Climate change in popular culture

• 1. Introduction

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  Climate change in popular culture drew a blunt verdict in 2005 from the science historian Naomi Oreskes. She saw "a huge disconnect" between three decades of professional research and what was circulating in popular culture. Since then, the subject has turned up in blockbusters, pop songs, cartoons and strategy games. References first appeared in the late 20th century and multiplied in the 21st. But a reference is not the same as a story. How often does a character in a hit film actually admit that the planet is warming? Which songs, shows and books have tried to tackle it head on, and what happened when they did? And why has such an enormous subject been so hard to put in front of an audience?

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• 2. A Simple Test

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  Two conditions make up the Climate Reality Check, a simple yardstick in the spirit of the Bechdel Test. First, climate change must exist somewhere in a narrative. Second, at least one character must know it. Researchers applied it to 250 of the most popular fictional films released between 2013 and 2022. All were set in the present, the recent past or the future. Only 12.8 percent passed the first condition. Just 9.6 percent passed the second.

  Counting any global environmental problem raised the figure to 26 percent. That list covered freshwater and marine pollution, air pollution, deforestation, species extinction and toxic waste, alongside climate change itself. Even so, the problems were generally mentioned in just one or two scenes, with little stress on how grave or urgent they were. Over the years studied, the presence of climate change and of common climate impacts rose substantially.

  An academic study in 2000 set ozone depletion beside climate change. Popular culture had accepted the ozone story relatively fast. It took far longer to accept the scientific consensus on climate. Commentators say the abstract nature of the topic makes it hard to cover. Cultural responses are nonetheless seen as an important part of communicating it.

  The 2010s brought a visible shift, as the climate movement, changing public opinion and new patterns of media coverage pushed the subject further into view.

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• 3. Cinema of Catastrophe

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  Two films released in 1961 treated global warming as an emergency to be fixed with explosives. In Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, a meteor shower ignites the Van Allen radiation belt. Earth is set to become uninhabitable within three weeks. The United Nations sends the submarine USOS Seaview into the Mariana Trench to fire a nuclear missile at the burning belt. In The Day the Earth Caught Fire, nuclear tests by the United States and the Soviet Union tilt the Earth's nutation by 11 degrees. The planet begins spiraling toward the Sun. Governments respond by detonating nuclear bombs in Siberia to correct the tilt.

  Soylent Green, from 1973, was directed by Richard Fleischer and stars Charlton Heston. Its future has dying oceans and year-round humidity, blamed on the greenhouse effect, along with pollution, poverty, overpopulation and depleted resources. Ridley Scott's Blade Runner followed in 1982, with Harrison Ford and Rutger Hauer, in a humid, rainy Los Angeles of an alternate 2015. Its 2017 sequel, Blade Runner 2049, is also noted for a warmer climate.

  The 1990s turned the damage into spectacle. Split Second, a 1992 film with Rutger Hauer and Kim Cattrall, floods London in 2008 as a result of global warming. Waterworld, from 1995 with Kevin Costner, is set in 2500, when melted polar ice caps leave Earth almost entirely covered with water. In The Arrival, from 1996, Charlie Sheen confronts aliens who secretly cause warming to make Earth suit them. A.I. Artificial Intelligence, from 2001, sets its story near the flooded ruins of New York City. Two thousand years later, a new ice age has arrived, and advanced robots called Specialists populate the world.

  Roland Emmerich's The Day After Tomorrow, released in 2004 with Dennis Quaid, imagines an abrupt shutdown of thermohaline circulation. A new ice age grips the Northern Hemisphere. Massive winter storms devastate the northern United States, Canada, Europe, East Asia and Russia, and surviving Americans are evacuated to Mexico. The film has been cited as one of the few blockbusters to discuss climate change.

  The Day the Earth Stood Still, in 2008, sends the alien Klaatu to persuade humanity to halt its destructive behavior or be destroyed. It swaps the original film's Cold War fear of nuclear warfare for climate change. Snowpiercer, from 2014, imagines a solar geoengineering attempt that accidentally freezes the planet. In Geostorm, from 2017, humanity builds weather modification satellites in 2019, and by 2022 they malfunction and cause severe weather worldwide. Downsizing, also from 2017, has scientists learn to shrink people to five inches tall to ease climate change and overpopulation. Only three percent of people choose it, and its inventor learns that Arctic methane emissions will drive humanity extinct within 100 years.

  The Tomorrow War, from 2021, ends the run with melting ice sheets that free a frozen spaceship from beneath the Academy of Sciences Glacier. Its weaponized bio-engineered aliens, called Whitespikes, overrun Earth from November 2048 and almost annihilate humanity by 2051.

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• 4. Satire and Sabotage

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  Don't Look Up, released in 2021, is an apocalyptic black comedy about two astronomers from Michigan State University. They try and fail to warn the world that a comet will hit Earth and destroy humanity within six months. The film is intended as a satire of public denial and apathy toward climate change among governments, the media and corporations.

  Climate Change Denial Disorder is a satirical short film that parodies denial by treating it as a fictional disease. Birdemic: Shock and Terror in 2010, and its 2013 sequel Birdemic 2: The Resurrection, take a stranger route. In them, global warming mutates birds into attackers of humanity.

  First Reformed, from 2017, follows a pastor of the Reformed Church in America who learns the causes and effects of climate change. He then tries to take violent action against those he holds responsible. The 2022 film How to Blow Up a Pipeline is based on the nonfiction book of the same name by Andreas Malm. The book, published in 2021, advocates sabotage and other violent techniques in climate activism.

  Research on 32 commercially and culturally significant fiction films released between 1972 and 2023 examined how cinema treats such militancy. Portrayals of environmentally motivated violence, labelled eco-tage and eco-terrorism, tended to present the more extreme acts of climate defense as morally illegitimate. More recent and commercially successful films generally preferred binary hero-villain characters over morally complex ones.

  Bo Burnham: Inside, a 2021 special, folds the topic into song. The lyric "20,000 years of this, seven more to go" comes from "That Funny Feeling". It is believed to reference the Climate Clock, which counts the time left to cut emissions before 1.5 C of warming becomes inevitable. Stand-up comedians including Michelle Wolf, Nate Bargatze and Joel Kim Booster have also joked about the subject.

  A 2009 satirical cartoon by Joel Pett posed a question aimed squarely at doubters: "What if it's a big hoax and we create a better world for nothing?"

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• 5. Documentaries

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  Davis Guggenheim's An Inconvenient Truth, an American documentary from 2006, followed former United States Vice President Al Gore's campaign to raise awareness about global warming. Gore released a book of the same name in 2006 alongside it. The book grew out of his lecture tour and added research, photographs, charts and personal anecdotes. A follow-up film, An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power, arrived in 2017.

  Leonardo DiCaprio created, produced and narrated The 11th Hour in 2007. In 2008, the Philippine television documentary Signos: Banta ng Pagbabagong Klima was presented and narrated by the actor Richard Gutierrez and aired on GMA Network. The Great Global Warming Swindle, a polemical film from 2009, takes the opposite position and denies the existence of climate change.

  The Age of Stupid, from 2009, mixes drama, documentary and animation. Franny Armstrong directed it, and Pete Postlethwaite plays a man alone in the devastated world of 2055. He watches archive footage from 2008 and asks, "Why didn't we stop climate change when we had the chance?"

  Chasing Ice appeared in 2012, followed by Thin Ice and The Expedition to the End of the World in 2013. Daniel Dencik directed the latter, which concerns the Greenland ice sheet and the retreat of glaciers since 1850. Chasing Coral arrived in 2017. Other titles include Carbon Nation in 2010, Before the Flood in 2016 and Damon Gameau's 2040 in 2019.

  Two documentaries in 2019 came with big names attached. David Attenborough presented Climate Change - The Facts for the BBC, while Michael Moore directed Planet of the Humans. I Am Greta follows the teenaged activist Greta Thunberg.

  Years of Living Dangerously, a nine-part series from 2014, prompts a harder question about what documentaries accomplish. One assessment holds that audiences responded by worrying rather than working out ways to act. The same assessment says documentaries should carry guidance on how to respond. Suggested routes include sustainable advocacy, volunteer work and consciously using fewer resources.

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• 6. Books and Science Fiction

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  Novels and programs from the late 1880s through the 1960s dwelt on weather and atmospheric change, catastrophe and rising temperatures. By the 1990s, the concerns had begun to shift from fiction toward reality. The author Kim Stanley Robinson wrote about Mars as an escape route from an overcrowded Earth.

  Bill McKibben's The End of Nature, published in 1989, has been cited as the first book on climate change written for a general audience. Isaac Asimov and Frederik Pohl followed in 1991 with Our Angry Earth: A Ticking Ecological Bomb. In 1992, Al Gore's Earth in the Balance recommended a "Global Marshall Plan" to resolve ecological crises such as climate change.

  The year 1999 brought two very different warnings. Jeremy Leggett, a former oil geologist, published The Carbon War: Global Warming and the End of the Oil Era. Whitley Streiber and Art Bell published The Coming Global Superstorm, predicting abrupt climate change from a shutdown of thermohaline circulation.

  Elizabeth Kolbert appears three times on the shelf. Field Notes from a Catastrophe, from 2006, describes effects already visible in the natural world, along with opposition from corporations and the Bush administration. The Sixth Extinction, from 2015, won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction and explained the concept of the Holocene extinction. Under a White Sky, from 2021, explores technological fixes such as solar geoengineering.

  Mark Lynas's Six Degrees, from 2007, walks through the consequences of each additional degree Celsius of warming. It culminates in a six-degree scenario in which a release of methane hydrate causes an extinction event like the Cambrian-Ordovician one. The book was adapted into a National Geographic Channel film.

  Nigel Lawson's An Appeal to Reason, from 2008, criticizes the scientific consensus on climate change. Clive Hamilton's Scorcher, from 2007, criticizes the Australian government for blocking international mitigation. Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway's Merchants of Doubt, from 2010, traces the history of climate change denial and its link to the tobacco industry playbook. Michael E. Mann explained the temperature record of the last 2,000 years in The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars in 2012. His 2021 book The New Climate War describes resistance from the fossil fuel industry.

  Jem Bendell's Deep Adaptation, from 2018, argues that climate change has progressed too far to prevent societal collapse. David Wallace-Wells's The Uninhabitable Earth, from 2019, grew out of a 2017 magazine series. Greta Thunberg's No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference collects speeches given to the United Nations, the European Union, the World Economic Forum, the United States Congress and the French National Assembly.

  Bill Gates's How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, from 2021, offers tactics for reaching carbon neutrality by 2050, with greater investment in sustainable energy technology.

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• 7. Climate on the Charts

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  The New York Times counted 192 references to climate change in English-language songs that entered the Billboard charts between 1999 and 2019. Around half of them, 87 songs, came between 2015 and 2019. Pop, folk, electronic music and heavy metal have all taken up the topic.

  Testament, an American thrash metal band, put "Greenhouse Effect" on its 1989 album Practice What You Preach. The band returned to the theme in "Fall of Sipledome" on The Gathering in 1999. The French band Gojira has released several songs on climate and the environment, including "Global Warming" and "World to Come". Others appear on From Mars to Sirius in 2005. Sepultura of Brazil followed in 2020 with "Guardians of Earth", about climate change, deforestation and indigenous people in their home country.

  Mos Def's "New World Water", from 1999, discusses the history of water access and scarcity, including the impact of climate change. Pitbull titled albums Global Warming in 2012 and Climate Change in 2017. Billie Eilish's 2019 single "All the Good Girls Go to Hell" refers to California wildfires and sea level rise. Lil Dicky released the charity single "Earth" in 2019, featuring numerous celebrities and other musicians.

  Melissa Etheridge's "I Need to Wake Up", from 2006, was the theme song to An Inconvenient Truth. OneRepublic's "Truth to Power", from 2017, did the same job for the sequel. Thirty Seconds to Mars released "A Beautiful Lie" in 2007 with a music video filmed in Greenland, highlighting the island's climate impacts. In 2015, the charity single "Love Song to the Earth" was produced in the run-up to the United Nations climate conference. Paul McCartney, Jon Bon Jovi, Sheryl Crow and Sean Paul all sang on it.

  The 1975 released a 2019 song featuring a spoken passage by Greta Thunberg, adapted from her "Our House Is on Fire" speech. It calls for civil disobedience to demand action, and proceeds went to Extinction Rebellion. Thunberg also appears in the music video for Pearl Jam's 2020 single "Retrograde". Massive Attack's 2020 EP Eutopia includes a song featuring a speech by Christiana Figueres, the diplomat who wrote the Paris Agreement.

  Radiohead's 2000 song "Idioteque" and 2016 album A Moon Shaped Pool both treat climate change as a theme, and Thom Yorke explored it on his 2006 solo album The Eraser. Grimes's 2020 album Miss Anthropocene is a concept album about an "anthropomorphic goddess of climate change" and human extinction. King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard made climate change central to Infest the Rats' Nest in 2019, which follows characters forced to leave Earth. Midnight Oil's final album, Resist, followed in 2022.

  Also in 2019, the composer Matthew Burtner wrote Glacier Music, intended to emulate melting glaciers.

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• 8. Television, Games and Stage

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  On the 22nd of September 2021, seven American late-night hosts devoted portions of their shows to climate change. They were Samantha Bee, Trevor Noah, Jimmy Kimmel, Seth Meyers, James Corden, Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Fallon. That same year, the rival British soap operas Casualty, Coronation Street, Doctors, EastEnders, Emmerdale, Holby City and Hollyoaks aired their first ever crossover episodes. All carried references to climate change ahead of the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference.

  South Park spoofed global warming in seven episodes. In "Goobacks", from 2004, climate refugees from the year 3045 use a time portal to take low-wage jobs in 2004, echoing the debate over illegal immigration. In "Smug Alert!", from 2006, drivers of hybrid cars produce so much "smug" that a superstorm destroys San Francisco and South Park. Also in 2006, "ManBearPig" had Al Gore warn the town of a giant carnivorous monster, only for it to become clear he was using the scare to get attention. The episode reflected the climate skepticism of co-creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone at the time. In 2018, a two-part arc revealed that ManBearPig was real. Parker and Stone wrote it as an apology for the show's earlier depictions, and Gore himself praised it.

  In "The Inner Light", a 1992 episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Jean-Luc Picard lives a lifetime on a planet suffering global warming and aridification. The change grows serious enough to threaten all life there. The episode won a Hugo Award. In 2020, the Doctor Who episode "Orphan 55" sent the Thirteenth Doctor to a spa that proves to be a trap on an abandoned planet. It is a version of Earth wrecked by climate change and nuclear warfare, inhabited by mutant humans called Dregs. The Doctor ends by telling her companions that she cannot guarantee this future will not come to pass.

  The Simpsons visited the subject in 2005, when a school field trip finds the Springfield Glacier almost completely melted. In a 2009 episode, Lisa is assigned a report on the year 2059 and becomes depressed after learning about the future effects of climate change.

  The 1987 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles series had four episodes about global warming, with villains usually behind it. In "Shredder's Mom", Shredder and Krang use a mirror on a satellite to warm the Earth unless political leaders surrender. The 1980s Transformers cartoon had at least one such episode, "The Revenge of Bruticus", in which the Combaticons use the Space Bridge to hurl Earth toward the Sun. Captain Planet and the Planeteers devoted numerous episodes to global warming, including "Greenhouse Planet".

  Civilization, released in 1991, lets pollution from industry and transport, if left unchecked, turn land into desert and coastlines into swamps. Civilization VI: Gathering Storm, from 2019, adds a mechanic in which carbon emissions cause sea level rise, permanent coastal flooding and more frequent, more intense extreme weather. Fuel, from 2009, is a racing game set in a post-apocalyptic world ravaged by extreme weather. Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey, from 2010, sends a task force to investigate the Schwarzwelt, a distortion spreading from Antarctica that is reminiscent of the ozone layer hole. Battlefield 2042, from 2021, imagines category 6 hurricanes and an influx of climate refugees causing an economic depression in 2034. Later, a Kessler syndrome event destroys 70 percent of Earth's satellites.

  On the stage, Steve Waters's The Contingency Plan, a diptych of plays first performed at the Bush Theatre in London in 2009, is set in a near future when severe tidal surges begin to submerge parts of coastal Britain. In 2014, the play 2071 arrived, written by the climate scientist Chris Rapley and the playwright Duncan Macmillan.

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