On August 14, 2021, rain was observed at the highest point on the Greenland Ice Sheet for several hours, and air temperatures remained above freezing for about nine hours. This was the third time in less than a decade, and the latest date in the year on record, that the National Science Foundation’s Summit Station had above-freezing temperatures and wet snow. There is no previous report of rainfall at this location (72.58°N 38.46°W), which reaches 3,216 meters (10,551 feet) in elevation.
Dr. Box discusses the continued research on algae growth as a darkening mechanism on the ice, increasing heat absorption and accelerating the melt process. Below, my Yale Climate Connections video following a team of researchers working on exactly that issue.
Amy Westervelt’s “Drilled” podcast is great listening, and I spoke to her on the roots of climate denial, and science denial, earlier in the year.
Amy used the example of the Sandy Hook shooting conspiracy, hatched by Alex Jones ( who recently lost a very expensive lawsuit brought by those parents for defamation) as an example of the type of stuff that is the collateral damage of long term climate denial exposure. Below, more recently, Jones explains that the recent Kentucky tornado disaster was the result of ‘weather weapons”. Of course.
It’s a short video from the usually solid Diana Olick- and I kept waiting for the punchline – OK if they’re capturing carbon, what do they do with it? Make more fossil fuel, bubbles for Coca-Cola, and enhanced recovery of, you guessed it, more oil. No commentary on the circular logic here makes this a fail.
Netflix’s Don’t Look Up, which released on Christmas Eve, is not a subtle movie. It is a brash, absurdist satire about the incapability of our political and media classes to respond appropriately to impending, world-ending disaster. Throughout its 2 hour, 25 minute runtime, writers Adam McKay and David Sirota repeatedly and angrily skewer the personalities and the structures that help prevent our status-infatuated, profit-obsessed society from taking climate change seriously. It does this whilst being extremely funny.
You would be forgiven for thinking that a snarky, star-studded comedy about a real-world, manmade crisis would be gobbled up by mainstream movie critics. But you’d be wrong. At the time of writing, Don’t Look Up had a decidedly mixed score of 55% on review aggregation site Rotten Tomatoes.
Why?
Criticisms of Don’t Look Up seem to boil down to two main themes: Firstly, it makes for uncomfortable viewing. The film is “blunt” (according to David Fear in Rolling Stone), “shrill” (Samuel R. Murrian, Parade Magazine) and “self-conscious and unrelaxed” (Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian). Luke Goodsell of ABC News Australia believes the director, Adam McKay, “just doesn’t know how to let people enjoy things—even if it is their own destruction.” In these critics’ views, it’s fine to make movies about the climate crisis—just as long as you do so in a way that soothes and placates the viewer. You must under no account employ “bombastic, shake-you-by-the-shoulders direction” (Simran Hans, The Observer).
Secondly, critics appear to be worried that the film is making fun of people—and that perhaps they might be among the targets.
“McKay has made it inescapably clear that, no matter who you are … he is serenely confident that he is much smarter than you are,” opines Tim Brayton of Alternate Ending. “Yelling ‘Look at all the dumb-dumbs’ cannot be the basis for successful satire,” cries a pearl-clutching Fletcher Powell of KMUW Wichita Public Radio. Tim Grierson at Screen International says the director takes “a smug, self-satisfied approach [that] proves insufficient at addressing the legitimate woes at the core of this picture.”
It’s unclear which characters these offended writers are identifying with, or which audiences they are being offended on behalf of, but the film has clearly hurt some feelings. Why do the critics—a community famously never given to snobbery or condescension—feel condescended to? Perhaps they believe they would be better climate communicators than the filmmakers. Indeed, Matthew Lucas, on his blog From the Front Row, says, “This isn’t just a noble failure, it’s a flat out bad film, an attempt to address a very real planetary crisis in the simplest and most misguided terms.” Don’t Look Up is guilty of“lofty superiority that would drive away any partisans who still need to be won over,” writes Charles Bramesco in The Guardian, with an air of lofty superiority.
The haughty reception for Don’t Look Up from the showbiz media contrasts starkly with the reaction from the community on which the film’s heroes are based: the climate scientists. And if Don’t Look Up is infuriating to watch, it is because it does a pitch-perfect job of channeling climate experts’ weary frustration at being ignored.
Short answer no. General consensus that 10 years of above-average precipitation would be needed to bring the west back to “normal”, or at least the norms of the 80s and 90s, when so much development took place.
Great interview w/ @janellewang on the state of the Sierra snowpack w/ Dr. Andrew Schwartz Lead Scientist & Manager at @UCB_CSSL who admitted it took 40 minutes of trudging through deep snow for … the data, record breaking as it was earlier today. #CAwx#Sierra@nbcbayareapic.twitter.com/vQ4YHbz13P
We are now on the accelerating upward sweep of an “S-curve” in the deployment of renewable energy, as well as battery storage. Above, I spoke to researcher Jonathan Koomey and energy visionary Tony Seba on the accelerating pace of renewable deployment. The historical example that kept coming up was John Kennedy’s bold plan to put a man on the moon in less than a decade.
Setting goals and taking first steps is the most important thing. “Our choices now create options later,” Koomey told me. “Everything we do creates new options…doors will open, opportunities will present themselves that we couldn’t even have imagined.”
Koomey is an independent researcher, having lectured at Stanford, and worked at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab for 2 decades. Below, I paired him with Saul Griffith, and MIT PhD, and winner of the MacArthur Foundation “Genius Award”.
One of my most valuable “go to” resources on solar is Josh Pearce, formerly of Michigan Tech, where I interviewed him in 2020, just before the Covid shutdown – he is now at Western University in Ontario.
Don’t Look Up, Adam Mackay’s new movie satire, is destined to be a cultural touchstone like Dr Strangelove, or Idiocracy. Is it “good”? In my first viewing, I wanted to like it more than I actually liked it. But then I found myself lying awake in early am, unable to sleep, going back for another look. Jennifer Lawrence is utterly great and I couldn’t take my eyes off her.
“Don’t Look Up” makes a few decent points and gets a chuckle or two, but mostly, it is leaden when it could be farcical, sluggish when it could be screwball. This end of the world comedy should have just been more fun. – Gary Kramer, Salon
[The premise is] squandered in a slapdash, scattershot sendup that turns almost everyone into nincompoops, trivializes everything it touches, oozes with self-delight, and becomes part of the babble and yammer it portrays. – Joe Morgenstern, Wall St Journal
