It's the end of the world as we know it (annotated)

For your consideration: Two possible, if not probable, future scenarios for the human race should the business of fossil fuel combustion continue as usual for the next few decades. The first, an ABC-TV special that aired this Tuesday night, "Earth 2100." The second, a film by UK documentarian Frannie Armstrong, "The Age of Stupid." The former depicts a world that is increasing hostile to civilization as the century draws to a close, the latter an even less habitable planet, not just for humans, by 2055.

Are either visions realistic, or just more worse-case scenarios that grossly exaggerate what the science says? Let's look first at The Age of Stupid.

The Age of Stupid: final trailer Feb 2009 from Age of Stupid on Vimeo.

Frannie Armstrong's previous claim to fame is "McLibel," a documentary that followed the longest trial in UK history. The Age of Stupid is also a documentary, but one sandwiched between apocalyptic scenes of the future. Interspersed with the real-life stories of a mountain guide who laments the shrinking glaciers, a Katrina survivor, a wind farm proponent, among others, is humanity's last representative, an archivist played by Pete Postlethwaite.

Because the stories told are genuine, there's no disputing the science of the footage the archivist chooses to illustrate why he calls this, the early 2100s, the Age of Stupid. Hurricane Katrina is not tied directly to global warming, but offered only as an example of what might be more common, should climate change trends continue. Likewise the melting glaciers. The idea is the signs are (were) all around us, if we would only connect the dots.

The segments following the efforts of an Indian entrepreneur to start a cut-rate airline amidst the squalor of his country's slums present more of a challenge. Based on comments posted on the film's website, some viewers failed to make the connection. This may be evidence of good or bad documentary technique, depending on what one expects from documentaries. It worked for me, though. Individually, the stories say little, but collectively they present a coherent message, one that reaches into the hearts as well as the minds. My favorite involved the rural UK town councillor who is oblivious to the contradictions between her ostensible support for green energy, and her opposition to wind turbines in her back yard.

The fictional wrapping, however, isn't hung on anything concrete. All we get are fleeting, softly focused images of a burning Sydney Opera House, a Las Vegas buried in sand, and a fluid Arctic Ocean. What the first has to do with global warming is never made clear. The second may be possible, but within 46 years? Doubtful. Only the loss of sea ice in the Arctic makes sense.

Such a film would benefit greatly from Michael Moore's strategy of posting supporting documentation online. That doesn't end of the arguments of those who refuse to accept the science, but it does improve a film's credibility.

UPDATE: The film does have some scientific documentation online, but it's a stretch to say that the material supports the scenes described above. Las Vegas may be abandoned, as he notes say, but buried in sand? As the site says: "While some scenarios depicted are at the extreme end of the range of possibilities within the timeframe of the movie, they are nevertheless physically plausible ."

Unfortunately, Armstrong's considerable skills behind the camera and in the editing booth are not matched by an ability to make full use of what could be as powerful an attention-grabbing tool as An Inconvenient Truth. I saw her film at a private screening for Al Gore's Climate Project team last month. It was followed by a video call to Armstrong's UK home. She graciously got up in the wee hours of the morning to answer our questions and several requests to make The Age of Stupid available in the U.S. now, instead of in late September as the release schedule now dictates.

Armstrong offered no sensible explanation for her unwillingness to work with her team to change the release schedule, which was designed with the Copenhagen climate change conference in December in mind, as the countdown clock on the film's website shows. The simple facts are 1) if the U.S. doesn't go to Copenhagen with legislation under its belt, the chances of progress are vanishingly slim, and 2) global treaties aren't negotiated at the last minute. I wouldn't go so far as to apply the title of her film to Armstrong herself, but it does seem like she's living in an Age of Naive.

What we have here is a missed opportunity. The debate over the climate change bill (Waxman-Markey) now working its way through Congress will be moot by the time the film hits screens here. Few Americans will see this flawed but moving and important film when they really need to see it.

At least Earth 2100 has made to the air. But it's a far less poignant effort. Instead of the sad but engaging Pete Postlethwaite, our host for this tour of the future is the professional but forgettable ABC journalist Bob Woodruff. The fictional element involves a series of graphic-novel cartoons narrated by a 91-year-old woman who has survived the collapse of American (and presumably human) civilization. Interrupting her story are conventional interviews with earnest and distinguished Americans such as former Weather Channel climate guru Heidi Cullen, Jared "Collapse" Diamond and former CIA director James Woolsey.

The science is annotated online, but most of the references are to interviews rather than scientific papers. Which suggests the reporting team has little experience reporting on science. Why quote the sometimes hyperbolic James Hansen saying that "there's no way that I can believe that we could go through the century without having sea level rise, measured in meters, not centimeters" when you could cite "Kinematic Constraints on Glacier Contributions to 21st-Century Sea-Level Rise," a paper that appeared last year in Science that anticipates a sea level rise of between 0.8 and 2.0 meters by 2100?

OK. That's nit-picking. But the choice of cartoons to illustrate the future presents a real problem. They may have been several orders of magnitude less expensive to produce than digital effects and real actors, but on a subject as controversial as this one, why use a medium associated with children's literature? (Apologies to adult graphic novel fans, but we're talking about general perceptions, here.)

In the end, Earth 2100 fails because, although it did manage to keep relatively close to the science, it didn't take itself seriously enough. It had some much good material to work with, but frittered it away. Are the flooding of New York City, invasion of Mexican immigrants, and disintegration of federal and local governments by the late 21st worst-case scenarios? Not compared to the much-worse-case depicted in The Age of Stupid. Do such visions exaggerate the science? Maybe a bit, but not by much. Earth 2100 foresees a temperature rise of 4 °C by the 2080s, which is in line what the science is telling us, under a business-as-usual future. For example, a recent New Scientist attempt to peer ahead to 2050, one that does a good job representing current thinking in climatology circles, begins with:

ALLIGATORS basking off the English coast; a vast Brazilian desert; the mythical lost cities of Saigon, New Orleans, Venice and Mumbai; and 90 per cent of humanity vanished. Welcome to the world warmed by 4 °C.

Of course, the whole point is to change business as usual. We're going to need more and better video products if we want to do that. And we're going to have to get serious about letting people see them.