Last year, Jared P. Scott tackled financial inequality in “Requiem for the American Dream,” a film about Noam Chomsky, of which he was a director. In “The Age of Consequences,” Mr. Scott looks at climate change from the perspective of military experts rather than that of scientists.

Michael Breen, a former Army officer, considers the role of climate change in human conflicts. “Think about relationships we don’t often look at,” he says. “The civil war in Syria, now going on for years, hundreds of thousands dead — the entire region is in chaos as a result.” The movie details how a three-year drought helped precipitate that war.

Talking about one of the strategies of the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, the retired Brig. Gen. Stephen Cheney states, “You control the water, you control the livelihood of the people.” Climate change affects the amount of water, and so terrorist organizations move to where the water is. The connection between environmental disaster and terrorism is drawn, persuasively. (The “Mad Max: Fury Road” scenario in which a despot clings to power by holding on to a water supply starts to look mildly plausible.)

The information here is compelling and frightening, but the movie is ham-handed. Malcolm Francis’s almost nonstop score is emphatic to a fault; interviewees extrapolate a “perfect storm” of concurrent catastrophes that could cripple the United States; there’s no bright side, and scant hope, just 70 minutes of unrelenting bad news served with dollops of implicit audience-blaming. A tacked-on eight-minute “call to action” coda feels halfhearted.