“Don’t Look Up,” the dark comedy about a comet headed toward Earth, topped the Netflix most-watched list last week in 88 of 89 countries.
While the movie’s central metaphor has struck some reviewers as inapt, climate scientists are overwhelmingly impressed by the film’s accurate depiction of their struggle to communicate to the public and policymakers the urgency of the climate crisis. Spoiler alert: In the movie, politicians including the president treat the threat to humanity’s existence as an issue to be used for political gain, and tech industry leaders do the same, prioritizing profit.
Early in her career, Graumlich had an eerily similar experience to the one Lawrence’s character, a PhD student, has in “Don’t Look Up.”“I’m a tree ring scientist: I study how climate has changed over the long term, in part to understand whether what we’re seeing is natural variability or human-caused,” Graumlich said. “So, imagine, being a young scientist, I turned 30. A week later, my science was covered in the New York Times: about tree rings, looking for past climate variability.
Of course, the threat posed by climate change is not much like a comet that will hit the Earth in less than seven months. Its effects are so slow-moving that despite beginning as early as the late 19th century, they have become perceptible to the average observer only in recent decades. But, while acknowledging that distinction, scientists mostly say the film nonetheless captures the political and economic challenges to mobilizing the public against any future threat.
“I enjoyed the movie,” Christopher Field, director of the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment and professor for interdisciplinary environmental studies at Stanford University, told Yahoo News. “It is really thought-provoking about lots of issues. It’s also a parable about climate change; it’s not about what we actually expect to happen with climate change. I enjoyed the insight into the frustrations and temptations that scientists feel when talking about important issues.
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