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OnAir Post: Movies that address climate communication
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8 Climate Movies That Get the Science (Mostly) Right—and 3 That Do Not, by Heather Gilligan Nov. 1, 2022 at Mental Floss.com.
Climate fiction (cli-fi) movies run the gamut from deliciously cheesy to heartbreaking. But are these films actually offering a glimpse of our future? Below is partial list of cli-fi films worth watching, along with some expert insight into what they get right—and wrong— about our climate change emergency.
Soylent Green – 1973
(03:25)
By: Rotten Tomatoes Classic Trailers
Soylent Green is set New York City in 2022. Earth is overpopulated and cities are overflowing, with 40 million people living in the five boroughs. Police detective Thorn (Charlton Heston) and his colleague, former professor and police analyst Sol (Edward G. Robinson), are working on solving the murder of a bigwig at the Soylent corporation. Soylent provides most of the world’s food in the form of protein replacement bars in three flavors—red, yellow, and green. After acidification of the ocean started killing the world’s plankton, the basis of Soylent green, the corporation needs to find a new main ingredient—which is (spoiler alert!) people.
In the film, human-caused changes to Earth have destroyed the food supply. Temperatures have spiked and farmable land has become scarce, due to soil erosion. Older characters dream of real meals. “When I was a kid, food was food—eggs they had, real butter. How can anything survive in a climate like this … everything is burning up,” Sol laments.
Soil scientist Jo Handelsman called the film “so clairvoyant” on NPR’s Science Friday. “We’re losing soil about 10 to 100 times faster than we’re producing soil,” she said, “and so that puts us in a near crisis.”
Not everything about Soylent Green is progressive, however; the film’s environmental insights come with a side of 1970s-era misogyny. From mentalfloss.com.
The Day After Tomorrow – 2004
(02:08)
By: TrailersPlaygroundHD
The Gulf Stream shuts down in The Day After Tomorrow, causing a climate catastrophe overnight. The northern United States is frozen and people in the southern states are told to evacuate, inundating the Mexican border. Though the climate change was almost instant, it wasn’t unexpected. Paleoclimatologist Jack Hall (Dennis Quaid) tried to warn UN officials and the U.S. vice president that the change was coming. No one listened, and when the worst happens, Jack has to hike through the frozen waste of the northern states to rescue his son, Sam (Jake Gyllenhaal), from New York. The city floods and freezes in rapid succession, and Sam and his friends take refuge in the main branch of the New York Public Library.
As many scientists have pointed out over the years, a change in the Gulf Stream causing an instant ice age is a very unlikely scenario. “There’s strong scientific evidence for global warming, but you won’t see any of it in the film because the filmmakers evidently think you’re too stupid or easily bored to be bothered with the scientific details,” Keay Davidson grumbled in the San Francisco Chronicle in 2004.
From mentalfloss.com.
Waterworld – 1995
(02:08)
By: Rotten Tomatoes Classic Trailers
Earth has been flooded by the melting of the polar ice caps in Waterworld. Dirt is a commodity and entire cities are submerged, slowly crumbling into the sea floor. The plot of the movie revolves around saving a young girl who has an alleged map to dry land tattooed on her back. No one on the quest really believes they will find a mythical remnant of the former Earth. “It’s funny. I always thought that dry land floated,” one of the characters muses. “That it drifted with the wind and that’s why we couldn’t find it.”
Waterworld’s reality is a possibility, according to a 2015 study in the journal Science. “If humans burn all of the known reserves of coal, oil, and natural gas, virtually all the ice on the planet will melt, inundating the land with up to 200 feet of sea level rise,” Mother Jones reported. The upside is that the process would take a few thousand years. The downside: ice sheets don’t need to melt completely to create catastrophic climate change or even sea level rise. Both are already happening. From mentalfloss.com.
Don’t Look Up
(02:45)
By: Netflix
DON’T LOOK UP tells the story of two low-level astronomers who must go on a giant media tour to warn mankind of an approaching comet that will destroy planet Earth. Written and Directed by Adam McKay.
