According to British documentary
filmmaker Franny Armstrong, we are currently living in the “The Age of Stupid,” and
stupid means us. I am not offended by this since I agree that people do a lot
of stupid things that have serious consequence. However, when it comes to
climate change and global warming, the blame is not entirely for us humans.
First, I think the director could
have made the computer graphics better. This movie opened in 2009, the same
year as Avatar. Of course, this documentary
did not get huge budget, but the first scenes are so badly made. They show what
earth looks like in 2055, such as London covered in dark clouds (like it is now
sometimes) when the global warming has progressed further and brought human
extinction (well almost, there are people walking around in these scene). The
worst is Sydney Opera House. It’s
very obvious that the fire is not real, but like a graphic. An art student with
basic animating skills could have made these scenes.
The archivist in the film, played by
British actor, Pete
Postlethwaite, looks back on archive footage from
2015 and says: “The conditions
we're experiencing now were actually caused by our behavior in the period
leading up to 2015.” The film goes on to illustrate lives of five different people. One
is a French mountain climber who talks about the melting glaciers. He takes a
British family on a tour (It’s
funny how they cannot speak French well.) There is an Indian businessman running
a cheap airplane company. They are somewhat affected by climate change, but it
was difficult for me to understand WHY showing them instead of using scientific
facts.
The film argues that Hurricane
Katrina, melting glaciers, and other environmental disasters are caused by massive
amounts of CO2 emitted by human industries such as oil, transportation, and food.
This is a misleading point, and it can be proven wrong with data that compares the
amount of natural consumption of CO2 to human consumption of CO2.
.
According to this figure, fossil
fuels and land use only contributes 29 mega tons of CO2 emission whereas the
land and the ocean naturally contributes over 700 mega tons of CO2 emission per
year. The film suggests that amount of 29 mega tons emitted by human every year
have seriously affected the balance of CO2 emission and culminated in global
warming. Many forget about mother earth herself. The amount of our emission is
so tiny that it only occupies about 4.1% of all CO2 emissions of the earth. Therefore,
the main cause in quantity is rather the increase in solar output.
The most unconvincing part about the
film is that it emphasizes we are not taking global warming seriously and that
we will lose everything if we do not act now as if we are confronting with a
complete new disaster. It is not the first time that earth is experiencing an
increase in its temperature. The Earth has repeatedly gone through many periods
of decrease and increase in temperature since its birth. Compared to the Earth’s age of 45 billion years, too much blame is put on the
past 100 years. For Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the film interviews Alvin Duvernay
who helped rescue people on his boat. (I was surprised to learn how there was
mandatory evacuation, but people STILL stayed.) He says, “In my opinion, our use or misuse of resources the
last 100 years or so, I'd probably rename that age, something like The Age of
Ignorance, The Age of Stupid.” He forgets
that pollution was unbelievably worst during Industrial Revolution that made
possible development of Western countries. Blogger “The Merry Farmer” has a post named, “History’s
Dirtiest Secret.”
After a few decades, humans might
even face a new problem of “global
cooling” which is predicted
according to the constant pattern of heating and cooling in the figure below.
The
Age of Stupid relies on emotional appeal to persuade the audience. It is
important to pay attention to our environment and to know what is happening.
However we should not be easily persuaded by emotions and focus on scientific
facts. We need to confront this with a more critical approach. ExxonMobil (http://www.ucsusa.org/assets/documents/global_warming/exxon_report.pdf)
has funneled about $16 million between 1998
and 2005 to a network of ideological and advocacy organizations that fuel uncertainty on the issue. Trying to
force industrializing countries and people in their everyday lives to reduce
CO2 gas emissions is neither the only way nor the most effective way.
Movie Magic - The Progress of CG
