Pssst. Have you heard about global warming? Sure you have. We’ve all heard about that, right? Especially since Al Gore told us a few years ago the inconvenient truth that the world as we know it is going to come to its catastrophic end if we don’t do something about it right now. The trouble is, who’s questioning whether we’re doing the right things?

One of the most controversial figures on the global warming scene is Danish political scientist Bjorn Lomborg, whose book, B, challenged the “conventional wisdom” assumptions about what to do about the threat of global warming.

Timoner’s documentary gives us a brief history of Lomborg and his work, which at one point found him challenged on questions of ethics by his own colleagues because of the questions he raised in his book. Lomborg is a fascinating subject for a documentary — a man of intelligence and passion who asked, simply that those leading the charge of the environmental movement pause to ask themselves not IF resources should be spent trying to solve the problem of global warming, but, from an economics point of view, which investments in solving the problem will ultimately lead to the greatest benefit.

What makes this subject so fascinating is that Lomborg, because he is a political scientist and not an environmental scientist, is approaching the global warming debate from a completely different perspective than the status quo. He doesn’t question that many of the issues around global warming are, in fact, real; what he does instead is question whether the sky is actually falling, and moreover, whether we are allocating resources to best solve the world’s problems. Because he takes this unusual approach to dissecting the issue, he comes up with some very different answers.

To begin with, he takes a step back to examine the greater issue of quality of life around the world. Lomborg makes the point that in roughly 2/3 of the world, basic issues like poverty, hunger, education, and disease are still very real problems affecting both lifespan and quality of life. If you wake up each morning wondering if you can feed your children, or they’re dying of a disease like malaria, which is directly related to poverty and clean water supply, you’re not very likely to be as concerned about shrinking polar ice caps.

From an economic and political standpoing, Lomborg also points out (likely quite correctly) that India, with its developing industrial economy, is unlikely to agree any time in the near future to limiting industrial concerns that the global scientific community agrees contribute to global warming. Therefore, he posits, it’s wiser to invest a large chunk of money into R&D to develop better solutions to clean energy that get the world off dependence on oil and coal; if solar as a technology, for instance, was developed to the point that it was actually a cheap source of energy for average people to use, they would by economic logic make use of it.

The European Union, we learn in the film, committed to spending $250 billion yearly over the next decade on global warming. Lomborg brought together a think tank of the world’s top economists to evaluate global warning from the standpoint of economic analysis, in determining whether the way we are currently spending on global warning is actually doing good and if not, how that money could be better spent.

Timoner is smart enough as a director to allow her charismatic subject to largely carry the weight of the film. There are some road bumps in the way the films is cut, a bit here and there that seems not to flow well with what came before or what comes after, and the overall effect of the film is more slick, less edgy that Timoner’s previous work. It lacks somewhat the stylishness of the political films of, say, Alex Gibney or Charles Ferguson, and at the same time it also lacks that artistic eschewal of stylistic same old-same old that’s tended to be a hallmark of Timoner as a filmmaker with an original vision. Still, the subject matter is timely and relevant, and Timoner’s direction and Lomborg himself present his position with such clarity, that it’s still very much worth watching.

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