivanka to discuss climate change. When asked by an audience member what he got from the Trump talks, Gore responded, "We will know soon enough. It's not the last conversation. A lot of people started out as climate-change denialists. Whether he will change remains to be seen."
"He was receptive to some of what I had to say, and I appreciated that," Gore also told The Hollywood Reporter in a later interview. "Candidate Trump made a number of statements and wrote a bunch of tweets that caused concern, but he also has other statements that at least give rise to the possibility that he and his team will take a fresh look at the reality of what we're facing here."
An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power, directed by Bonni Cohen and Jon Shenk, comes to theaters July 28. To coincide with the film's release, publishing company Rodale Books will also release a companion book of the same name.
Watch Gore's Q&A here:
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By Aaron W Hunter
A chance discovery of a beautifully preserved fossil in the desert landscape of Morocco has solved one of the great mysteries of biology and paleontology: how starfish evolved their arms.
The Pompeii of palaeontology. Aaron Hunter, Author provided
<h2></h2><p>Although starfish might appear very robust animals, they are typically made up of lots of hard parts attached by ligaments and soft tissue which, upon death, quickly degrade. This means we rely on places like the Fezouata formations to provide snapshots of their evolution.</p><p>The starfish fossil record is patchy, especially at the critical time when many of these animal groups first appeared. Sorting out how each of the various types of ancient starfish relate to each other is like putting a puzzle together when many of the parts are missing.</p><h2>The Oldest Starfish</h2><p><em><a href="https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/216101v1.full.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Cantabrigiaster</a></em> is the most primitive starfish-like animal to be discovered in the fossil record. It was discovered in 2003, but it has taken over 17 years to work out its true significance.</p><p>What makes <em>Cantabrigiaster</em> unique is that it lacks almost all the characteristics we find in brittle stars and starfish.</p><p>Starfish and brittle stars belong to the family Asterozoa. Their ancestors, the Somasteroids were especially fragile - before <em>Cantabrigiaster</em> we only had a handful of specimens. The celebrated Moroccan paleontologist Mohamed <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.palaeo.2016.06.041" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Ben Moula</a> and his local team was instrumental in discovering <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0031018216302334?via%3Dihub" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">these amazing fossils</a> near the town of Zagora, in Morocco.</p><h2>The Breakthrough</h2><p>Our breakthrough moment came when I compared the arms of <em>Cantabrigiaster</em> with those of modern sea lilles, filter feeders with long feathery arms that tend to be attached to the sea floor by a stem or stalk.</p><p>The striking similarity between these modern filter feeders and the ancient starfish led our team from the University of Cambridge and Harvard University to create a new analysis. We applied a biological model to the features of all the current early Asterozoa fossils in existence, along with a sample of their closest relatives.</p>Cantabrigiaster is the most primitive starfish-like animal to be discovered in the fossil record. Aaron Hunter, Author provided
<p>Our results demonstrate <em>Cantabrigiaster</em> is the most primitive of all the Asterozoa, and most likely evolved from ancient animals called crinoids that lived 250 million years before dinosaurs. The five arms of starfish are a relic left over from these ancestors. In the case of <em>Cantabrigiaster</em>, and its starfish descendants, it evolved by flipping upside-down so its arms are face down on the sediment to feed.</p><p>Although we sampled a relatively small numbers of those ancestors, one of the unexpected outcomes was it provided an idea of how they could be related to each other. Paleontologists studying echinoderms are often lost in detail as all the different groups are so radically different from each other, so it is hard to tell which evolved first.</p>President Joe Biden officially took office Wednesday, and immediately set to work reversing some of former President Donald Trump's environmental policies.
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