Documentary turns the heat on global warming

Here is a slow hanging curve if there ever was one: Laurie David, Hollywood wife of uber-neurotic Larry David, unloads a documentary on global warming pegged to Earth Day. Showbiz to the rescue.

The temptation to poleax the opus, which Laurie David executive produced, is strong. It is with some disappointment, then, that one finds ''Too Hot Not to Handle" to be decent, if unmodulated, work.

Let's call it Global Warming for Dummies (which includes most of us) -- a primer on the impending global-warming catastrophe, combined with a 50-yard dash through some of the solutions. What's missing is a hard look at the alternatives, like ethanol, that are trumpeted as salvations. Most come with significant problems, but you'd never know it from this program. What's presented here is unalloyed boosterism.

The show, airing tonight at 7 on HBO, inoculates itself from charges of Hollywood superficiality by presenting a roster of heavyweight talking heads who explain the situation in clear, simple terms. We've got faces from Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Princeton, and the National Center for Atmospheric Research, among other august institutions, who argue convincingly that global warming is a reality that must, and can, be countered. (Neil Armstrong, we are reminded, landed on the moon only 60 years after the Wright brothers first went airborne.)

''Too Hot Not to Handle," in other words, is advocacy television. Skeptics on global warming are absent here. But there are not always two sides to an issue. As the documentary points out, the country is ahead of its leaders on global warming. Nowhere is denial stronger than at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

On the show, scientists define the problems, which are then illustrated with film clips. We get a good explanation of the greenhouse effect, triggered largely by the carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere from our burning of fossil fuels such as gasoline and coal. We learn that heat waves are the most lethal of extreme weather conditions -- tens of thousands of Europeans died during one in 2003 -- and will only increase with global warming.

If nothing is done, there will also be, let's see, more forest fires and hurricanes, more droughts and disease-carrying bugs, less water, rising sea levels. The list is as long and apocalyptic as it is familiar to any sentient human who reads a newspaper. In terms of solutions, we skate past hybrid cars, ethanol, biodiesel, wind and solar power.

''Too Hot Not to Handle" is respectable fare. It would have been bracing had it the moxie to plumb the politicization of science by this administration, but such confrontational journalism is beyond the edge of its envelope. So think of it as an hour of Cliffs Notes for your next dinner party.