‘Cool It,” a documentary about a mild-mannered Dane proposing solutions to global warming, carries a message likely to provoke, agitate and even infuriate. The message? The world is not going to end.
Bjorn Lomborg, who (like Al Gore) is not a climatologist but a gadfly with training in political science, says global warming is an important problem and praises Gore for drawing attention to the issue with “An Incovenient Truth.” But “Cool It” — complete with its own slide show and witty graphics — amounts to a devastating rebuttal to Gore-ism.
If someone ever demands you watch Gore’s film, agree! — on condition that your friend watch this optimistic, wised-up answer.
Lomborg, a blond who looks like a Beach Boy, started on his journey when he read a book by Julian Simon that laid out all the ways in which the world was getting better — man was producing more food, reducing pollution, etc. Preposterous!
Lomborg spent six months trying to refute the book, failed, and decided to adapt his perception of reality to fit the facts. Now he deploys a slide show pointing out that the most common solution to global warming — the cap-and-trade system backed by Enron, GE and BP — would have a massive price tag, but few benefits.
He reckons that a dollar spent fighting HIV/AIDS would lead to $40 worth of benefit in the developing world, a dollar spent taking on malaria would have $14 or so worth of benefit — but implementing the Kyoto plan would yield only 25 cents in benefits for every dollar in costs.
Doing nothing isn’t the answer either, Lomborg says. He and director Ondi Timoner lead us on a tour through such technological fixes as solar and wind power (both far too costly to be practical) to crafty and cheap ideas such as painting roofs and roads white to reflect heat. For $1 billion worth of such fixes, he says, the effects of global warming in Los Angeles for the next 100 years could be wiped out.
Meanwhile, artificial photosynthesis (separating hydrogen and oxygen in water), pumping seawater into the sky (to brighten clouds and reflect more sunlight) and other clever and cheap methods are tantalizing prospects. All of them are far more practical than President Obama — or not-quite-president Gore’s — ideas for subsidies of green schemes that will never pay for themselves.
The movie has amusing moments as well, catching the late Stanford professor Stephen Schneider, a global-warming alarmist, yelling that Lomborg “needs to be taken down, not put up.” Later we see a 1970s clip from the quasi-documentary series “In Search of,” in which we are warned of a coming ice age by a scientist . . . named Stephen Schneider.
Timoner also has some fun with Gore’s documentary, showing that Gore’s blather about 20-foot rises in sea levels inundating New York and other cities is scoffed at by scientists. (The actual rise, over the next 100 years, will be more like a foot or so.) Polar bears? Their population has been increasing, from about 5,000 in the 1960s to 25,000 today. It’s been five years since Gore warned us that we only have 10 years to fix global warming — hey, Al, my apartment is near the Hudson River. Wanna bet it’s still above water in 2015?
Lomborg rebuts Gore’s view that Hurricane Katrina was a product of global warming with a photo of 1926 Miami Beach. A single hotel is visible in the picture. The reason hurricane damage spirals up is because more stuff is built in the path of storms these days. Visiting Holland, much of which lies, like New Orleans, under sea level, Lomborg shows how that nation successfully deploys high-tech sea barriers to fend off floods.
Such reasonable thinking has been repaid with headlines like “Bjorn Lomborg is the devil incarnate.” If so, sign me up to be Devil’s Advocate.