Global warming: no big deal

This week sees the premiere of a new global warming doc by Bjorn Lomborg, a skeptic who says climate change isn't a big threat to humanity. He's already winning converts.

One movie premiering this week at the Toronto International Film Festival is reportedly so gorey it’s caused at least three people to faint from fright. But if you’re not fazed at watching heartthrob James Franco cut off his own arm, or if your name’s Al Gore, the scariest movie at the fest might be Cool It, a documentary by Denmark’s controversial “skeptical environmentalist” Bjorn Lomborg, who refutes almost all of the claims made by mainstream global warming activists.

Lomborg’s movie is “far more convincing than An Inconvenient Truth” writes Peter Foster in the Financial Post. “Every schoolchild who was forced to watch Mr. Gore’s apocalyptic whoppers should also be given the opportunity to see Cool It, which presents a balanced and convincing case against doom and gloom.” In fact Foster seems more concerned with the motivations of environmentalists than he is about global warming itself: “much deeper inquiry is needed into the dark political/psychological heart of the green movement.”

In a column by Lomborg himself in the Globe and Mail last week, he says “for some years now, the debate over global warming has been dominated by fear,” to the point that you can no longer tell if Gore et al. “are quoting from scientific journals or the Book of Revelations.” His argument is that while global warming will bring about change, it won’t throw anything at us that we can’t use technology or good planning to cope with. “The point isn’t that we can or should ignore global warming. The point is that we should be wary of fear-mongering.”

But critics like documentary filmmaker Mark Terry say that even tiny changes can have unpredictable consequences. In an interview with The Mark last week he points to Norway, where the reindeer have disappeared thanks to warmer temperatures prolonging the life of a minute bug that feeds on grazing grass. “Even a one inch increase in sea levels can cause extra pressure on oceanic fault lines which cause tsunamis,” he says, “So you can have an enormous environmental disaster from a very small introduction.”