Unlike schoolchildren around the world who take crayon to paper and draw horrible pictures of a world in which climate change has ruined our cities, I don't spend too much time thinking about the issue of global warming. Not because I don't believe in science mind you, but precisely because I do believe in science, and its dynamic nature which often means that the things we worry about today either aren't true at all or turn out to be not as bad as we thought, as new science is introduced.
Take kids and sugar for instance. I thought it was settled long ago in a laboratory somewhere that sugar made kids act crazy. Turns out, according to the L.A. Times, that it has no such effect, that the hyperactivity parents like me associate with the sugar that kids ingest is really associated with the excitement of events that sugar is often associated with.
All that to say that people like me are the perfect target for works like Cool It, which releases this weekend, because I wouldn't fit neatly into either camp on the issue of global warming.
Bjorn Lomborg, the author of several books, fancies himself a "skeptical environmentalist" and that sounds about right to me. His film is witty, fast-paced and above all else full of common sense.
Why don't we paint all of our roofs and roads white? Why don't we derive energy from waves that hit our shores? Why don't we work to make nuclear energy, so obviously effective, safer? And why didn't I know that a number of multi-national corporations supported the Kyoto Treaty because they stood to make billions of dollars were it to take effect?
These are the kinds of questions that an agnostic on the issue of climate change like me, leaves the theater with after watching Cool It. If Lomborg's goal was to make people like me even more skeptical about what's been going on over the last decade by those forces of fear who inspire our children to take crayon to paper, than he has succeeded.