Guest essay by Eric Worrall
The Conversation is worried that climate disaster films like Sharknado might damage the credibility of climate scientists, because sometimes the characters in such movies use scientific sounding language to discuss preposterous fictional climate disasters.
Why ‘Sharknado 4’ matters: Do climate disaster movies hurt the climate cause?
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At their heart, however, the “Sharknado” films are stories about climate change, albeit in a way that is scientifically flawed to a comical degree. It’s a genre – climate disaster films – we decided to explore as an emerging mode of communication in society.
Fiction helps us understand reality
It’s explained in the original “Sharknado” that climate change has created an unusually strong tropical cyclone approaching Southern California. The sequels backed away from that explanation, whether out of a desire to avoid courting political controversy or simply because the creators felt that sharknados needed no explanation, we can’t be sure. But casting climate change as a catalyst for extreme, globally threatening natural disasters is a move characteristic of a small but growing genre of climate disaster films.
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To get a better sense of how fictional disaster films shape environmental attitudes, I (Lauren) conducted an in-depth analysis of 18 disaster films featuring climate change. The results of my research show that most of these films make only tenuous connections between climate change and natural disasters, which affects how people react to them.
Terminology related to climate change and extreme weather is often misused, and it’s not uncommon to see films that use the term “climate change” or “global warming” to refer to completely different phenomena – some of which are physically impossible and could happen in no world. For example, one film uses climate change to discuss a buildup of methane gas in the atmosphere that is predicted to ignite, incinerating all life on Earth.
The results from focus groups I held with participants who watched one of three representative disaster films confirm that these scientifically dubious depictions of climate change dilute any perceived environmental message in climate disaster films. Most participants were unconvinced – often with good reason – that anything shown in the films could happen in the real world and did not see much of an environmental message.
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It’s worth noting, however, that “The Day After Tomorrow” was an exception within the larger climate disaster film genre, both in terms of its production value and its (relatively) detailed discussion of climate change. Low-budget films like “Sharknado,” which stray very far afield from climate science, likely pose different possibilities for both misinformation and engagement with climate change. The question, then, is how to best tap into this potential while avoiding the pitfalls.
I suspect films like Sharknado are more about mockery of establishment climate narratives, than about promoting concern. The credibility of climate as an urgent issue has long since passed. When given a choice between different issues, people consistently rate climate as one of their lowest priorities.
Not even remotely possible.
Sharknado has MORE scientific credibility than do climate scientists.
Yes. There is more science in Sharknado than a thousand ‘climate models’.
Worrying about how a movie like Sharknado made destroy the credibility of climate change science, is akin to worrying about how the Three Stooges may impact the credibility of the medical community. They have already started down the slippery slope of irrelevance.
“Calling Dr. Howard, Dr. Fine, Dr. Howard!”
The Conversation is worried that climate disaster films like Sharknado might damage the credibility of climate scientists,
NOPE. The “climate scientists” are doing that quite well all on their own. Mind you,you have to have credibility to start with. And just as an afterthought,how can you damage something which does not exist?
Yes that is my immediate reaction – in order for them to be concerned about “climate science” (in the “Man(n) made” sense, of course) to have its “credibility” CHALLENGED would first require it to have some credibility to start with. Nobody but the completely uninformed about the Earth’s climate history ever endowed the ridiculous notion of catastrophic human induced climate change with the slightest bit of credibility.
“The Day After Tomorrow” was a complete joke as there cannot be a hurricane or cyclone based on a cold engine model. Hurricanes are bases on the difference in temperature between the surface (warm) and upper atmosphere (cooler). It cannot be based the reverse. The temperature decreases of buildings and other objects is simply impossible as the materials could not transmit kinetic energy that quickly between phases.
You mean the alarmists don’t get their “science” from Hollywood climate disaster movies?
I love it when the absurd is embellished by the absurd (and you get to figure out which “absurd” is which).
But, really, this was all built in at the beginning. When I first saw “An Inconvenient Truth,” I almost guffawed out loud at the point when, in Gore’s list of animals extinct because of global warming, I saw a picture most clearly of a coelacanth. Think about it: extinct, right? It would serve Gore right to be bitten by one…
At least the producers, directors, actors, and viewers of the “sharknado” movies know that they are fiction.
I really appreciate it when disaster movies spit right in the face of the Eco-Fascists. My favorite example of this is a subtle line from the latest Godzilla (2014), when Ken Watanabe’s Dr. Serizawa says…
“The arrogance of man is believing that man is in control of nature, and not the other way around.”
Couldn’t have said it better myself!