A coffee-break conversation at a climate-change conference in Wellington in 2006 was the beginning of this small but accomplished doco, which provides a lucid and highly accessible summary about the research underpinning greenhouse-gas emission and global warming.
The brainchild of Simon Lamb, a geologist with Oxbridge pedigree who is now
at Victoria University in Wellington, the film touches base with scientists in both hemispheres - most of them at higher latitudes - as they explain the nature of their work: how it enables them to peer back into our climate's past and how that allows them reliably to predict its future.
Lamb has an engagingly eccentric tone and the film abounds in striking images, such as crocodiles swimming off the coast of Greenland, but it has its feet firmly on the ground.
The stated objective at the outset is to address the accusations of alarmism, conspiracy and fraud glibly trotted out by those who routinely dismiss what science has to say about climate change and I'm not sure that it does that, except indirectly.
An explanation of the nature of the scientific method and academic peer review might not have gone amiss; instead, Lamb's narration contents itself with an "I was impressed" coda.
