Cold, hard facts

In his latest documentary, Patrick Gower examines climate change and its repercussions.

- RUSSELL BROWN

We should all know by now that the main character of any Patrick Gower documentary will be Patrick Gower - and, sure enough, the first-person pronoun does plenty of work in the first few minutes of Patrick Gower on Ice. He even opens with a fairly strained play on his top-rating meth documentary: "But this two-part special covers a different kind of ice. The pure stuff - produced in Antarctica over millions of years."

Thing is, it works. Gower has an ability to connect with viewers whom other documentaries don't reach. It's not hard to see why increasingly alarmed climate researchers might want to reach for a little Gower Power to try to get across the message that the Antarctic ice melt driven by a warming planet has catastrophic implications for humanity.