The Cold Truth of the Warming Climate

A few thoughts on watching Martin Durkin’s new documentary.

I remember sitting at the jury of one of North Europe’s nature film festivals some 15 years ago and discussing stories of endangered species, different habitats, nature preservation and human’s role in it all. I recall only few films directly about climate back then and those didn’t generally rise to the heightened attention of the jury members who felt there were deeper and more immediate issues to be concerned with, like the effect of high shipping traffic on the unique marine ecology of the Baltic Sea or the refuse float threatening the sea turtles. I have lost touch with nature film circuit in later years and do not know how much has its content or preferences changed, but the approach to its subject matter has certainly changed in the wider society around us. Much like with the notion of ‘health’ in the Covid years, where hardly any of the decision makers took time to define it in a nuanced and integral way – one could argue that even WHO lost track of its own definition, having once stated in its constitution that “health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity”, but then prioritising a requirement of being vaccinated pretty much above all else – I fear the notion of ‘green’ has now suffered a similar destiny. ‘Being green’ feels hijacked from studying and learning about nature and seeing ourselves as fundamentally rooted in its ways into talking only about ‘climate change’ and even that merely in the narrow framework of rising CO₂ levels.

Martin Durkin’s new film Climate: The Movie, subtitled The Cold Truth, takes a shot at challenging this newly-made status quo. Presenting an impressive line-up of scientists and speakers, including a Nobel laureate in physics, a former science adviser to several US presidents, as well as a co-founder of the Greenpeace movement, and other experts in their fields, it asks whether our commonplace understanding of climate is actually quite correct, or if there could be other credible explanations beside CO₂ to the current situation. The film highlights cycles of solar activity and the inaccuracy of heated-up urban testing grounds as primary among those, along with an understanding that it is temperature that drives up CO₂, rather than the other way around. But it also asks whether ‘being green’ isn’t perhaps just another line of business for those involved in it – it is particularly the latter that the film manages to unfold for the viewer, be it through discussions of tilted academic funding or profits from so-called green investments.

Climate: The Movie gives good attention to historical data, going back, for example, to the oldest continuous instrumental temperature series that we have, the Central England Temperature Record, and more importantly, highlights our planet and its climate as a dynamic reality. That there are changes in climate over time isn’t a question of concern in itself, for all we know, there have always been changes and fluctuations in climatic conditions. The question is hence not really whether the climate is changing, but whether the causes of the change are really as unambiguously clear and changes as drastic as we’re told, and even if they were, whether any change, except adaptation, is in our power.

Everybody seems to be warming faster than everybody else. A selection of headlines in recent years from around the globe.

Rather than establishing a new hard truth, however, Durkin’s film seems to beg for at least a debate. Science as ‘re-search’ presumes repeated visits to the data and a presence of various possible, or extending conclusions. Scientific truth isn’t established by concensus, physicist Will Happer emphasises in the movie, for argument is the very core of what drives science forward. There is no sensible reason to expect the science on climate to really be ‘settled’ – an aim, perhaps, questionable by the nature of scientific process itself – if some of the fairest and most laurelled minds in contemporary science diverge from the so-called mainstream opinion. And it hardly speaks for fair science, nor media, if whatever could be tied to worsening climate conditions is being loudly advertised as such, while positive changes are, more often than not, downplayed or ignored – Peter Ridd’s reports on the Great Barrier Reef, potentially, as one example. After all, history recalls only of one type of governing (and settled ‘truth’) where diverging views and understandings had to be wiped out as dangerous or harmful, and to return to that after the experience of mid-20^th century Europe would feel the real catastrophe of our time. For now, however, claims astrophysicist Sallie Baliunas, natural causes for climate change have essentially been outlawed.

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A colleague of mine at the university was recently telling me of a shift of consciousness he has noticed amongst the students in the last five or six years. Working in the field of ecology himself, he was saying that this generation of young people has acknowledged that there is no point in planning their lives past next 20 years, for there is no knowing if there will still be a liveable space for us by that time. I thought I felt him say it with a certain amount of pride in appreciating the better awareness of the younger generation, but I was thinking, in the reverse mirror of Greta Thunberg’s famous, or maybe infamous speech (that Durkin’s movie also begins with), ‘How dare you?’ – or more precisely, ‘How dare we?’ While Thunberg was worried we’d be robbing the young of their future by ignorantly ravaging the planet for our supposed welfare – a sentiment not hard to sympathise with – I am becoming increasingly worried that we are actually robbing the young of their future in a way by the exact opposite, i.e. by new and ever more radical climate policies.

For has the greed really changed? When Thunberg bitterly reproaches the wealthy of the world that all they can think about is money, isn’t it eventually the same with the strategies that now govern ‘green transition’? The admission is at times even openly on investors’ lips, e.g. in Norway, where some of them have been opposing traditional Arctic reindeer herding in favor of windfarms on the excuse of vastly different profit. What if, I wonder, subsidies were pulled from ‘green energy’, or a low ceiling set on allowed profits, or new taxes curtailed – would we still be seeing as much cheering for moving on to a ‘greener’ world? But even more than that, I’m afraid that all the CO₂-fuelled talk has shifted our attention from what we should really be concerned about – over-fishing of the oceans, monocultural farming, water and soil pollution etc. And most importantly, from our personal loss of connection with nature and hence our dwindling understanding of it, not least because of the growing urbanisation of the world’s population – even if some deem, but rather as a testament to the superficiality of the times, that the latter is now the ‘green’ solution.

Winters are still here. Climate: The Movie makes a case for a comparatively colder rather than a warmer period on the planet. Photo by Phil Müller, Unsplash.

If there’s a downside to Durkin’s movie, it is that it doesn’t perhaps tackle environmentalism in a wider sense – that of our age-old intrinsic connection to nature and hence its importance to our ‘mental and social well-being’ beside the physical or economical one. There is some sense of that in the later part of the movie, e.g. when discussing Africa’s desires for better development etc, but time runs out before giving the matter a more in-depth perspective. Regardless, Climate: The Movie is a very well structured, bold and informative piece of film-making and should serve at least as food for thought for everybody across the contemporary spectrum of views on climate change. It might take a little time getting used to the packed, TV-production style pace of the film, but its strength and nuance grow as the story progresses. The nature documentary scene, however, would greatly benefit from complimentary single-case observations of the hidden, and even not so hidden collaterals of green policies – eagle populations diminished or reindeer migrating patterns disrupted by windfarms, the pitiful working conditions and child labour of African cobalt mines in production of batteries, or the devastation of delicate salt lakes by lithium harvest in the same pursuit, to name a few. Not to mention the shift’s cultural implications, like the ones we have written about here. Overall, thought-provoking and well recommended.