Why you should watch 'Climate: The Movie'

Martin Durkin's latest polemic against environmentalism is an entertaining antidote to the endless assertions that we're all doomed if we don't change our ways.

Having turned green activists red with rage with his previous documentaries, like Against Nature and The Great Global Warming Swindle, director Martin Durkin is back with a new film, Climate: The Movie - The Cold Truth. In it, Durkin brings together a cast of sceptical academics and commentators to offer another side of the climate story.

The mainstream climate narrative goes something like this: 

• Temperatures are rising at an alarming rate

• The overwhelming driver of this temperature rise is man-made greenhouse-gas emissions, mainly carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels

• In order to 'save the planet', we need to stop using fossil fuels, switch to 'clean' energy sources and, where that isn't possible, just make do with less.

In less than 90 minutes, Durkin whizzes through the various aspects of this narrative and attempts to debunk them, including arguments that:

• Temperatures have risen, but not all that much based on official figures

• The official figures are probably overstating that warming anyway

• Greenhouse-gas emissions cannot be the driver of these temperature increases

• There is little or no increase in 'extreme' weather events

• Science funding distorts the science because it is based on finding out how greenhouse-gas emissions are wrecking the planet rather than whether that is the case

• Public perception of the problem is further distorted by hyperbole and the muting of sceptical voices

• The real drive of the 'climate emergency' is politics (particularly anti-capitalism), not a cool assessment of the science and the data

• Climate change is being used to micromanage our lives in the West and prevent development in poorer parts of the world

The film isn’t perfect. For example, illustrating the decline in global temperature during the middle of the twentieth century with people shovelling snow seems to contradict the argument that small temperature changes don’t make much difference, either way. Nonetheless, pointing out that the 1930s in the US were as hot if not hotter than now will be an eye-opener for many people who assume that global temperatures have been on a relentless rise since the Industrial Revolution. Perhaps CO2 isn’t the only important factor in our climate…

While I'm always a bit queasy about 'follow the money' arguments, the film is right to point out that a huge complex of individuals, institutions and businesses - from academics and universities to governmental and supranational bodies and renewable-energy companies - rely on maintaining the idea that the climate is not merely changing but that climate change is an emergency. As a result, proper political arguments about what we should do - as individuals and societies - are made almost impossible. As one interviewee in the film, Benny Peiser of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, notes, in an emergency, 'all normal forms of openness and democracy have to be suppressed'. The choice of terminology is utterly political - it’s an attempt to shut down debate.

In that respect, the way that debate around climate change has been restricted should concern us all, whether it is by undermining academic freedom or in the way major broadcasters like the BBC pretty much refuse to give a platform to anyone with views at odds with this mainstream narrative and instead promote alarmism at every turn. Yet wider, better-informed debate is crucial. The fact that there are efforts by some to have the film removed from video-streaming services - it was gone from Vimeo at one point - seem to confirm that climate alarmists aren’t terribly interested in having that debate.

For example, many argue that we can expect more heatwaves, floods, wildfires and hurricanes in the future - although even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) struggles to find clear trends in these things. What should we do about it?

One idea would be to spend trillions on rushing to transform the way we make things, travel, heat our homes - even whether we should stop doing them at all. That's the official, Net Zero outlook. Or we could spend probably far less making our societies more resilient to climate events, whether or not they are caused by burning fossil fuels. Yet, there is precious little discussion about these options. Indeed, all of the parties in parliament right now are fully signed up to the Net Zero target, so it’s very hard to vote for different policies. 

Given that there are plenty of arguments to be had on the science - which should never be considered ‘settled’ - Climate: The Movie is on surer ground when talking about the politics of the issue, a section which features both Academy of Ideas director Claire Fox and regular Battle of Ideas festival speaker Austin Williams. Claire rightly notes that climate change is a 'huge validation of the government running our lives… the government gains the authority to interfere in every nook and cranny of our lives'. We face being told to replace our gas boilers with less effective heat pumps, our reliable petrol cars with electric alternatives and much more, with little concern about the impact on our lives.

Claire also notes how the issue has helped to promote modern anti-capitalism, which criticises free markets not for failing to produce rising living standards (as anti-capitalists in the past would have argued), but for making us too wealthy - at least, in the eyes of the materially well-off. Climate alarmism, she notes, has given a new lease of life to middle-class snobbery at the temerity of ordinary people for wanting more comfortable and interesting lives.

For Austin Williams, environmentalism has provided an excuse to keep the world's poorest people poor. 'Sustainable development means no development.' The film reminds us of the desperate state of many people in Africa, struggling to get by on smallholder agriculture when what they need is industrialisation to provide reliable energy, clean water, healthcare and much more.

Without doing a deep-dive into the claims and counter-claims around the science, most of us have to remain sceptical about the arguments being made on all sides. And Climate: The Movie isn't in the business of nuance - it's a polemic, after all, and an entertaining one at that. But if it does indeed breed some scepticism about the wilder claims being made about climate, and encourage people to look further into sceptical resources like Climate Debate UK, it will have done a worthwhile job.

Watch Climate: The Movie here.