Climate change in popular culture

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A satirical cartoon about sea level rise.

References to climate change in popular culture have existed since the late 20th century and increased in the 21st century. Climate change, its impacts, and related human-environment interactions have been featured in nonfiction books and documentaries, but also literature, film, music, television shows and video games.

Science historian Naomi Oreskes noted in 2005 "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 in 2000 contrasted the relatively rapid acceptance of ozone depletion as reflected in popular culture with the much slower acceptance of the scientific consensus on climate change.[2] Cultural responses have been posited as an important part of communicating climate change, but commentators have noted covering the topic has posed challenges due to its abstract nature.[3][4] The prominence of climate change in popular culture increased during the 2010s, influenced by the climate movement, shifts in public opinion and changes in media coverage.[5][6]

Art[edit]

Climate change art is art inspired by climate change and global warming, generally intended to overcome humans' hardwired tendency to value personal experience over data and to disengage from data-based representations by making the data "vivid and accessible". One of the goal of climate change art is to "raise awareness of the crisis",[7] as well as engage viewers politically and environmentally.[8]

Some climate change art involves community involvement with the environment.[7] Other approaches involve revealing socio-political concerns through their various artistic forms,[9] such as painting, video, photography, sound and films. These works are intended to encourage viewers to reflect on their daily actions "in a socially responsible manner to preserve and protect the planet".[9]

Climate change art is created both by scientists and by non-scientist artists. The field overlaps with data art.

Film[edit]

Fictional films[edit]

Climate change has been an occasional topic in fictional cinema.[10] Nicholas Barber opined in BBC Culture that Hollywood films seldom feature climate change mechanisms due to the difficulty of tying the topic to individual characters, and due to fears of alienating audiences; instead, impacts of climate change have been more frequently depicted as a consequence of nuclear or geoengineering accidents.[4]

Documentary films[edit]

Literature[edit]

Non-fiction[edit]

Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature.

This refers to the classification non-fiction, without regard to whether the books are accurate or intended to be accurate.

Fiction[edit]

Climate fiction (sometimes shortened as cli-fi) is literature that deals with climate change.[29] Generally speculative in nature but inspired by climate science, works may take place in the world as we know it, in the near future or in fictional worlds experiencing climate change. The genre frequently includes science fiction and dystopian or utopian themes, imagining the potential futures based on how humanity responds to the impacts of climate change. The genre typically focuses on anthropogenic climate change and other environmental issues as opposed to weather and disaster more generally. Technologies such as climate engineering or climate adaptation practices often feature prominently in works exploring their impacts on society.

The term "cli-fi" is generally credited to freelance news reporter and climate activist Dan Bloom in 2007 or 2008.[29][30] "Climate fiction" has only been attested since the early 2010s, and the term has been retroactively applied to a number of works.[31][32] Pioneering 20th century authors include J. G. Ballard and Octavia E. Butler, while dystopian fiction from Margaret Atwood is often cited as an immediate precursor to the genre's emergence. Since 2010, prominent cli-fi authors include Kim Stanley Robinson, Richard Powers, Paolo Bacigalupi, and Barbara Kingsolver. The publication of Robinson's The Ministry for the Future in 2020 helped cement the genre's emergence; the work generated presidential and United Nations mentions and an invitation for Robinson to meet planners at the Pentagon.[33]

University courses on literature and environmental issues may include climate change fiction in their syllabi.[34] This body of literature has been discussed by a variety of publications, including The New York Times, The Guardian, and Dissent magazine, among other international media outlets.[35] Academics and critics study the potential impact of fiction on the broader field of climate change communication.

Music[edit]

Climate change has been a topic of some popular music, particularly during the 2010s.[5][36][37] The topic has been discussed in various genres, including pop, folk, electronic music and heavy metal.[6] The New York Times found 192 references to climate change in English-language songs that entered the Billboard charts between 1999 and 2019, with around half of those (87 songs) between 2015 and 2019.[5]

American rock band Smash Mouth performing in 2011. The New York Times listed their 1999 song "All Star" #1 on their list of top 10 climate change songs.[5]

Theater[edit]

Still from a 2010 performance of The Climate Monologues.

Television[edit]

Television documentaries[edit]

Fictional television[edit]

Trey Parker and Matt Stone, creators of adult animated comedy series South Park. South Park has parodied climate change on several occasions, particularly focusing on the environmental activism of politician Al Gore.
  • Captain Planet and the Planeteers had numerous episodes which dealt with global-warming including "Two Futures" Part 1 & 2, "Heat Wave", "Domes of Doom", "The Ark", "Summit to Save Earth" Parts 1 & 2, "Greenhouse Planet", "A Perfect World", and "Planeteers Under Glass"
  • "The World Set Free" (Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey), 2014 TV series episode
  • South Park spoofed global warming in seven episodes:
  • Star Trek: The Next Generation had several global-warming themed episodes:
    • Episode "Deja Q" (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.
    • Episode "A Matter of Time" (Season 5 EP 9) - A passing cloud of dust from an asteroid causes global cooling on a planet, the crew of the enterprise use a phaser to release frozen deposits of carbon dioxide on the planet.
    • "The Inner Light" (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.
  • 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 world's 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 1980s Transformers animated series had at least one global-warming themed episode: "The Revenge of Bruticus". There, the Combaticons (a faction of the series' main villains, the Decepticons, created by rebel Decepticon Starscream) use the Space Bridge device to hurl Earth toward the Sun, hoping to destroy the Earth and all enemies. The Autobots are forced to help the humans endure the heat while putting aside their differences with the Decepticons in a race against time to restore Earth to its natural orbit.
  • The TV series Utopia (2013-14) is a violent thriller about a fictional conspiracy that has a number of secret agents embedded in key places in government and industry. The conspiracy, known as "The Network", seeks to frighten the populace into taking a vaccine which will, as a side-effect, cause mass infertility. Their aim in doing so is to reduce the number of humans on the planet, in order to tackle climate change, resource shortages and other environmental issues.
  • The Simpsons:
  • The science fiction TV drama Life Force (2000) depicts much of Earth flooded by runaway global warming in 2025.[59] The vast majority of its ecologically-driven plot aspects spring naturally from this situation, such as climate refugees being brutally used for farming slave labour in episode 4 ("Greenhouse Effect"), civilians turning to look for old parts for electricity generators at scrap heaps or local markets using Euros and bartering as currency instead of pound sterling in episode 7 ("Beware of the Dog"), and manipulative sun-worshipping cults luring people in with rare natural ingredients for protective cream in episode 9 ("Siren Song").[59]

Late-night television[edit]

Comic books[edit]

Video games[edit]

Stand-up comedy[edit]

Other[edit]

See also[edit]

Footnotes[edit]


References[edit]

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