Guest essay by Eric Worrall
According to JPL’s Peter Kalmus, Netflix’s “Don’t Look Up“, about an incoming planet killer asteroid, is a moving metaphor for the struggle to be heard faced by climate scientists.
I’m a climate scientist. Don’t Look Up captures the madness I see every day
Peter Kalmus
Thu 30 Dec 2021 01.08 AEDTA film about a comet hurtling towards Earth and no one is doing anything about it? Sounds exactly like the climate crisis
The movie Don’t Look Up is satire. But speaking as a climate scientist doing everything I can to wake people up and avoid planetary destruction, it’s also the most accurate film about society’s terrifying non-response to climate breakdown I’ve seen.
The film, from director Adam McKay and writer David Sirota, tells the story of astronomy grad student Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence) and her PhD adviser, Dr Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio), who discover a comet – a “planet killer” – that will impact the Earth in just over six months. The certainty of impact is 99.7%, as certain as just about anything in science.
The scientists are essentially alone with this knowledge, ignored and gaslighted by society. The panic and desperation they feel mirror the panic and desperation that many climate scientists feel. In one scene, Mindy hyperventilates in a bathroom; in another, Diabasky, on national TV, screams “Are we not being clear? We’re all 100% for sure gonna fucking die!” I can relate. This is what it feels like to be a climate scientist today.
The two astronomers are given a 20-minute audience with the president (Meryl Streep), who is glad to hear that impact isn’t technically 100% certain. Weighing election strategy above the fate of the planet, she decides to “sit tight and assess”. Desperate, the scientists then go on a national morning show, but the TV hosts make light of their warning (which is also overshadowed by a celebrity breakup story).
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After 15 years of working to raise climate urgency, I’ve concluded that the public in general, and world leaders in particular, underestimate how rapid, serious and permanent climate and ecological breakdown will be if humanity fails to mobilize. There may only be five years left before humanity expends the remaining “carbon budget” to stay under 1.5C of global heating at today’s emissions rates – a level of heating I am not confident will be compatible with civilization as we know it. And there may only be five years before the Amazon rainforest and a large Antarctic ice sheet pass irreversible tipping points.
The Earth system is breaking down now with breathtaking speed. And climate scientists have faced an even more insurmountable public communication task than the astronomers in Don’t Look Up, since climate destruction unfolds over decades – lightning fast as far as the planet is concerned, but glacially slow as far as the news cycle is concerned – and isn’t as immediate and visible as a comet in the sky.Advertisement
Given all this, dismissing Don’t Look Up as too obvious might say more about the critic than the film. It’s funny and terrifying because it conveys a certain cold truth that climate scientists and others who understand the full depth of the climate emergency are living every day. I hope that this movie, which comically depicts how hard it is to break through prevailing norms, actually helps break through those norms in real life.
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Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/dec/29/climate-scientist-dont-look-up-madness
“Don’t Look Up” should have been titled “Don’t Look Now”.
Watching “Don’t Look Up” was like watching a low budget amateurish version of Bruce Willis “Armageddon“, with all the funny bits removed.
I mean, the movie Armageddon was enjoyable. Bruce Willis’ character Harry Stamper chasing A. J. around an oil rig with a shotgun, after catching him in bed with his daughter. The entire specialist drilling team failing their NASA psych exam. The crazy guy who likes to play with explosives when they let him.
“Don’t Look Up” characters by contrast are just not that interesting.
PHD candidate Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence) popping random pills whenever she can get her hands on them, and sneering at the President. DiCaprio overacting character Dr. Randall Mindy’s tiresome struggle to form coherent sentences when talking to anyone who might be able to help resolve the problem, then suddenly coming good halfway through the movie, after the pretty blonde news anchor starts feeling him up on set, followed by a kinky foreplay scene – “Tell me we’re going to die”.
Repeated inexplicable long pans of Hillary Clinton’s White House portraits during the first meeting with the President, including one of her embracing Bill.
OMG, still 1:22:55 to go.
The head pilot of the comet mission shuttle just asked for the President to make his DUIs go away. Was this an attempt at character development?
The shuttle mission aborted after launch – suddenly they want to recover the minerals from the comet, rather than deflecting it. 1:19:00 – Leonardo DiCaprio’s character just did an advertisement for the caricature capitalists who aborted the destroy mission. Then 1:31:00 DiCaprio has a meltdown on TV about why they didn’t destroy the comet. Consistency not.
For some reason main characters keep having black hoods put on their heads for rendition to a black site, but before they are driven off they have a long chat to their friends while wearing the hood. Oh hang on, next scene the hood is removed and he’s driving a car. Maybe the men in black changed their mind.
1:38:00 – “Don’t Look Up” is now a crowd protest chant, like “Lets go Brandon”.
41 minutes to go. Watching the clock. Now someone just started singing.
1:45:00 – The foreign destroy mission just blew up on the launch pad.
1:51:25 – Buying end of world groceries from the chiller section.
1:54:00 – DiCaprio’s character just bought flowers for his wife (after banging the TV personality). All hugs again, like immediately. What a doormat.
1:59:00 – Finally something a little funny – the mineral recovery mission fails, then everyone starts fleeing the situation room “I’ve got to use the rest room”.
2:04:00 – The comet strikes, wiping out the entire cast of tiresome characters. Ah bum, there are survivors. It just wiped out the less annoying characters.
2:07:00 – Weird scene with cellphones and other weirdly intact debris floating about in space.
2:08:00 – I was wrong – 22,000 years later, the President and entrepreneur disembark on an alien planet, all naked, where the President almost immediately gets eaten by an alien, shortly followed by (hopefully) all the other colonists.
Oh dear, there was another survivor – taking selfies in the middle of a smoking ruin.
I guess “Don’t Look Up” is a good metaphor for the climate crisis after all. Shallow, poor plot development, no consistency, boring unsympathetic characters with little genuine depth, and a totally unbelievable ending.
I have no problem with climate disaster films as such – I loved “The Day After Tomorrow“, its a great adventure film, so long as you ignore the bad science. “Snowpiercer” – awesome. But by the end of “Don’t Look Up”, I was rooting for the comet. And the carnivorous aliens.
Update (EW): Bonbon mentions “Greenland“, an awesome disaster movie if you haven’t seen it yet.
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Is he referring to the 2% of climate scientists like himself that claim humans are the main cause of warming that constantly have their opinions shown on the news without ever being questioned, or the 98% that don’t agree?
The irony it burns! Don’t Look UP! is the Government’s message to try to deflect citizens from seeing the truth for themselves that the planet is going to be imminently destroyed by a giant comet. It is a small group of scientists that are trying to get the message out on what is really happening.
JPL’s Peter Kalmus, clearly the opposite of “The Right Stuff”, doesn’t seem to see that, re climate, the consensus has most people, all the global universities, all major institutions, all governments, nearly all the mass media, nearly all the money and the billionaires behind their crumbling hypothesis. It is the intrepid “Three Percent” holding back the 97% juggernaut in lock-step! You guys reminds me of the quip “There we were, two against a hundred. Boy did we ever kick the s#*t outa those two guys!”
It is the consensus that is obfuscating the truth, hiding the declines, disappearing the 1930s-40s 20th Century high temperature stand, the “Ice-Age-Cometh” deep cooling period of late 40s to 1980, the LIA, the MWP and other Warmer periods going back 8000yrs (claiming its warmer now than any time over the last 800,000yrs).
Fortunately for him, P. Kalmus is not known. He’d best keep his head down as this climate fairytale falls apart.
More like Don’t Look Back at 40 years worth of phony science and utterly absurd doomsday predictions!
The Grauniad says…”An erosion of democratic norms. An escalating climate emergency. Corrosive racial inequality. A crackdown on the right to vote. Rampant pay inequality. America is in the fight of its life. If you can, please make a year-end gift today to fund our reporting in 2022.”
Makes me ill to read such leftist bull cookie.
Doesn’t Britain require an ID to vote? If so, is Grauniad declaring that Britain has no right to vote?
The claims of pay inequality were dealt with 40 years ago, back when those lies were first trotted out.
The claims of racial inequality are also easy to refute.
America is in a fight for it’s life alright, socialists have been doing everything in their power to kill it for years, and at present their nonsense is in the ascendency.
“America is in a fight for it’s life alright, socialists have been doing everything in their power to kill it for years, and at present their nonsense is in the ascendency.”
Yes, this is the real problem.
The erosion of democratic norms is caused by the Democrat Socialists attempts to cheat at elections, and the “crackdown on the right to vote” is referring to Republican efforts to stop the Democrat Socialists from cheating in elections.
There is no climate emergency. It’s all in alarmists heads.
So now it’s climate breakdown is it? How does climate breakdown?
It usually starts with a crying jag, progressing to angry fits, leading to social isolation and, ultimately, suicide. So, keep dangerous weapons away from the Earth during this troubling time it is having. Don’t worry, though, eventually (according to George Carlin) the Earth will shake humanity off like a dog does fleas and all of its cares will go away.
“How does climate breakdown?”
It doesn’t. The author is an idiot.
There were a couple chuckles in the movie. But I was really hoping for a shallow Hollywood type who blathers about the comet but then does everything in his life opposite to what is supposedly required to stop the comet although that would be hard to do, because a comet isn’t climate change.
At some point I would like to see some glimmer of awareness in Leo DiCaprio as to just how hypocritical he truly is
But introspection requires an IQ above 50 I suppose
DiCaprio never made it through high school.
Looking at this performance he never made it through drama school either….☹️
His film, The Revenant, was pretty good- especially the scene when he was being attacked by the grizzly. :-}
Umm, Leo is a pretty good actor…
I thought the BASH mobile guy, played as a caricature of Biden, Musk, and Jobs public personas was a complete hoot….He and Cate Blanchett should get supporting role nominations for their satirical character delivery. Let’s face it, with B-grade actors, this movie would never have seen the screen. Unfortunately DiCaprio, capitalizing on his climate change aura (CC not even mentioned in the movie), will get a best actor nom for something not even close to his 2010 performance in Shutter Island.
I want a movie where ignorant pretty boy Leo plays the hero, not so pretty Michael Mann. Emma Thompson, Jennifer Lawrence, Emma Watson, Charlotte Church etc along as shaggable eye candy PHD climate scientists who know how to help Mikey save the world
Fluffy kittens and polar nears de rigueur.
How would Naomi Oreskes be cast in your film, alastair?
Steve Buscemi perhaps?
As not shaggable.
As a throw rug?
Okay. That made me laugh, Mark.
As for anyone else’s answer… AAAAARRRRRRRGGGGGHHHHH!!!!!!!!!
As they say, she has a face perfect for radio.***
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*** Apologies to Naomi. I don’t really judge people by their looks. But I’m not judging Naomi’s politics or agenda. with which I strongly disagree, I’m just stating a fact. I too, have a face perfect for radio. She’s just going to have to accept the fact and move on. And she’s not exactly out on freeway off ramps with a ‘Need Some Help’ sign, ya know. She’s doing OK on our dime.
When a comet is hurtling towards earth, what do climate scientists recommend we do about it? And why would I think they know any better than anyone else?
Sometimes in life, when faced with certain choices, the best action is to take is no action.
Unless of course, you are able to predict the future without error. But if that were the case, the best action would be to go to a horse race.
I had the exact same thought. The characters in the movie are running around trying to get everyone to panic about the comet. What’s the point? Are we all expected to build nuclear missiles in our garages and launch them in the nick of time to disintegrate the comet?
Have a look at Greenland instead :
Hair raising comet impact…
Greenland is awesome
Technically, a large meteor, approaching from say Virgo direction, has added to it’s velocity the Earth’s orbital velocity, and would traverse the Earth’s atmosphere to ground in about 1 second, so would make for a really short action movie….
The movie sucked. Even if I was a climatista- I’d still it sucked- bad acting, bad plot, bad dialogue, bad directing, bad everything. Truly awful.
However, I have my only view of how the film could be- though it isn’t– a metaphor for the fact that the world, most of it, isn’t paying attention to the UAP problem. There is a good chance we are being visited by craft and maybe aliens from another planet. There are a lot of people who believe that is is a possibility and it’s worth finding out (https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/galileo/home). But, most people are ignoring it. If it’s true, it’s almost as potentially dangerous as a mountain size comet heading our way. Too bad the writer, director and DiCaprio weren’t smart enough to create THAT story. If it is true and the aliens aren’t friendly, then it’s far more dangerous than a mountain sized comet.
What is it about UAP’s that you think “it’s worth finding out?” If we do figure out they are of alien origin (short of them walking up and saying “hi”), what could we do about it?
well, if nothing else, it’s fascinating- if we find out they’re alien, then we can begin to think about what to do about it- prepare for the “big day”- kinda like in that movie, Mars Attacks- which of course didn’t turn out so well- but it was funny as a movie
I expect the aliens will tell us that there is no climate crisis.
Not a fan of satire, Joseph?
I love satire- best form of comedy.
Joseph, start touring with your demonstration of alien technology salvaged from a crashed starship and send me a reviewer’s ticket.
oh, I guess you’re an “alien denier” :-}
For more than a century professional astronomers around the world have been pointing very powerful telescopes with cameras at the sky and taking countless pictures.
For many decades amateur astronomers around the world have been going out every night to take more pictures.
Since the Seventies we’ve had earth observation satellites taking photos of the whole Earth from orbit.
Inexpensive cameras have been available since at least the Sixties.
Cell phones with cameras have been ubiquitous around the world for at least a decade.
Between Sklyab, Mir, and the International Space Station, we’ve had people orbiting Earth almost constantly since the Seventies.
Earth is under constant surveillance from the ground up and from space down and has been for decades.
Where are the pictures of these alien spacecraft?
good point- but that point alone proves nothing- you think those Navy pilots are ignorant? that those modern radar and other sensors are malfunctioning? You think the Pentagon would say that there are things out there flying around and we don’t know what they are? That’s all I’m saying too- I don’t know what they are. And, I saw a UAP back in ’83 in the Hudson Valley, seen by thousands
I don’t really have a stake in this- not going to make any profit from the idea- just exhibiting curiosity over something that IS POSSIBLE and if true, would be highly significant.
We need better pictures than the fuzzy pictures we have now.
I can’t recall any UFO picture that was in focus enough to see any details. Why that is, I don’t know, since as you point out, there are millions of cameras avialable today.
Waiting for a good picture.
Because atmospheric plasma will not have a defined edge. These people mistake a natural phenomenon as “zippy little aliens!”
It could be that atmospheric plasma plays a role in fuzzy pictures. That could be one explanation.
UFO “sightings” have only decreased as global surveillance increased. I hold the Fermi Paradox as true- there is no other life but here. Drake’s Equation is a ridiculously stupid argument of supposition.
Earth is either the first instance, or last vestige, of Life.
“However, I have my only view of how the film could be- though it isn’t– a metaphor for the fact that the world, most of it, isn’t paying attention to the UAP problem…
“If it’s true, it’s almost as potentially dangerous as a mountain size comet heading our way.”
If these phenomenon are aliens visiting the Earth, they don’t seem to be doing anything hostile. They don’t seem to be trying particularly hard to hide themselves, either. If what we are seeing is superior technology, then they are way out of our league.
So, if there are aliens, let’s hope they are friendly.
There is good reason to assume they could be friendly. If they have the technology to travel between the stars, then they have access to all the raw materials they would ever need, so they would have no need to take resources away from other beings.
Now planet Earth might be a different story. Planets like Earth may be more unique than we imagine. But still, there must be many worlds in the galaxy that look a lot like Earth.
We really do need to get to Mars to see if we can find life there that has developed independently. If we found that, then we could assume that life will occur in every place where the environment is suitable.
That won’t prove whether aliens are visiting Earth or not. We need an alien landing on the White House lawn, or something similar, for that.
The Galileo Project may be a way to get much better data than ever before.
https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/galileo/home
so we won’t need an alien craft landing at the White House
It seems pretty clear that they’re not a threat. I only made that suggestion because it is possible but highly unlikely, like the supposed climate emergency. My interest in the UAP thing is mostly because it’s an exciting development- that not only is the Pentagon changing its tune but many astronomers, like Avi Loeb, at Harvard are also showing interest. If and of course that’s a big if- but if we find out for sure that we are being visited by something from another planet, that is exciting, no? That Galileo Project seems to be the best way we’ll ever know for sure.
The boy who spun a handmade tale.
Now if it was a handmaiden’s tail, I could go along with it.
Peter Kalmus is a Climate Lientist, who is merely using Appeals to Emotion. What a fraud.
Same as the survival rate of CoVid. And yet we are all locked down and in perpetual booster shots, etc.. There’s delicious irony here, is there not?
Don’t think and question or investigate is more like it. Political science and agenda advocacy have over-stretched themselves on this one.
right … so the EU, Japan, Israel just sit on their hands and wait for the Russia/China mission ?
maybe if the climate change cult ever pointed at something besides a model output more people would listen …
I thought it was a metaphor for “Don’t look up the data on the vaccine tests” …
(not really but since the same leftists are terrified of a virus that hasn’t killed a single celebrity it could be)
LOL! I enjoyed Don’t Look Up. It was a great example of the Peter Principle.
If a comet and some carnivorous aliens showed up, it would give people something to really worry about rather than ‘Climate Change’/Global Warming.
I still can’t get passed George Carlin.
The planet is fine, the people are fkd.
Pack your bags….
https://youtu.be/7W33HRc1A6c
I thought it was a super entertaining and fascinating movie. Jonah Hill was over the top great. Same with Streep. The news anchors were entertaining as well.
The jaw-dropping irony was fascinating and speaks to the oblivious ignorance and hypocrisy of everyone involved.
The whole notion of two independent scientists fighting against the machine to get their voices heard is beautiful because the producers actually believe this – oblivious to the reality that the climate change industrial complex is the machine.
It’s the climate scientists and associated grifters who are sabotaging any real attempts to solve the issue in their quest to milk every last penny of profit, regardless of its impact in the world.
If climate change is real and imminent, nuclear power is the only possible solution. Solar and wind are the faux solutions intended to mollify the masses while the climate industry gobbles up trillions in profits.
The guy who wrote the review is the icing on the cake. He figures we only have five years to solve this existential threat. Does he have any idea how many times we’ve heard this same doomsaying predication in the last 35 years? The ignorance of all these characters is gobsmacking and fascinating at the same time.
I just didn’t find it funny, except that final bit when they all started fleeing the operations room after all was lost. But maybe that’s just me.
The only similarity between Don’t Look Up and CAGW is that they are both Science Fiction.
Good one! And so true.
They are both fiction. Not much science in either.
Another good one!
I watched it the other night and it was woeful… so ridiculous, so bad… I dozed off for a bit.
I am guessing the earth must have been saved, cause we are still here.
Honestly… DON’T WATCH IT…It’s AWFUL, SAD AND PATHETIC.
It was not a bad movie. Yes, thin plot (“Armageddon”), “C” acting, almost 100% predictable plot, but the metaphor in the scene where the “believers” who have been told to “Don’t Look Up” suddenly look up and find out they’ve been scammed by the political class was the big selling point.
As so many here and at Jo’s already know, we’re being scammed on so many levels, most of us have lost track. At some point, the scammed are going to ‘look up’ and figure out that they’ve been scammed. And earlier post here was about the ‘turning point’. And, so many know the famous quote that the human animal goes insane in herds, but recoveries its sanity one individual at a time.
Listen: You’ve probably got a better way to spend 2 hr and 22 min, but consider that it is a satire, and whether excellently or poorly done, it might be worth it, if nothing else, for the historical aspect of (almost) 2022.
One man’s opinion, I value yours,
Vlad
Eric, I’ve always disagreed with your taste in sci-fi camp weather disaster movies. The Day After Tomorrow was painful to watch, and Snowpiercer was almost as bad, albeit a little more artistically bizarre in the vein of Naked Lunch or Eraserhead. I’d liken Snowpiercer to “Barbarella on a Train.” only without the body of Jane Fonda, which, as much as I hate her politics and thought processes, did have a nice figure, She took good care of herself and showed off as a matronly Barbarellla on the Lake later in her career (I.e. On Golden Pond), which was arguably the best acted Fonda offspring movie, except perhaps Brother of Barbarella Visits Some Amusement Parks (i.e Westworld and Futureworld). And then there’s the worst of the movies, Kevin Costner’s financial disaster, Waterworld, in which Dennis Hopper bravely guides the oar-powered Exxon-Valdez around a future Earth, successfully refining gasoline and diesel from what remains of a load of oil, and where only the Himalayan Mountains peak up out of the water. I’m not sure Kevin (who also produced the movie) knew how to do math wrt ice melt. If ALL of GREENLAND’s and ANTARCTICA’s ice melted, the ocean would rise about 200-250 feet, leaving most of the land in the world, high and dry, but certainly drowning certain low-lying coastal areas, including the Florida peninsula, and much of the flat Mississippi River basin. Probably the only US states that would be entirely drowned would be Florida, Delaware and Louisiana. Most of Mississippi and about half of Alabama would be underwater, too. US citizens, assuming the USA still exists, would still buy seafront property southeast of Dallas. Costner is, as are so many alarmists, innumerate. But of course, campy sci-fi movies are fiction, and so we won’t insist on realism and accuracy where art is the process.
Now,speaking of true art, we must praise excellence and achievement. I’ll just say one word. Sharknado.
Yeah, you got me 🙂
“And then there’s the worst of the movies, Kevin Costner’s financial disaster, Waterworld”
I liked Waterworld. I especially like the quad-fifty machine gun.
As for Snowpiecer, it’s too much drama in a little space, like a soap opera, and it promotes an implausible scenario. It’s not even good science fiction.
I spent the first hour fixated on how Kate Dibiasky looked like Rebecca De Mornay
If “Don’t look up” was as much fun as “Risky Business”, I would have written a very different review!