According to Gore, he became interested in global warming when he took a course at Harvard University with Professor Roger Revelle, one of the first scientists to measure carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Later, when Gore was in Congress, he initiated the first congressional hearing on the subject. Gore's 1992 book, Earth in the Balance, dealing with a number of environmental topics, reached the New York Times bestseller list.

As Vice President during the Clinton Administration, Gore pushed for the implementation of a carbon tax to modify incentives to reduce fossil fuel consumption causing fossil fuel to last longer and thereby decrease emission of greenhouse gases in the short term but not long term; it was partially implemented in 1993. He helped broker the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, an international treaty designed to curb greenhouse gas emissions. However, it was not ratified in the United States after a 95 to 0 vote in the Senate. The primary objections stemmed from the exemptions the treaty gives to China and India, whose industrial base and carbon footprint are growing rapidly, and fears that the exemptions would lead to further trade imbalances and offshoring arrangement with those countries.

Scientific basis
In the film, Gore presents the Keeling curve, which shows a pattern of steadily increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere since 1958.

Main articles: Scientific opinion on climate change, Global warming, and Global warming controversy

The film's thesis is that global warming is real, potentially catastrophic, and human-caused. Gore presents specific data that supports the thesis, including:

* The Keeling curve, measuring CO2 from the Mauna Loa Observatory.
* The retreat of numerous glaciers is shown in before-and-after photographs (see Retreat of glaciers since 1850).
* A study by researchers at the Physics Institute at the University of Bern and the European Project for Ice Coring in Antarctica presenting data from Antarctic ice cores showing carbon dioxide concentrations higher than at any time during the past 650,000 years.
* Temperature record since 1880 showing that the ten hottest years ever measured in this atmospheric record have all occurred in the last fourteen years.
* A 2004 survey by Naomi Oreskes of 928 peer-reviewed scientific articles on global climate change published between 1993 and 2003. The survey, published as an editorial in the journal Science, found that every article either supported the human-caused global warming consensus or did not comment on it.

An Inconvenient Truth is an American documentary film about global warming, presented by former United States Vice President Al Gore and directed by Davis Guggenheim.[2] The film premiered at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival and opened in New York and Los Angeles on May 24, 2006. The film was released on DVD by Paramount Home Entertainment on November 21, 2006. A companion book by Gore, An Inconvenient Truth: The Planetary Emergency of Global Warming and What We Can Do About It, reached #1 on the paperback nonfiction New York Times bestseller list on July 2, 2006.The documentary won Academy Awards for Best Documentary Feature and for Best Original Song.

Earning $49 million at the box office worldwide, An Inconvenient Truth is the fourth-highest-grossing documentary film to date in the United States (in nominal dollars, from 1982 to the present), after Fahrenheit 9/11, March of the Penguins and Sicko