Climate change in popular culture
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The issue of climate change, its possible effects, and related human-environment interaction have entered popular culture since the late 20th century.
Science historian Naomi Oreskes has noted that "there's a huge disconnect between what professional scientists have studied and learned in the last 30 years, and what is out there in the popular culture".[1] An academic study contrasts the relatively rapid acceptance of ozone depletion as reflected in popular culture with the much slower acceptance of the scientific consensus on global warming.[2]
Some examples of global warming references in popular culture include:
- The Archie Comics Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Adventures are set in their present (1980s/1990s), but also include time travels to a future, in which New York City is flooded because of global warming and the greenhouse effect.
- In the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode The Inner Light from 1992 Jean-Luc_Picard lives a lifetime on a planet experiencing Global Warming and aridification. Ultimately the climate change becomes serious enough to threaten all life on the planet. This Hugo Award winner is among the 5 most popular out of all 178 episodes in the TNG series.
- In the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode Déjà Q from 1990 the crew suggests an artificial amplification of global warming using greenhouse gases to counter the cooling effects of dust from the impact of a moon on a planet.
- The 1987 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon has four episodes dealing with global warming. In Shredder's Mom, Shredder and Krang use a mirror fixed to a satellite to warm up the Earth if the political leaders do not surrender to them. The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles get help from General Yogure to stop them. In Northern Lights Out a man named Eric Red in Norway plans to melt the polar ice cap and flood all the coastal cities on the Earth by blowing up underground volcanoes, which will make it "easy" for Eric Red and his gang to take over the Earth. In A Real Snow Job, set in the Alps in Austria, Krang and Shredder use a Zoetropic wave device to melt the worlds' ice, flooding the coastal cities and making the Earth easy for Krang and Shredder to take over. In Too Hot to Handle, Vernon Fenwick's nephew Foster has an invention that brings the Earth closer to the Sun, a "Solar Magnet".
- The Prometheus Award-winning novel Fallen Angels depicts a world where a radical technophobic green movement dramatically cuts greenhouse gas emissions, only to find that manmade global warming was staving off a new ice age.
- The movie Waterworld from 1995, starring Kevin Costner, is set in a future world, where the polar ice caps have melted due to global warming and the Earth is almost entirely covered with water.
- The movie The Arrival from 1996, starring Charlie Sheen, is about the attempt by extraterrestrial aliens to secretly cause global warming and thereby terraform Earth into an environment more suited to their needs.
- Catastrophic climate change due to abrupt shutdown of thermohaline circulation was the subject of the 2004 blockbuster, The Day After Tomorrow. Experts say that the scenario described is impossible.[1]
- Global warming was spoofed in five South Park episodes: Two Days Before the Day After Tomorrow, Spontaneous Combustion, Goobacks, Smug Alert! and Manbearpig.
- A documentary film, An Inconvenient Truth, starring former United States Vice President Al Gore was released in 2006; the film was the third highest grossing documentary film in the United States to date.[2]
- A documentary series Cosmos:_A_Personal_Voyage (1990 update) by the late Carl Sagan has an impassioned final speech calling for a fast and substantive response to the dangers of the increasing greenhouse effect, many years before widespread media attention, and cited the atmosphere of Venus as an example. Cosmos (1980) has been broadcast in more than 60 countries and seen by over 600 million people.
- A book by Michael Crichton, State of Fear, was released criticizing the Global warming consensus and accusing its proponents of using fear tactics.
- The Science in the Capitol series of novels by Kim Stanley Robinson (Forty Signs of Rain, 2004; Fifty Degrees Below, 2005; Sixty Days and Counting, 2007) describes the impact of global warming on Americans and Buddhist monks from the Ganges delta
- The Danish film Help! I'm a Fish displays a brief moment where a professor explains the changes in the Earth's atmosphere and the north and south polar ice caps melting. Another young boy explains the height of the sea level.
[edit] Related Videos
- From Science to Time to Vanity Fair: Global Warming Becomes a Hot Topic. Lecture given by Amy Gajda, Assistant Professor of Journalism and Law, University of Illinois. February 8, 2007. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
[edit] References
- ^ Sandi Doughton, "The truth about global warming," The Seattle Times (October 11, 2005).
- ^ Sheldon Ungar, "Knowledge, ignorance and the popular culture: Climate change versus the ozone hole," Science 9.3 (2000) 297-312.
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