Cool It

Director Ondi Timoner spotlights Bjorn Lomborg, Danish author of The Skeptical Environmentalist, in a documentary examination of what can and should be done to deal with global warming. The title is a double-entendre, calling both for rationality and an end to hysterical doomsaying (Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth comes in for a bit of a skewering, as well as kudos for at least bringing the topic to the table), and for responsible research and development in technologies that can serve in the long term to alleviate the problem. Lomborg is an affable and persuasive advocate (and Timoner cleverly edits the movie to make his detractors look and sound dogmatic, intolerant and closed-minded), and the technologies he focuses on—wind, wave, solar, geoengineering—are provocative and suitably mediagenic.