"We're on track to basically civilizational collapse."
In the film "Don't Look Up," scientists are repeatedly ignored as they warn the world of an imminent threat to the planet. That's what happens in real life too, according to this climate scientist ...
In the film "Don't Look Up," scientists are repeatedly ignored as they warn the world of an imminent threat to the planet. That's what happens in real life too, according to this climate scientist ...
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00:00Breathing is stressing me out.
00:04This will affect the entire planet.
00:05I know, but it's like so stressful.
00:08As I was watching the film, I felt like I was seen.
00:12I constantly feel like I need to climb up on my roof
00:15and just start screaming to everyone to wake up.
00:30Fifteen years of that, for me, has been emotionally brutal, I guess.
00:43The feeling of being gaslit, you know, knowing what's coming from the science, not seeing
00:51it in the media, not seeing it in the public discourse, and constantly having to go back
00:59to the scientific papers and the science and the IPCC reports and remind myself that, yes,
01:04this is really happening.
01:05There's a comet headed directly towards Earth.
01:14Do you know how many world is ending meetings we've had over the last two years?
01:20Throughout famine.
01:21All in the ozone is so boring.
01:24The comet in the film was such a great, you know, sort of parallel for the satire, because
01:31you have this astronomical object, which doesn't give a crap, and it's just coming inexorably
01:40to the Earth.
01:41You can't negotiate it.
01:42You can't talk it out of hitting.
01:45And whether you believe it's coming or not, it doesn't care.
01:48It's going to come anyway.
01:49And it's exactly the same with climate and ecological breakdown.
01:55The public, in my opinion, still doesn't fully understand the depth of the climate and ecological
02:04emergency, how irreversible it is, how rapidly it's happening, and how it's going to impact
02:10literally every aspect of how we live in modern life.
02:15I think that we're on track to basically civilizational collapse if we don't change course rapidly.
02:24And the thing that really has me worried is that there's no, I don't see signs that
02:30society is going to change course rapidly.
02:41It's often treated as just another issue.
02:43There's no discussion of just how serious the impacts are going to be.
02:49What would civilizational collapse look like, right?
02:52It's still a taboo to talk about that.
02:55You still see articles about winter heat waves.
02:57They illustrate it with a photo of people playing in the beach, and they don't mention
03:01climate change.
03:02You see show after show and movie after movie that are worlds depicted that look exactly
03:10like modern life, basically, except without climate change and without ecological breakdown.
03:15That reinforces people's sense that maybe it's not that serious.
03:22Unfortunately, they tend to be the ones who get invited on the really big platforms, on
03:33CNN, on MSNBC, in the biggest newspaper platforms, because society is not ready to hear that
03:44we're heading towards full-on civilizational collapse.
03:47On a matter of principle, I can't sugarcoat anything.
03:50I just have to say what I see coming.
03:53And unfortunately, I think that's part of why my voice hasn't been such a loud voice
04:01in the mainstream media.
04:11The fossil fuel industry, to be very clear, is the root cause of what's happening to our
04:16planet right now.
04:17You burn the fossil fuel to fly the planes, drive the cars, make the electricity, et cetera.
04:22And CO2 goes into the atmosphere, traps the outgoing heat.
04:28The planet gets to a higher temperature so that it can re-equilibrate the incoming energy
04:34from the sun with the outgoing energy from the infrared emission of the planet.
04:38A hotter planet means ice melts more.
04:41You get more wildfires.
04:43The precipitation cycle changes.
04:45So you get droughts in some places and flooding in other places.
04:57We need to stop with this farce of, oh, we have to protect fossil fuel jobs.
05:04What about the fossil fuel workers?
05:06We could quickly, probably by executive order, simply have free training, free retraining
05:13for those workers to train them up for, say, renewable energy jobs.
05:35It makes you realize how just repeating something over and over again, like net zero by 2050,
05:41doesn't make it right.
05:42And I think that that is a recipe, absolute recipe for catastrophic, potentially civilization
05:50ending disaster on this planet.
05:532050 is too late.
05:55We need to go faster than that.
05:56I feel like the film Don't Look Up really shines a spotlight on this sort of institutional
06:03denial from the mainstream media.
06:05And if we can break through that, and if we start getting the climate story being told
06:10with the appropriate level of urgency, then maybe we can get this social tipping point
06:16and get this really strong grassroots movement.