Tim Lambert (deltoidblog AT gmail.com) is a computer scientist at the University of New South Wales.
Sizzle is a comedy about the making of a documentary about global warming. Randy Olson plays an inept director who interviews a collection of scientists and skeptics and is repeatedly interrupted by his cameraman, who is a skeptic. The people they interview are real, and all of the skeptics have featured on this blog: George Chilingar, whose argument was so obviously wrong that it discredits anyone who cites him, Bill Gray, who reckons that Al Gore is like Hitler, Pat Michaels, he of the fraudulent testimony to Congress, S Fred Singer, who cherrypicked the data to turn warming into cooling and Inhofe's anti-science warrior Marc Morano, who orchestrates attacks on scientists.
Olson's message in the movie is that scientists aren't doing as good a job of communicating as the skeptics -- they try to tell the truth which is kind of boring, while the skeptics are much more interesting because they aren't constrained by the truth as a result of being crazy (eg Chilingar) or shamelessly dishonest (eg Michaels). In the second half of the movie Olson shows us how he thinks things could be improved. Naomi Oreskes has a star turn with a suggestion of how you to communicate the some of the likely consequences of warming, leading to Olson visiting New Orleans and talking to people there about what happened to the lives as a result of Katrina.
So what do I think of the movie?
Well, some of the comic stuff was funny, but a lot of it missed the mark with me. The interviews with the scientists and skeptics made Olson's point about communication effectively. I watched the movie with my wife who reckoned that the skeptics were more likeable and believable. It was a bit annoying seeing all the skeptics bullshit about polar bears and so on uncountered, but I guess the point of seeing the bad guys winning for half the movie was to make the turn around in the second half more compelling. There he was able to show scientists communicating better, though the happy ending where the skeptic is converted seems rather contrived.
Anyway for me it was worth seeing.
Environment
Politics
Comments
I didn't recall Chilingar, so I did some searching. Did you know that he has a funny new paper for this year?
http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~content=a788582859~db=all
Posted by: pough | July 15, 2008 5:20 PM
I saw an early screening of Sizzle a few months ago, followed by a Q&A with Olson. Let me preface by saying that I really, really like Olson's first movie Flock of Dodos. Okay, now for Sizzle. I found it unbearable to watch. It isn't a documentary, it isn't a mockumentary, and it is a far cry from Borat, which I guess is kind of what he's going for. In the Q&A Olson claimed he wanted to portray some sort of struggle between the skeptics and fanatical environmental groups, with the legitimate scientists struggling somewhere between, but I didn't get much of that in my viewing. Oreskes was the stand-out star, followed by the sound guy (who's name I forget now), who was the only "character" who seemed to be speaking sense. Olson throws his mom into the movie in an effort to replicate her successful appearance in Flock of Dodos, to little effect. In the end, I thought the movie, as a film, was a complete mess.
Posted by: brian | July 15, 2008 6:49 PM
Stephen Jay Gould made much the same point in the early 1980s about the evolution versus creationism debate. The serious scientists were generally plodding communicators and (in the public domain) boring people who were no match for the rhetorical skills and personable personae of the creationists.
Posted by: Paul Norton | July 17, 2008 9:01 PM