There’s plenty of room for debate within the broad scientific discussion of global climate change. The question raised by the new documentary “Cool It” is whether censured Danish economist Bjorn Lomborg deserves a place at the table.
The author of “The Skeptical Environmentalist” doesn’t deny global warming, which may disappoint some of those who embrace his “discredit Al Gore” mission. Lomborg’s attack on the orthodoxy of climate change policy has won him conservative and businesscommunity friends and enemies in both science and environmental circles. The Danish Committee on Scientific Dishonesty found Lomborg is ill-qualified to be making the arguments on a subject that lies outside his areas of expertise.
“Disingenuous,” in other words, for “fabrication of data” and misleading use of statistics.
And “Cool It” does little to remove that taint. It’s a “What, me worry?” spin on the science that suggests we stop letting ourselves be paralyzed into inaction by the scale and cost of the “worst case scenario” that “An Inconvenient Truth” hurled at us.
When director Ondi Timoner’s film opens with the voices of children blurting out what they know about climate change and you hear the fear and doomsday prophecies they parrot, you’re inclined to hear Lomborg out. He talks about allocating resources toward attacking real human problems (malaria, poverty) instead of the tiny changes he expects from all our efforts to lower the planet’s temperature over the next 100 years.
But he bends numbers, something you notice in a movie built on a point-by-point attack on Gore’s Oscar-winning, climate-change documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth.”
Yes, staggering costs and effort might make temperatures drop only a half degree over this century. But doing nothing will allow them to continue to climb and climb.
No, sea levels won’t turn Earth into Kevin Costner’s “Waterworld.” But you can’t help but notice Lomborg talks to experts who agree with him, to a point, about Antarctica, and yet somehow leave out the rapidly shrinking Arctic ice pack.
Lomborg is forever taking it upon himself to sum up the other side’s argument so that he can debunk it, a classic “straw man” approach.
The film about Lomborg’s crusade avoids being shrill or overly political. And Lomborg repeatedly notes that climate change is “real, it’s man-made and it is a problem.”
But as useful as it is to chew on ideas that don’t hew to climate change dogma, “Cool It” leaves big questions about Lomborg unanswered. Is he qualified? Is he honest? And who is funding him?
“Cool It”
PG for thematic elements. 1 hour, 29 minutes. Starring Hashem Akbari, Jagdish Bhagwati and J.E. Bickel; directed by Ondi Timoner; written by Terry Botwick, Sarah Gibson and Bjorn Lomborg. Opens today at area theaters
