Atmospheric scientist reacts to Geostorm

thanks to notion for sponsoring this video get your free personal account at the link in the description hi my name is dr simon clark i am an atmospheric scientist turned youtuber who spent the best part of 10 years studying the earth's atmosphere and climate and then changed to making youtube videos i also happen to be a fan of bad movies and i recently learned that geostorm is available on uk netflix i've never seen it but this is so up my alley i thought i'd give it a watch the first time in this video and basically react to and discuss some of the science or black thereof that we see in it everyone was warned but no one listened we lost entire cities the east river swallowed lower manhattan a heat wave killed two million people in madrid in just one day okay we're not a minute and a half into this movie oh okay so let's dive right into this so the geostorm is about the deployment of geoengineering to counteract the effects of global warming and what they're depicting in this opening scene is a single year in which absolutely every conceivable natural disaster hits and we anticipate that as the climate warms which it has been for the past several decades uh that extreme weather is going to become more common and likely more extreme depending on the kind of weather like for example hurricanes or droughts um we don't know whether that means just more intense or if it means more frequent or both something that is important to stress though is that an apocalypse scenario in a single year is extremely unlikely the uh severity of the impacts that are being depicted here like two million people dying in madrid in a single day making it look like literally seen out of the walking dead why are there so many fires come to think of it that is extremely unlikely to happen climate change happens in slow increments it's going to be the slight shifting of spring and or winter over or ever so slightly more frequent occurrence of hurricanes or heat waves it's not going to be a single year where everything just goes now we're in the apocalypse and to think like that isn't a terribly useful way to think about the problem because it certainly kind of engenders an idea of helplessness i should stress that anthropogenic climate change will have significant effects similar to what's being depicted here but not so uh short and sharp not over the course of a single year you're going to see this many disasters just dialed up to 11. facing our own extinction it became clear that no single nation could solve this problem alone the world came together as one and we fought back i think if this video may just be the intro at this rate okay i'm just gonna let me just let me let's unpick that human race is not going to go extinct as a result of climate change in the course of a single year what may happen is over the course of a century human civilization as we know it may collapse humans are still going to be around we're pretty tough we fought back so this idea of the world fighting back is a really interesting psychological point so take for example the famous picture of earth taken from the apollo program this was the blue marble it's i think the most reproduced picture of all time and when it first came out there was this idea that it was going to engender like a huge wave of environmentalism it's like how fragile we are look at how perilous this blue planet is and yes it did do that but what it also did was basically instilled this idea that humanity was above the planet the humanity was on top of and it kind of led this to this idea of what some people call the god species that humans can uh make and remake the earth and that is us against the earth it is this idea that we are somehow separate from everything that goes on and when you see stuff like we fought back against the planet what we're really doing is fighting ourselves because we are part of this hugely interconnected system and the earth is just responding to what we are doing to it what we are doing to it is the problem so we are fighting ourselves the idea that we are fighting the earth is just quite an is an interesting psychological point i think it's also quite an unhelpful way of looking at it because the earth is not the problem we are the problem scientists from 17 countries led by the us and china work tirelessly in blender apparently so therein lies one of the major issues when it comes to geoengineering saying that it's a coalition of 17 countries it's led by us and china the problem is that with any kind of international collaboration there is only one dial when it comes to um traditional geoengineering obviously this is uh a more sci-fi version traditional geo engineering is what's normally solar radiation management so basically dimming the sun um and there is one dial to that there is the dial of how many aerosols you want to put into the atmosphere how much sunlight do you want to reflect and different countries will have a different idea about where that dial should be set a country like russia for example may well want there to be a bit of warming because it would mean that they have a lot more arable land and suddenly lots of siberia opens up to being inhabited whereas countries like for example um egypt or places in the middle east um may well want the temperature to be a little lower than it actually was before we started interfering with the climate and there's going to be an international tension about where that one dial should be set i don't know if that's why they did it like this in this movie or possibly if it was just because they wanted lots of satellites but the international unity that would be required to make a project like that work we've never seen it i'm not going to say it's impossible but we've never seen it and what happens if one nation decides actually no this isn't going very well we want to change our minds they found a way to neutralize the storms with a net of thousands of satellites each deploying countermeasures designed to impact the basic elements of weather heat pressure and water all over seen by the international space station what why why would it be the international space station it's it's a football pitch in space they do like microgravity experiments not weather manipulation how many extra modules did you add they gave the satellite net a technique what but we all came to call it dutch boy after the story of the child who got the damn with his finger okay apparently they're reigning xanax on the planet what incarnation is that density of satellites that's a castle syndrome waiting to happen kester syndrome is basically what was depicted in the movie gravity where um if you can get one satellite colliding with another and producing uh lots of fragments you can get a chain reaction of all these satellites in orbit taking each other out much like a nuclear chain reaction um where you get more neutrons produced for each fission but though that density of satellites that is all but guaranteed to happen that is completely infeasible what oh wow that's a lot this is what saved us all it was built by a team led by one man oh okay i have no doubt that this movie is not going to go into the details of the science but what they appear to be doing there is blowing up a hurricane they're somehow adding energy to it and causing the colossal energy held within the hurricane to be dispersed i mean yes technically a hurricane is just an area of low pressure with a lot of moisture around it and so i suppose if you were to artificially raise the pressure of the eye of the hurricane then it would stop rotating but you've then just superheated all that water and it's gonna it's not gonna look like that oh boy this is so much this is so much worse than i thought it would be actually i had a low expectation as well i mean the movie's got gerard butler in and it's not 300. the dutch boy guy right yeah man i need to shake your hand oh okay well it'd be nice if weatherman got that kind of credit zap blizzard zap so the implementation of geoengineering in this movie is very much as we kind of already talked about man versus nature and um this idea that we are fighting against the planet that you zap a monsoon or a hurricane or whatever it is now as a matter of fact there is a whole chapter about this kind of mindset uh when it comes to geoengineering in niamey cline where is it in naomi klein's excellent this changes everything um about how basically geoengineering is a classic example of a technological fix to global warming and it is a sticking plaster over the problem without actually addressing its root cause which is fundamentally adding more carbon to the atmosphere what it is and it's really it's like this movie hits the nail on the head so much is this idea of technological supremacy over nature nature being separate from man and man using a technological fix to overcome the way the damage we were doing it means that oh yeah we can carry on our behaviors previously but yeah we've got a we've got a sticking plaster we can actually just don't worry about that aside from all the other issues with this way of thinking about things um this basically doesn't require any change to the root cause of the environmental damage that we're doing it doesn't require us to change our emissions and this mindset is very much promoted by the kind of people who would really like to be able to continue emitting as they are so massive energy companies um consumers with a high carbon footprint lifestyle so basically people in the west the idea of geoengineering is particularly intoxicating these people because it means that we can continue emitting as much carbon as we want without suffering the negative consequences well well actually there would be a lot of negative consequences um a lot of people would probably die as a result of geoengineering whilst the overall effect of solar radiation management would be uh to lower the average temperature of the earth we are pretty confident that in the aftermath of um major volcanic eruptions like mount pinatubo in 1991 that a lot of people died from drought and famine in places like africa and those historical events are the closest precedent for the use of geoengineering so we actually can be pretty confident that if we were to deploy solar radiation management if we were to manipulate the climate with this technological fix we would be saying yeah we're okay with x number of people dying as a direct result of our actions rather than changing the fundamental cause of the problem which was the emission of gases of greenhouse gases what this movie is doing is basically papering over the cracks of uh the flaws in this mindset like the movie's gonna go on to to say you know you shouldn't play god it's a natural system like roland's connected probably but it's not addressing that fundamental problem of uh you know oh yeah we can we can just you know use our fantastic technology we're the god species we're on top of the earth we can bend it to our will not have to change our way of life well it doesn't really work like that failure to follow procedures numerous violations of the chain of command and then oh my god they're doubling down on it oh i i don't think i can watch the rest of this this is so doubling down on this idea of the the uh the individual the maverick individual the genius is going to save everything which is just like a subset of like the very neoliberal way of looking at the environment and okay so here's what i think we can draw from this movie well the intro because i basically can't get past that one that the depiction of geo engineering that it's depicting is definitely not in the scientific mainstream it's not the solar radiation management idea of injecting stuff into the stratosphere to dim the sun basically two they have said that this system has been implemented in response to a sudden sharp change in uh in anthropogenic climate change basically there's this rise in extreme events and that's simply not in any way what we would expect to happen and i think it's a very unhelpful way of looking at this issue that we expect it to basically be doomsday uh that's not what we expect and three the way this movie is framing geoengineering is very very typical of the kind of people who normally do talk about geoengineering which is this idea of humans mastery over the earth and our ability using technology to fix a problem and not actually address the root cause the fact of the matter is that geoengineering is a highly controversial uh technology but there is absolutely the capability today to use geoengineering not as depicted as geostorm because why you'd want to bombard the planet with xanax i don't know but in a way that would on average cool the planet but we can also be very confident that it would have massive side effects and it would particularly hit a lot of communities that exist in the global south that exist in the developing world that wouldn't realistically have a seat at the negotiating table that gets to decide you know how we do this massive climate experiment we could be pretty sure that if we were to implement it people a lot of people would have their lives irreversibly changed or just taken away from them so i suppose that's something this movie gets right is that you know it's this technology is dangerous but not not quite as they are depicting it can we do it yes technically absolutely can the money is available you know it probably wouldn't be the united nations that would actually do it it would probably just be a wealthy individual like bezos if you just got bored from fighting ant-man but morally should we do this and also just in terms of you know practically the other climate knock-on effects and changes in precipitation and plant growth and all these kind of things absolutely we shouldn't be doing it oh there's so much we could talk about during engineering maybe i don't know if people like this maybe i should do a follow-up video this was basically just an experiment i wanted to see how this this style of doing a video would work and also because i was kind of morbidly curious about geostorm like i say if you're interested in the broader discussion of geo engineering i cannot recommend this book enough i'm actually i think it's the next video that's going to come out this channel is going to be a review of this and the other essential reads that you should have on your shelf about climate change but if you'd like to see a kind of a summary of a couple of the details of the science and some stuff that i didn't have time to fit in this video then i've written that up as a notion page which will be linked down there in the description in this i talk about the different techniques of geoengineering such as solar radiation management some of the risks and advantages of each one and i hopefully make a case uh that is compelling about why i don't think we should do it for a lot of reasons i've talked about notion in previous videos about how i use it as my management software basically my life os for my youtube channel for my to-do lists on a weekly basis for keeping track of my goals and also things like my address book and all that kind of stuff it's basically incredibly modular software it's almost like a set of lego bricks you can build however you want and you'll see in the notion page links in the description that there's so many different ways you can put information in there i've tried to showcase a few different kinds and it looks gorgeous it's an incredibly easy way to put together information and make it look good and make it all interconnect with one another it's kind of like building your own internet almost like when i my life os i can't imagine living without it to be honest it's been such a game changer now it used to be the case that was five dollars a month to get a personal notion account but it's now completely free so there is literally nothing to lose by giving it a go i cannot recommend it highly enough uh if you'd like to get yourself a personal account there's a link down there in the description and on the screen here oh that was good and um yeah i can't recommend it highly enough it's totally changed my productivity and so many aspects of my life so check out the page that i wrote about geoengineering techniques and also get yourself a free notion account both links are down there thank you for watching the video i realized this was like an unusual one but i i was morbidly curious about how bad geostorm was and also just to sort of give this a go um i'm a big fan of movies uh and i would like to do more kind of videos like this if you found it enjoyable if you found it entertaining um and hopefully informative so let me know what you thought let me know if you liked it or didn't like it in the comments and uh what you'd like me to look at next maybe in this kind of format if you enjoyed it do pop it a like and you can even share it if you want that'd be nice thank you very much for watching as i say the next video is going to be about reading recommendations for climate so look forward to that and i'll see you there [Music]

Channel: Simon Clark

Views: 84,683

Keywords: science, movie science, geostorm, greenland, climate change, geoengineering, global warming, solar radiation management, srm, carbon capture

Id: 8-xlw8anneA

Length: 16min 42sec (1002 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 10 2020