The Great Warming.

• Author: Hunt, Suzanne
• Position: Movie review

To anyone who has seen An Inconvenient Truth, The Great Warming will feel like the Disney version of Al Gore's film. It is family oriented, with almost a Learning Channel feel, and was clearly made for an American audience.

The film opens with an appeal to the emotions: shots of children against the backdrop of smog-choked cities and extreme weather events. Narrators Keanu Reeves and Alanis Morissette note ominously that these children's grandparents grew up in the Great Depression, while they will come of age during the Great Warming. The narration then shifts to the facts of climate change, explaining the problem in a series of interviews with scientists who describe the delicate, life-enabling balance that has existed in our atmosphere for millennia and the accelerating warming now occurring. Talking heads are rarely the most appealing tactic in a persuasive film, but these "heads" effectively lay to rest the so-called debate about global warming. The science is settled: humans are changing the climate.

The Great Warming is well intentioned and generally well done. Its one major flaw is its disproportionate emphasis on the role of developing countries in climate change. "More and more developing economies are consuming more and more fossil fuels," the narrators say. "The industrial revolution is arriving in all of these developing countries just in time to accelerate the great warming." China especially is singled out and a Chinese family is interviewed as they shop for their first car. Viewers are told that from Beijing to Bangladesh, multiplying one family's ambitions across the whole globe spells big trouble.

The key problem, the film implies, is that developing countries (especially China) are adopting the U.S. model of personal car ownership and intensive consumption. It's true that the Earth's climate and resources cannot sustain over 2 billion people in China and India consuming at the rate of the average American. Conspicuously missing is the fact that the United States and other developed countries created the unsustainable economic model that other nations are following, are responsible...