Movie: 'Cool It' calls for calm in handling climate change

From The Seattle Times | 12th Nov 2010 | By John Harti

"Cool It" is a wide-ranging, sometimes scattered documentary on climate change directed by Ondi Timoner and featuring Bjorn Lomborg, author of "The Skeptical Environmentalist."

The documentary "Cool It" features the views of Danish author Bjorn Lomborg.

For such heresy, he's been labeled "the devil incarnate," "a massive negative force" and "a threat to all science." Lomborg, however, thinks he speaks for moderates who don't use scare tactics to call attention to inconvenient truths.

He's also the star and co-author of "Cool It," a wide-ranging, sometimes scattered new documentary that's positioned as a four-years-later answer to Al Gore's 2006 Oscar winner, "An Inconvenient Truth."

Lomborg has called Gore "an alarmist" who exaggerates the consequences of global warming. At the same time, he praises Gore for bringing up the subject. He sees himself as a corrective influence, emphasizing practical and inexpensive solutions rather than insisting that the end is near.

Yes, he admits, the world is plagued by natural and man-made disasters, but people live longer and a lot of things are getting better, not worse. His defining question, whether he's stopping in Edinburgh or Seattle: "Where can we do the most good?"

A blond, slim, impassioned vegetarian who dotes on a mother in the early stages of Alzheimer's, Lomborg ignores the bigger picture to focus on specifics. He seems especially attached to a Nairobi slum where education offers a potential escape.

Lomborg and his director, Ondi Timoner (who made the "Social Network"-like documentary "We Live in Public"), carefully skewer the distortions of celebrity endorsements and such propaganda embarrassments as "duck and cover," but their own movie is hardly free of bias.

Indeed, "Cool It" ends with a loaded exchange between Lomborg and U.S. Rep. Jay Inslee of Washington state, who discuss the virtues of Denmark versus the United States. Guess who gets the last word.


Watch the Cool It trailer. 

Movie rating: 2.5 ★

John Hartl: johnhartl@yahoo.com