Don’t Look Up & Climate Change
Combating American science denialism
Disaster movies — especially those in which the disaster is not avoided — are difficult for me to watch under normal circumstances. Don’t Look Up was additionally so, as not only did I have to grapple with the existential dread of a dead Earth, but also the crippling frustration I feel as a scientist-in-training watching a painfully accurate representation of science contrarianism in the United States. Needless to say, it was a poor choice to watch this movie at midnight while my girlfriend was out of town — and she has the text receipts to prove it.
Full disclosure, I am not an expert in my field. However, I have a bachelor’s in physics and I’m currently in a graduate program for astronomy, so I think it is fair to say I have a little more experience with space, and science in general, than most outside of fields of science. Moreover, I’ve followed anti-science and contrarian movements for my entire adult life, hoping to make a career out of science outreach and to see what I’m up against. After inundating myself with every cringe-worthy, confident misunderstanding of science I’ve run across, I can say with quite a high level of confidence that every anti-science movement operates more or less the same way. It doesn’t matter whether you believe that evolution is “just a theory” — as Mike Pence himself once iterated on the house floor — or that climate change is a hoax, or that vaccines cause autism, or that the Earth itself is flat. The communities of people that believe these things in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, are essentially the same.
Now, some creationist or climate change contrarian may read this and ask “Are you saying I’m as ignorant as a flat Earther?” Well flat Earthers generally already deny evolution, climate change, vaccines, and basically anything they consider to be “official” narratives, so technically no. However, considering these issues in a vacuum: yes. Because the at the core of all these perceptions is the rejection of, or refusal to explore, overwhelming evidence in order to preserve one’s own idea of how the world is. If this is you, I really do hope you’ll keep reading, because maybe you’ll learn something.
In a departure from more well known disaster movies — think Armageddon, Deep Impact, 2012, etc. — Don’t Look Up contains a surprising level of scientific accuracy, especially for a dark comedy. That isn’t to say that scientific inaccuracies aren’t present at all; there are plenty, but there’s no point in getting nitpicky. Suffice to say, the inaccuracies weren’t distracting.
Long-period comets — some with orbital periods so long that we will never see them again — do occasionally show up in our solar system. Thankfully, the odds of such a comet impacting our planet are, quite literally, astronomically low. I would bet my life on it not happening in the lifetime of anyone reading this. If one were to show up, we almost certainly would notice it with more of a warning than six months — provided we keep our astronomers well-funded.
That isn’t to say it doesn’t happen. A similar event wiped out the dinosaurs after all. However, the solar system is a mind-bogglingly enormous place, and the Earth inhabits an almost non-existent portion of it. So the frequency of such events is vanishingly small. That’s why you see the astronomers celebrating at Dibiasky’s discovery in the opening scene of the movie; the risk of such an object hitting us isn’t really the forethought to an astronomer who knows the odds of something like that happening. It’s only when a student asks Dr. Mindy whether they can determine the orbit of the comet that they realize the danger they are in.
Of greater concern in the real world are the many thousands of smaller near-Earth objects — NEOs — already within the solar system. Most of these objects are small; not big enough to destroy life on Earth, but large enough to cause regional damage, perhaps wiping out a town or a city. These smaller NEOs are one of the reasons that modern astronomy is so important. When you live in a shooting gallery, you want to make sure you know where all the bullets are. The good news is plans are in place should something get a little too close for comfort, such as the DART (Double Asteroid Redirect Test) mission. The asteroid DART is targeting isn’t currently a threat to us, so no need to panic, but this mission is an important stepping stone for putting plan into practice, a dress rehearsal for Armageddon.
But as much as I’d love to sit here and discuss with you the nuances of orbital mechanics, Don’t Look Up isn’t really about a life-ending comet.
“Are we not being clear? We’re trying to tell you that the entire planet is about to be destroyed!”
If you didn’t get the memo, Don’t Look Up is meant to specifically satirize the political and public response to the threats we face by climate change — though the message could naturally extend to the pandemic response in the US, as well as scientific denialism in general. Of course, if astronomers said that a comet or meteor were headed toward Earth, we would listen, right? In there lies the satire: of course we would listen. But we are performing a facsimile of the Don’t Look Up scenario in our rejection of scientists’ findings regarding the climate and the cause of climate change. You don’t have to be scientifically literate to say, “I don’t actually know anything about this topic, so I defer to the people that do.”
If you believe that climate change is a hoax, let me be perfectly clear: you are wrong. If you think that it’s happening but reject humans as the cause: you are wrong. If you think scientists can’t know these things: you are wrong.
Perhaps you think that this is just your opinion, and I’m all for people having their own opinions on things which you can hold an opinion about. This is not one of those things. There are things about which opinions do not matter. Can one have the opinion that the Earth is flat? That’s not an opinion, that’s just wrong. The climate debate does not happen on social or news media, or even in the political sphere. And it certainly doesn’t happen at the Thanksgiving table. The debate has already happened, and it happened in peer reviewed journals, through research, and the rigor of the scientific method.
Perhaps you think that the debate just isn’t settled yet. Well allow me to put your mind at ease. From Myers, et al. 2021, a study on climate change consensus:
We find that agreement on anthropogenic global warming is high (91% to 100%) and generally increases with expertise. Out of a group of 153 independently confirmed climate experts, 98.7% of those scientists indicated that the Earth is getting warmer mostly because of human activity such as burning fossil fuels. Among those with the highest level of expertise (independently confirmed climate experts who each published 20+ peer reviewed papers on climate change between 2015 and 2019) there was 100% agreement that the Earth is warming mostly because of human activity.
Remember, scientists don’t agree on much of anything. If you’re one to read scientific journals, you know what non-consensus looks like. For example, the age of Saturn’s rings is in dispute amongst the scientific community, with papers pretty evenly split between being nearly as old as the solar system and having formed about 100 million years ago. The scientific debate on climate change, however, is over. Let’s take that 98.7% figure, for example. That is an extremely high percentage of scientists. If 100 plumbers examine your plumbing and 99 tell you that your house is flooding, and one of the plumbers says they aren’t sure, whose opinion do you go with?
Let’s look at it another way. According to one study, 3% of US adults strongly agree that the Earth is flat. That means that flat Earthers are more common among the US general public than climate skeptics are in the scientific community. Just because differing opinions exist does not mean each opinion is equally valid, or likely. This is magnified through media when climate change contrarians and climate scientists — or, more often, science communicators — are pitted up against one another, as if this were an unsettled debate that could go both ways. But, gee, should we listen to Tucker Carlson — a man who won a court case against him by his lawyers successfully arguing that he is playing a character that no reasonable person could believe is being genuine — or the publicly funded organization that sent us to the moon?
Many nay-sayers will turn this around on defenders of the scientific method and claim that we are asking for unquestioning worship of scientists as unable to make mistakes. Don’t fall for this. It’s a straw-man argument — and an incredibly poor one. It’s an attempt — from people who have usually never bothered to read the primary sources of published research — to pretend as if they are simply asking questions.
Skepticism is good! Science runs on skepticism, but a good skeptic will accept overwhelming evidence when it is presented to them. We don’t want people to not be skeptical: we want them to stop making claims — often given to them by talking heads — on subjects they know little about. Asking questions that you don’t actually want an answer to is not a skeptical tactic, but a conspiracy theorist tactic.
Scientists are often wrong, and often adapt to new information. But this is science working as intended. Individuals will be wrong, but science is the filter through which we examine our knowledge and say, “This is the best information we have right now.” The public often takes statements like that to mean that scientists don’t know what they are talking about, but the truth is, scientists understand the limits of their own knowledge. There are limits to all knowledge, but in the common public discourse, we behave as if uncertainty isn’t there. Right now, in history, the scientific method is the best epistemological resource we have to understand our world. If you have a better one, I would genuinely love to see it.
“And if we can’t all agree, at the bare minimum, that a giant comet the size of Mount Everest hurdling its way towards planet Earth is not a fucking good thing, then what the hell happened to us?”
Climate change is unlikely to cause human extinction, but it can set the stage for it. In a worst-case-scenario it will cause widespread famine, the displacement of hundreds of millions if not billions of people, war over resources, and the collapse of our modern world. At best, life gets a lot harder for everyone. The best course of action is to not find out how bad it can get.
It’s not a conspiracy. It’s not a hoax. It’s not “Big Solar” or socialism or whatever trying to destroy America. It is the best knowledge that we have right now. It is happening. We have to act so that our progeny do not look back on us with scorn. We can sacrifice a little now for the future of our world, or we can sacrifice everything later on. The natural resources that our world so dearly depends upon are not renewable. We will run out of coal, oil, and gas no matter what happens. We just want to make the switch away from these addictions before irreversible damage is done.
And as scientists, we need to reject the talking heads and communicate with the fury, frustration, and urgency that we actually feel, and demand that people stop lying about what we do.
