Cool Hunting

I quite liked Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth. I say quite, because although his arguments were compelling, at the back of my mind, I knew I was still watching the practiced performance of a politician. Such a polished one, in fact, that many who would normally seek to counter such bold claims swallowed them whole. The fact that it's now won an Oscar and is being shown in schools means Gore's message has quickly become the received wisdom. But where's the debate?

The Great Global Warming Swindle, which was shown by Channel 4 in the U.K. on Thursday night, seeks to redress the balance. Don't be distracted by the pretty graphics (pictured above); the documentary pulls in some decent scientific opinion, to argue that the carbon footprint of humans may not be responsible for global warming after all. Martin Durkin may never have been the next President of the United States, and he also has his critics, but his documentary is perhaps more rigorous than Gore's film in scrutinizing the data to posit the argument that Earth may have warmed up even if we weren't here.