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Documentary has an argument to make

BY MIRIAM RINN

NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM

MOVIE REVIEW

The documentary "Cool It," has an argument to make, just as Al Gore did in his 2006 climate-change documentary "An Inconvenient Truth," and the argument is that Gore and his followers are over-reacting. Like "An Inconvenient Truth," "Cool It" is propaganda — that is, a blinkered presentation of a particular point of view on a subject. It's not aiming for objectivity, if such a thing exists. The proponent of the over-reaction argument is Danish economist Bjorn Lomberg, the director of the Copenhagen Consensus Center and the author of "The Skeptical Environmentalist." An affable young man, Lomberg suggests in a calm, rational tone that the world is facing many more immediate and critical problems than climate change, such as malaria, AIDS, and the lack of clean drinking water, and we should turn our attention to solving those problems, which we know how to fix, and deal with climate change through something called geo-engineering.

Director Ondi Timoner, who also made the documentaries "DIG!" and "We Live in Public," follows Lomberg around as he speaks at conferences, visits his mother, and hangs out with village children in Africa. She includes information about the controversy that surrounds Lomberg — he was accused and later cleared by the Danish Committee on Scientific Dishonesty (this sounds like something out of a Marx Brothers movie) for asserting in his book that contrary to most scientific opinion, the world was getting better and better. She gives generous screen time to Stephen Schneider, the Stanford University climatologist who spent 20 years urgently pressing for sharp reductions in greenhouse gases. Schneider, who recently died, seems furious when discussing Lomberg's position, accusing him of not knowing what he's talking about, which of course makes him look like a poster boy for over-reaction.

A co-writer of the script, Lomberg is the soul of reasonableness. He believes in the reality of climate change, he makes clear, and he thinks that human activity is responsible. The problem arises with what to do about it. As the world is getting richer — and it is — billions of people want the comforts that the U.S. and Europe have enjoyed for a century. They want cars and refrigerators and air conditioning. When scientists and politicians point out that all those goodies will burn a bigger hole in the ozone and make the planet hotter, the developing countries respond, Okay, then you give up your cars and air conditioners and meat-based diets and let us have a turn. Oh, you don't want to? Then shut up.

Lomberg's solution to this quandary is to back off cap-and-trade and the other economic incentives to reduce dangerous emissions, which he says haven't worked anyway, and deal with soluble problems now. Because fear is ruling the climate debate, he suggests, people aren't thinking clearly. Worst-case scenarios are no more plausible than the God-will-take-care-of-us argument. The last quarter of the film is devoted to geo-engineering ideas, such as carbon sequestration and sulfate aerosols, which try to mimic the effect of volcanic ash clouds. It's pretty wild stuff, but maybe it could work.

No one knows. The most important point the film makes may be that all of these predictions, both the world-may-end-soon ones and the we-don't-need-to-lose-sleep variety, are based on models. Of course, no one really knows what will happen in 20 or 30 years. And the success of a lot of scientific modeling is mixed, as we have learned from all those cool mathematical models the financial-services industry used recently.

The charts and graphics in "Cool It" aren't as impressive as the ones in Gore's PowerPoint, and the film feels disjointed and repetitive at times. But there's no denying that Lomberg makes an interesting argument. Unfortunately, most people will leave as confused and frightened as they were after "An Inconvenient Truth," and that leads to a sense of apathy, which may be the most dangerous reaction of all.