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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I’m going to take a contrary read on this movie. I think it does a wonderful job of parodying our culture’s shallow celebrity-obsession that promotes pop singer Ariana Grande as an expert on manatees or comets. Kinda like Leo Dicaprio being a climate scientist. Her song at the “Just Look Up” rally was as hilarious as “We Are the World”.
“pop singer Ariana Grande”
Isn’t she the one who got caught on camera in a donut shop taking a donut off a display case and taking a bite out of it, and then putting the donut back on the shelf?
I think she licked it, which is even worse. If you see a bite out of a donut, you don’t buy it. But if she just licked it…. Just imagine if that’d happened in the Age of COVID.
That’s right, she did lick it, not bite into it. Thanks for the reminder.
Started watching and turned it off after 5-10 minutes. I didn’t realise it was a comedy. The initial discovery of the comet by astronomers seemed to have the wrong vibe. I also can’t stand people with face piercings, especially two in the nose.
That is a turnoff. To me, anyway. Of course, I’m not a big fan of tatoos, either. I’m not really a fan of any “monkey see, monkey do” fad. It reminds me of sheep.
Just watched it. Greatest documentary ever. I liked the part where Leo’s character, Dr. Mindy, says, “Scientists like me are being fired for speaking out.” Does sound like what’s going on today.
Has Dr. Mindy consulted with Dr. Mork?
“A film about a comet hurtling towards Earth and no one is doing anything about it? Sounds exactly” [contrary to] “the climate crisis.”
The reason is that there is no observable climate crisis.
In contrast, Leonardo’s oncoming comet is directly and undeniably observable.
The contrast could not be more stark. The analogy is false at its base.
And Dr. panic-stricken, desperate and terrified Peter Kalmus doesn’t see the falsehood. Not his fault in a way, really. Like all other consensus climate scientists, he apparently hasn’t the training to evaluate the quality of his own data.
I think academic climatology is almost unique in systematic avoidance of the training students need to carry out science effectively.
I say almost unique, because on observing the stark incompetence on display over the past 2 years of the C*vid-19 fiasco, I now suspect that medical schools have done similarly.
For sure. By their pathetic attempts at parody they expose their own ignorance.
It was nothing like climate science.
The comet hit the earth according to the forecast.
If it was like climate science then they would have predicted that the comet hit earth, but in “reality” it did a near miss on Jupiter instead.
Other than that it had a few decent laughs in it!
“society’s terrifying non-response to climate breakdown”,
Europe’s Frans Timmermans will be receiving a Dr HC for his climate alarmism this January from Delft University.
I’m way more worried about asteroids hitting earth than climate change. After Shoemaker-Levy and Oumuamua, either of which could have been an utter disaster if the angles had been slightly different… I couldn’t care less about another degree average increase in temperature.
“Oumuamua”
This is an asteriod/comet from outside our solar system that passed through the solar system.
Some idiots were speculating this was an alien spacecraft. Their comments made for a good laugh, and a shake of the head.
Astronomers are discovering lots of rogue planets roaming the galaxy. Rogue planets are planets that became separated from their Sun, or they are planets that formed in a gas and dust field that didn’t have enough material to form a Sun.
A rogue planet coming into the solar system would be a huge disaster. It wouldn’t even have to impact another planet to cause a lot of trouble.
Humans need to move off the Earth and into space as soon as possible, for the sake of continuing humanity. Disasters that would wipe out all life on Earth, would not affect humans and other creatures living in habitats in space. Humanity and all the plants and animals on Earth are at risk until we reach this level of safety. A gamma ray burst, or a rogue planet, may be heading our way right now.
We should have some human communities living in space in the next 25 years or so. I think we should try to speed this up, and should think BIG about human habitats in space. We can build habitats in space that can hold millions of people and all our animals and plants. We should do so as soon as possible. Gerard O’Neill, Jeff Bezos’ mentor, can be our guide.
Back in the mid-80’s I belonged to the L5 Society, a society dedicated to building space colonies at the L5 Earth-moon Lagrange point. It merged with the National Space Institute, resulting in the National Space Society, which is still around today. I never kept up, and I don’t know if NSS supports space colonies. I do think that space colonies are a far better idea than colonizing Mars. Mars would be a miserable death trap. Unfortunately, space colonies wouldn’t be safe from gamma ray bursts or rogue planets any more than Earth would.
“Back in the mid-80’s I belonged to the L5 Society,”
Me, too.
“I do think that space colonies are a far better idea than colonizing Mars. Mars would be a miserable death trap. Unfortunately, space colonies wouldn’t be safe from gamma ray bursts or rogue planets any more than Earth would.”
Living in Orbiting Habitats is a much better idea than living on Mars or the Moon because the Space Habitats can create an environment similar to Earth. Rather than living on Mars and the Moon, explorers could live in Orbiting Habitats and just spend short exploration visits to Mars and the Moon.
With sufficient radiation shielding, an Orbiting Habitat would be able to survive a gamma ray burst. Water ice makes a good radiation shield, and habitats carved into small asteriods would also be safe from radiation., A rogue planet would not harm an Orbiting Habitat unless it ran right into it, which is highly unlikely.
“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.”
Hahahahahahahaha! Now that is what I call an accurate review!
Transparent allegory never makes for a good film.
I also watched this satire, But saw the exact opposite of the “climate scientist’ Mr.(Dr.?) Klamus. The scientists portrayed in the movie were non other than our current lineup of climate skeptics trying to convince a non-interested world that “the science” doesn’t follow what big media, big tech, and big government are portraying. I get it that dear Mr. Dicapprio is a climate fool but don’t let that color your judgement of the satire. It is a satire btw, pure and simple. I think it backfired, at least for me as I saw many parallels to the the fight to get the skeptic message out to a non-interested world.
That rock, 66 million years ago, I would love to have witnessed it from various radii, jeesh the waves alone, and what did it feel like at the antipode? Imagine tidal waves miles high!
Impact was a good disaster movie about a colliding comet
Poor Peter Kalmus. It must be terrible living in such continual despair. Personally I am still waiting to see a bit of real warming in Canads
Anyone else notice the similarities with the Doran & Zimmerman consensus paper? Male academic advior, female graduate student, 97–99% consensus.
I found the movie funny. The funniest part is the belief among the makers and possibly actors of this movie that they were dramatizing a real threat and an oblivious public and political class. What they clearly don’t understand is that the promoters of CAGW are the obliviots and, unfortunately, the ruling class are listening far too ardently to the misinformation the idiots are spouting. If Armageddon is coming, it is coming in the form of ill conceived, unscientific, and highly destructive policies to fix a non-existent problem.
Here’s what a Chixilub size comet would really look like on approach:
https://youtu.be/QZDmTBqLkLI
Up (the movie) was pretty bad. But—given an actual issue, not “climate change”—quite the opposite would happen. EVERYTHING would be blamed on it and the media would have the world die a hundred times over before the one strike came.
Climate change, like the population bomb and Silent Spring is just the abuse of the term “science”, used like a talisman, to justify a ‘solution’ that involves a globalist, socialist agenda.
As for the comet, “A coward dies a thousand times before his death, but the valiant taste of death but once. It seems to me most strange that men should fear, seeing that death, a necessary end, will come when it will come.” —W. Shakespeare