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I saw Alejandro Innauruatu’s new film, Digger. I think it’s one of the better movies I’ve seen in a while. Maybe in this decade. It’s overtly political in multiple ways, enough to talk about it here rather than the Friday Fun Thread.
The movie is about Digger Rockwell, an eccentric third generation oil company executive who cuts a rather Trumpian figure. Digger is a friend of the president, and a close enough one to make him effectively an unofficial member of the cabinet.
When one of Digger’s drilling rigs in Greenland explodes, it send a massive ice shelf (named Judy) heading towards Europe. It’s loosely based on the Thwaites glacier nightmare scenario that keeps climate scientists up at night. Digger, the President, and Digger’s reluctant head of environmental safety must try to avert the crisis. The whole thing has a tone somewhere between Dr. Stranglove and your average Wes Anderson movie. Digger and his pals unfortunately fail to stop the iceberg, and the planet is rendered semi-uninhabitable. Millions perish.
The “twist” is revealed early, about 20 minutes in. We are not watching the “real” Digger, or President Compson. We are watching a satirical stage play based on the real events, called Fossil Fools. The play premiered off-broadway five to ten years after the real events, and the big budget revival we’re seeing is about twenty years after that. Tom Cruise is Curtis Markson, a well respected stage and screen actor portraying Digger Rockwell. Markson is becoming concerned that the truth of the real man’s complicated character and legacy is getting sanded off in favor of cheap sneers.
It’s an interesting movie. On the one hand it is very much about global warming and the climate crisis. And its opinions on climate change are nuanced and deep, and wouldn’t be out place in an effort-post here. But it’s more about how people pass from living breathing people into historical heroes and villains in the pages of history books.
It also gives Cruise the chance to do performance that is simultaneously huge and very subtle. And it’s beautifully shot movie, worth seeing in theaters or IMAX. I would have liked to have worked on this post more, but it’s rapidly falling out of theaters and I’m trying to get the word out.
The climate crisis is not a real crisis and dangerously distracts from serious issues.
I do a search on the Thwaites nightmare scenario and get this:
Wow, 77 centimetres by 2100! I'm shaking in my boots. 77 centimetres of water by 2100 is not a significant issue. That's 'modest expenditure on coastline management', not a civilization ruining disaster. Apparently we might even get 4 metres by 2300!
There's a stupid loop where the media picks out the worst case scenario from some cluster of studies (all of which are expansive predictions far into the future that are basically meaningless: 2100 cannot be predicted full stop) and then aggressively misreads it to imply some huge catastrophe is imminent unless radical action is taken. Then it's fictionalized into a fable, somehow the scriptwriters are allowed to make up nonsense like 2012 or Digger and the gross exaggeration is accepted as artistic metaphor to enhance the standing of a real serious issue. It's epistemic sabotage to derive real political value from a made-up scenario, pure propaganda.
But when the predictions don't hold up, there are never any updates except on a few climate obsessive's blogs where they meticulously list all the predictions that failed...
Compare two articles: https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2022-09-17/thwaites-glacier-antarctica-doomsday-moniker-is-it-valid/101433974 (scary, 'we're probably past the tipping point', implies bad things are going to happen, not quite sure when or how but it's pretty clear what the meaning is)
And then a later article: https://www.science.org/content/article/doomsday-may-be-delayed-antarctica-s-most-vulnerable-glacier (disaster is still coming but sometime later this century unless we cut emissions, suddenly we're not past the tipping point)
Climate change is fundamentally unthreatening to us. It would be menacing for an iron age civilization of subsistence farmers. Such a society is only a few bad harvests away from a major crisis. There were indeed historical incidents of climate change contributing to countries collapsing in the 1640s.
But we are not an iron age civilization. What could possibly happen that we can't adapt or alter or control? If we wanted to stop climate change tomorrow we could, sulphate aerosols can directly control temperature. If we wanted to produce more food we could rationalize consumption by cutting back on wine, tobacco and biofuel, we could scale up agriculture or conduct further mechanization of agriculture, store food better, waste less. If cities flood we could simply move them inland or build dams to protect them. We can counterattack into the ocean and reclaim land. Holland expanded into the North Sea with great success up until the 1960s. Then people decided to pretend man was powerless in the face of nature across the West, reclamation stopped here but continued in Asia. That is a more real danger than climate change, an attitude of incapacity.
How can we adapt agriculture, conduct necessary large scale engineering improvements if we think such activity is impious? What happens to us if we are up against a foe without such self-imposed restrictions?
The only thing that can produce such a disaster is deliberate intelligent effort from people or AI, not climate change. The greedy elites aren't going to be reckless, 'dig too deep and too greedily' and anger nature in their hubris, bringing down destruction from the heavens. The danger the greedy elites pose is just outright shooting or nuking people to death, starting and losing wars or creating thinking adversaries. A devastated city patrolled by soldiers with unbreathable air is what you get after losing a nuclear war, not from icebergs.
If they wanted to make a really subversive and interesting film, they should adapt a Liu Cixin short story 'Fire in the Earth' where a miner wants to revitalize his poor town by burning coal seam gas underground for power. More energetically efficient that way, rather than taking it up. Only the fire spreads by an unpredicted channel and starts a hellish underground fire rendering a whole area uninhabitable. Mass evacuation. The guilty protagonist commits suicide by heading down into the mine... and a couple hundred years later some school kids head into a coal mine on a school trip to see how tough the miners of old had it hauling coal out by hand (before the marvellous progress of underground processing, which was refined and fixed later on).
Yes, climate change poses absolutely no threat to humanity over the next 200 years at least.
I do sometimes wonder what, if anything, we owe to people hundreds or thousands of years in the future. If 100 billion people existed in the past, we might expect a median of 100 billion to exist in the future. Imagine a world 10,000 years in the future. Absent space travel, the world might essentially be a big trash heap. All the easily accessible oil, coal, and metals would be used up. So once technology was lost, there'd be no way to restart it. A few million people would live on the ruins of a vast civilization, like the Dark Age barbarians who turned Roman amphitheaters into quarries.
But that's not how it works, certainly not for metals. The Dark Age barbarians used amphitheaters as Quarries precisely because those were so easily accessible. They lost the technological sophistication to support the kind of a large-scale system to build Amphitheaters, but jump-starting civilization from a trash-heap is imo most likely easier, not harder, than doing so from scratch.
There are resources that genuinely get used up like fossil fuel, yes, but since these are to my knowledge all about energy-generation, I'm quite hopeful that this will take so long that we will have a near-endless list of alternative energy sources, even if those may be less efficient pound-for-pound.
Not 100 percent sure but I think we’ve already got pretty much all the oil that can be retrieved with 1900 level technology. It used to ooze from the ground.
Coal is the best bet for still being available post a new Dark Age.
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Space travel, actually. We're burning up all these easily accessible ressources, at least let it not be to paint ourselves into a corner.
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It's an interesting scenario. I think it'd be easier than one might think to restart civilization though. Hydro power provides 15% of world electricity and you can have a fairly large metallurgical industry from charcoal, as Brazil shows. The metals we dug up are mostly still at the top somewhere.
But best to avoid losing technology or space travel rather than planning for such a failed scenario. I think it's no good to do those labelling projects (as are conducted for nuclear waste) where anthropologists think about how to communicate to people about the dangers of buried nuclear waste without sharing a language. Effort should be spent to avoid such an end state, not to ameliorate a total abysmal failure.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_nuclear_waste_warning_messages
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