Left as an Exercise

The Age of Stupid Global Premiere Trailer

Two of the biggest problems with climate change as a social problem are that it is not immediate, and that it isn’t human - that is, it doesn’t have a face and it isn’t in our face. This, in turn, makes it very easy to ignore.

Before I continue, I’d like to take a moment to remind everyone about the modes of persuasion found in common rhetoric. In a nutshell, logos is an appeal to information favored in science, ethos is an appeal to expertise (for lack of a better term) favored in law, and pathos is an appeal to emotion (which doesn’t necessarily mean it’s using incorrect information, although it’s often abused that way, especially in an appeal to fear). Although a logical fallacy, pathos can be undeniably powerful, especially where logic has failed - I Have A Dream is almost entirely pathos, for instance, and look at what it did to the civil rights movement.

I bring this up for a very good reason: If the IPCC is logos and An Inconvenient Truth is ethos, The Age of Stupid is climate change’s pathos. The three sources share roughly the same relationship as the modes of persuasion. The film is a fascinating attempt to personalize climate change, to illustrate that it’s an ethical issue, and to show how time’s running out. Don’t expect it to be educational in terms of the science (that isn’t its role), but do expect to be moved by it.

As a film, it’s hard to classify: It’s part documentary and part drama. During the film’s creation, the crew traveled to different places looking for human stories relating to climate change. These range from an up-and-coming businessman in India hoping to end poverty by starting a low-cost airline to an ancient French mountaineer affected by retreating glaciers and the traffic of globalization, from a young woman in Nigeria forced to sell diesel on the black market to pay for her medical school to a wind turbine developer in England facing off against the NIMBY crowd, and so on. These stories are compelling, especially when taken as a whole, but the film wasn’t considered marketable with just that approach.

In order to increase the appeal (and, in my opinion, strengthen the message), a framing story was constructed - the year is 2055, we didn’t act, the worst-case-scenarios of climate change came true, and now civilization has collapsed. Alone in an Arctic tower containing an archive of as much of our planet’s history as could be managed, a genial English archivist reviews film clips from around 2008 (the stories above), wondering why we didn’t save ourselves when we had the chance.  The framing story also draws on news clips from the last few years and a couple of expository animations created to move the story along. For something that was literally filmed in a day, it works surprisingly well, in a large part due to Pete Postlethwaite’s casting.

This isn’t a scientific movie. Its opening text card says its science comes from the ‘mainstream’ understanding, but the only scientific claims in the film are drawn from news clips (and we all know how journalists botch science reporting), Mark Lynas (a journalist best known for Six Degrees), and the backdrop of the framing story (a work of fiction). As I understand it, although the speed of the events in the framing story is on the high side, it does still appear to fall within the scenarios put forth by the IPCC - yes, the worst-case-scenarios really are that bad (although, as I suggest, they may not be that bad as quickly).  Still, my focus isn’t on climate science, so I’ll be doing what I can to check this claim in the future.

Really, though, the framing story is just glue holding it together. The point isn’t about the science, it’s about the stories of the people now. Some of the documentary segments really highlight why the title is appropriate - they showcase how even with our best intentions, we seem to willingly blind ourselves to the big picture. The Indian businessman with the low-cost airline, for instance, volunteers at a poverty shelter and is concerned about his people, and even claims to value the environment, but seems oblivious to the impact air travel has on the atmosphere. There’s a man in Louisiana, recently retired from thirty years as a Shell Oil geoscientist, rescuing over a hundred people in the Katrina aftermath (in which he lost nearly everything he owned), but still saying that given the choice, he’d go into oil again. The most blatant example was an anti-wind-farm activist, opposing wind developments because (essentially) it would spoil the view of the English countryside, claiming to be very concerned about global warming. (She’s the lady in the trailer above who acts incredulous when asked that.) Taken on their own, they get the point across to people willing to listen, but I admit, without the framing story, it would be hard to get through all of what they’ve included.

Bottom line: I would recommend it, especially to people who are realistic about the science but don’t see the need to act. The major message is that climate change isn’t an environmentalist issue so much as the defining social issue of our times (a point the ever-insightful Kate just made over at the criminally-under-subscribed ClimateSight); to understand or communicate this issue well, the film gets a glowing recommendation.

I would ESPECIALLY recommend it for people interested in social or reform activism of any sort who are NOT engaged in climate change yet - the local Make Poverty History group in particular comes to mind - because, as I’ve said before, no amount of humanitarian aid can improve the human condition in an unlivable climate. The best long-term humanitarian aid people can give right now is getting a serious global cut in carbon emissions.

I would NOT recommend it as a mode of persuasion for people who dismiss even conservative estimates as alarmist. (Bear in mind how the debate works…) My reasons, again, fall back to the strengths and weaknesses of the modes of persuasion. Remember the civil rights movement again? Pathos didn’t convince the establishment to change, but it did engage the progressives to act - and it was that engagement that brought about effective reform. If the IPCC and every single national and international scientific body on the planet aren’t enough to convince people to act, The Age of Stupid won’t either. However, the film just might get fence-sitters off of their asses and calling for a low-carbon transition.

Is it perfect? Far from it. Is it entirely accurate? You’d only worry about that in the deliberately fictional framing story, since the rest of the film keeps the science to a minimum. Does it need to be? Viewing it as necessary pathos, I don’t believe so. The Age Of Stupid managed to put a human face and personality on climate change, and managed to deliver it in a way to make it both immediate and personal. For that, I applaud them, and do recommend the movie. Just don’t judge it for what it isn’t.