Study: Gore's Movie Had an Impact on Viewers

(Nov. 28) -- It's easy and sometimes even fun to pick on Al Gore. But at some point -- and that point was surely reached during Gore's Lock Box days -- the jokes exhausted themselves, though of course Rush Limbaugh still snickers at them.

What we're left with these days, if we're tired of Pavement-era bon mots, is Al Gore's ideas, and because he's a politician, the effect those ideas have had on the populace.

That's where Grant Jacobsen comes in. He's an assistant professor at the University of Oregon. A few years back, he read an article in Time about whether a film can change the public's perception on an issue.

Though other movies were mentioned, Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" was at the center the story, and the experts quoted didn't know how quantifiable any effect could be.

So Jacobsen investigated. His conclusion, reached in a forthcoming paper from the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, is that people who lived near movie theaters that showed "An Inconvenient Truth" bought more carbon offsets in the months after the film's release than people who didn't live near a theater showing the movie. "If you did watch the movie, you were more likely to be affected by it," Jacobsen tells AOL News.

Jacobsen contacted Paramount Vantage, which distributed the film, and asked for the 1,389 U.S. zip codes in which the movie appeared. He then contacted a lot of companies that sell the public carbon offsets. (And carbon offsets, for the uninitiated, are purchases you make to reduce greenhouse gases in your life. So if your home produces 100 pounds of carbon dioxide a year, you could buy carbon offsets from a company that would plant the trees that would consume those 100 pounds of carbon dioxide.)

Carbonfund responded to Jacobsen's query and gave him a list 12,902 carbon offsets purchased between March 2006 -- two months before the film's release -- and May 2008. Carbonfund also provided to Jacobsen the zip codes of individuals who'd purchased the offsets.

Now Jacobsen had the data he needed. He crunched the numbers and found that immediately following the film's debut, people who lived within a 10-mile radius of a theater purchased 50 percent more carbon offsets than people who lived outside it. (The average offset purchase was $104, the study finds.)

Jacobsen was intrigued by the effect any so-called "awareness campaign" can have, and drew inspiration for his study from one from 2006, which found that people who began watching Fox News subsequently voted Republican. An awareness campaign of a different sort, to be sure, but "that study was pretty cool," he says.

He isn't the only one to test an Al Gore effect, however. The Pew Research Center for People & the Press, in a study that gauged the public's perception of the environment, found that from June to July of 2006, a period that overlapped with the film's showing, nine percent more Americans believed global warming was the result of human activity.

Still, unlike the unending ridicule that haunts the man, Gore's environmental effect does not seem to last. Jacobsen reports that one year later, after the film had left theaters, no more people than usual purchased carbon offsets.

That gust of air you hear? That's Rush Limbaugh laughing, and it could power 10 wind farms.