This week we started a new unit—- Communication. In this unit we are going to look at different types of non-fiction media to investigate an essential question: What is truth? The non-fictions we are looking at this stage are about environment. This blog is about the TED talks. I want to talk about two TED talks. Firstly is what comes after An Inconvenient Truth by Al Gore in 2009. In the documentary film An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore gave us a wake-up call about global warming. This TED talk is about after 4 years, what happened? He showed the disasters the global warming has brought and his stance on “clean coal”. Through the TED talk we can tell that global warming hasn’t been stopped. It continues affect the ice and ocean as well as the human beings. He showed a graph of the amount of disaster happened in last 30 years. Global warming increased the disasters a lot. For me, this TED talk is not so interesting because it’s based on a serious topic and there are many professional issues in it. But it’s definitely useful both for this unit and me. Al Gore’s speeches and film make people believe, because behind every point of view, he all has a lot of evidences to prove that. But even though he gives audience many evidences, the source of the evidences still need to be discovered.

The second TED talk I want to talk about is also by Al Gore called New thinking on the climate crisis filmed in 2008. In this TED talk, he gave many evidences that the climate crisis is going even worse than scientists predicted, he challenged us to act. He mentioned that we had a lot of opportunities for the previous generations to act to solve the problems, but we did not act. His talk, as usual, is very effective. It makes people think about the global warming rather than just listening and then finish. For me, it’s funnier than the previous one since it added a funny ad about global warming in the talk. But behind the fun of that, it gives the audience more thinking. It’s also definitely a useful and watchable TED talk.

After watching all of these film and TED talks, I realized that global warming is a very serious issue and we really need to act on that. It’s a challenge for us but it’s worth trying.