Miserable movies

The opening film to the Copenhagen summit, featuring a girl having a nightmare about catastrophic climate change, unwittingly reveals the pervasiveness of contemporary social pessimism. It assumes that our irresponsible actions today will cause devastating problems for our children in the future. The opposite possibility, that human action could improve our lives and those of our descendents, is not entertained.

Still it is probably not as bad as this evening’s BBC Horizon programme. It features David Attenborough, a veteran presenter of nature programmes, talking about human population. Given that he is a patron of the Optimum Population Trust it looks certain to take a Malthusian line.