We are buggered. That’s the message from the former next President of America, Al Gore. Utterly buggered, unless we take action now. Global warming, he asserts, is not a possibility, it’s a certainty. Anyone who tells you otherwise is working for the media, and probably for the government. For not one of 900+ scientists sampled for their opinion denied the existence of global warming. Look around you they say, from record heatwaves in Europe to record hurricanes in America, the evidence is unambiguous. Like I said, we’re buggered.

An Inconvenient Truth is not so much a documentary but a televised lecture by Mr Gore. He has made over 1000 such presentations on a topic close to his heart, and, he hopes, close to ours. Director Guggenheim set theatre cameras rolling and let his articulate and highly entertaining host do the rest. There are some fluffy bits with Al pondering over his computer, or staring solemnly from a car window, but for the most part this ‘documentary’ is Al the Lecturer at his podium. Accordingly, An Inconvenient Truth delivers one point of view in an unexpectedly amusing fashion with credible data, photos and graphs all pointing to one inescapable conclusion. Unless we act, and act fast, our life on this planet is doomed. There’s a shocking Oh-My-God factor as he piles on alarming statistics: ice sheets that were expected to last a hundred years melted in a barely nine months, for instance.

An Inconvenient Truth won’t be the best film you’ll see this year, but it is one of the most important, and most frightening.

// COLIN FRASER