Until the end of 2018, film director Adam McKay spoke to journalist David Sirota about the media’s lack of coverage of what they considered the biggest problem of the time: climate change. One IPCC report just emerged, predicting widespread volatility even with 1.5 degrees Celsius warming — global food shortages, ecosystems ravaged by rising temperatures — and McKay was “absolutely alarmed.” “.
“It’s like an asteroid is going to ravage the planet and nobody cares,” Sirota told him. That spark became the idea for a movie, Don’t look up, will air on Netflix this week after a brief theatrical run. Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence play astronomers Randall Mindy and Kate Dibiasky, who stumble across a comet on a collision course with Earth, but then have trouble getting someone serious carry out the threat. Instead, the public, the politicians, and the press in his film are just like us – like a guy in a burning restaurant who wants to finish his steak.
For scientists working in this field, Don’t look upThe thinly veiled allegory of the climate crisis painfully hit close to home. For decades, they’ve sounded the alarm about global warming, and it’s only in the last few years that governments have really begun to listen. Piers Forster, professor of climate physics at the University of Leeds, said: “I’ve certainly noticed that Leonardo DiCaprio’s t-shirted scholar figure is often confused as to why people don’t get the scientific evidence staring at them. staring at them,” says Piers Forster, professor of climate physics at the University of Leeds. “And especially confused by where people come from and all their different agendas.”
While the film is mostly targeted at government and the media, scientists don’t catch it particularly well either – as DiCaprio’s character is in the Oval Office explaining the situation to the president (played by Meryl Streep), he begins by talking about orbital dynamics and the Oort cloud, and ends with disturbing headline news: that a giant comet is going to destroy Earth. Journalists call this burying arrows alive.
“It was quite frustrating, until she retired in 2019. Haigh sees attitudes towards climate change,” said Joanna Haigh, who was a professor of atmospheric physics at Imperial College London. transition from cynicism to acceptance in her career — but it took longer than necessary. Yes. “I think part of the problem is that it is the scientists themselves who write these huge, hundreds of pages long reports,” she said. “You can’t expect the average person to have the time or energy to read such things.”
There’s an echo in the movie about how dire messages are diluted due to the uncertainty inherent in the scientific process – experts are never 100% sure, they say confidence intervals and p value. “We’re especially bad with uncertainty and like to dive straight into what we don’t know,” Forster said. “We are also bad at not telling people what they should do about it. We should start by saying what we know and offering solutions.”
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Even so, climate scientists are slowly getting better at communicating their message — aided by the fact that climate change is no longer an abstract problem that occurs miles on Earth. soil; it’s the floods in the North of England, the wildfires raging in California, the slow escalation of the Sahara.
Over the past few decades, the language we use to discuss this has changed from fairly quiet (global warming) to wildly vague (climate change) to appropriately alarming ( climate crisis) —but tangible action still lags. “It could be the fault of the scientists,” Haigh said. “They could make it much clearer, but of course you don’t want to be a crying wolf. You have to be careful in what you say. ”
