An Inconvenient Truth—Is It Still Effective at Familiarizing Students with Global Warming?

Abstract

Chemistry courses for nonscience majors emphasize chemical concepts and the relationship of chemical knowledge to everyday life while teaching the utility of quantitative analysis. As an introduction to the topic of global warming, the first half of An Inconvenient Truth, released in 2006, has been shown annually since 2008 in the chemistry course for nonscience majors at a large public university. The initial goal of the current study was to determine the effectiveness of this introduction. Even though the results indicate that the percentage of students who have watched this documentary has declined over the years, nearly all students enjoy learning from this relatively jargon-free, broad overview. The documentary causes students to formulate questions about the data presented and to want to learn what has been done about this issue since the documentary was released and whether the trends have continued. All of these are then addressed in subsequent lectures. By collecting the data about the documentar...