The Age of Stupid is a polemic rather than a thought provoking documentary. In fact there is a lot here that is familiar.

Set in the year 2055, an archivist played by the actor Pete Postlethwaite looks back how the planet ended up in this catastrophic situation and why the human race took no steps to stop it from happening.

The big bad is the oil industry and inertia.

We follow some random people. Two children who are refugees from the Iraq war. An Indian entrepreneur who is setting up low cost airline in India. A Nigerian student doctor wanting to improve life in her village. A British man wanting to set up a wind farm.

It is all unfocused and just too pessimistic. If you are going to tell people that the world is going to hell in a cartwheel, then you are not going to change behaviour even if it is an inconvenient truth.

It's a documentary about global warming or, more specifically, about anthropogenic global warming. Our host and narrator is a very serious Pete Postlethwaite. The opening shows us scenes, most computer-generated images, of a Las Vegas buried under sand dunes and a Sidney Opera House burning amidst the rubble. The message, repeated several times, is, "We could have saved ourselves." The producers are more certain about that than I am. The question is not whether the earth is heating up -- of course it is -- but how much our own activities contribute to that warming. If we ceased all emission of greenhouse gases at once, could we really "save ourselves"? The answer can't be a simple "yes" because we don't know for sure. The only correct answer is "probably" -- with a high degree of probability, and probably very high.

However, my judgment is based on a scientific approach to social problems, a filthy tendency I picked up during a career in research. But this unnerving documentary isn't aimed at people like myself, who take science seriously. It's aimed at an audience who either haven't thought much about the ultimate effects of global warming or have managed to convince themselves -- or to let others convince them -- that the whole issue is a liberal-inspired hoax with Al Gore at the bottom of everything. That's almost as sad as the message of the film. The people who need most to see it will never watch it because it challenges an ideology to which they've committed themselves.

The first example is presented by an eighty-two year old French guide to climbing in the Alps. He begins by leading a married couple down what appears to be a quarter mile of ladders bolted to a cliff face of rock, and he remarks that when he began his career there were no ladders because climbers could step directly off the cliff onto the glacier. Since then, the glacier has melted and dropped hundreds of feet. I didn't need convincing. I climbed, or rather walked, on the Columbia Icefield in Alberta, Canada, for the first time in 1953. I visited it again in 1988 and the edge of the ice had retreated about the length of a football field, one hundred yards or so, the glacier having melted to that extent over a mere 35 years.

It's an important film but not a perfect one. The producers sort of skipped over the root cause of the processes they condemn. Regrettably, we can reduce our greenhouse gas emissions all we want, but there really is only one sure and final way to cut our contribution to global warming. As long as human being make use of an energy source there will be some environmental impact, large or small. Eventually we'll need to face the fact that there are simply too many of us. Nobody has exact figures on the world's population but the best estimate is that in 1950 there were about two billion of us. Today there are somewhat more than six billion. And, at current growth rates, by 2050 we should have doubled that figure to twelve billion. Every one of those twelve billion will be a contaminant, and China is the only nation currently addressing the problem -- in its own interest, not that of the globe. We all need a long-distance wake-up call from Thomas Malthus.

And what is America doing? We're electing politicians who decry all science that doesn't fit their ideology, not just global warming but evolution. (Other countries have done such things before, proving the superiority of the Aryan race and the fact that acquired traits are inherited.) Two years ago, an elected representative stood on the floor of Congress, railing against the global warming hoax, took a deep breath, blew it out, and said, "That's carbon dioxide. See? It's not a poison gas!" A Missouri Congressman, a member of the House Science and Technology Committee, who believes that a woman can't conceived after being raped, recently told us, "I'm not anti-science. I'm pro-science. Only let's have science we can believe in."

"The Age of Stupid." Even if everything else about the film were wrong, they'd have gotten the title right.

What a magnificent documentary, and 10 years later, nothing has changed, quite the contrary, we are increasingly consumerist, inhuman and materialistic... The real characters Layefa Malini and the lifeguard touched me, and the children cut me to the heart, the naivete, and responsibility so young, the game representing the guild, cruel and treacherous... Guy Piers' struggle for wind energy, a solitary struggle, touched me, and the rancidity I took from the despicable Indian businessman Jeh Wadia... Beautiful ...