Trees and power lines in Puerto Rico, damaged by Hurricane Maria in September. REUTERS/Alvin Baez
Overall 2017 will be the warmest non-El Niño year on record globally, and over the past 12 months we have seen plenty of extreme weather, both here in Australia and across the world.
Here I’ll round up some of this year’s wild weather, and look forward to 2018 to see what’s around the corner.
Drought and flooding rains… again
It feels as if Australia has had all manner of extreme weather events in 2017.
We had severe heat at both the start and end of the year. Casting our minds back to last summer, both Sydney and Brisbane
experienced their hottest summers on record, while parts of inland New
South Wales and Queensland endured extended periods of very high
temperatures.
Sydney sweltered last summer.Joel Carrett/AAP
More recently Australia had an unusually dry June and its warmest winter daytime temperatures on record. The record winter warmth was made substantially more likely by human-caused climate change.
The end of the year brought more than its fair share of extreme weather, especially in the southeast. Tasmania had by far its warmest November on record, beating the previous statewide record by more than half a degree. Melbourne had a topsy-turvy November with temperatures not hitting the 20℃ mark until the 9th, but a record 12 days above 30℃ after that.
November was rounded off by warnings for very severe weather
that was forecast to strike Victoria. Melbourne missed the worst of the
rains, although it still had a very wet weekend on December 2-3.
Meanwhile, northern parts of the state were deluged, with many places recording two or three times the December average rainfall in just a couple of days.
Euroa in northern Victoria copped a drenching.AAP Image/Brendan McCarthy
Hurricane after hurricane after hurricane…
Elsewhere in the world there was plenty more headline-worthy weather.
The Atlantic Ocean had a particularly active hurricane season, with several intense systems. Hurricane Harvey struck Texas and its slow trajectory resulted in record-breaking rainfall over Houston and neighbouring areas.
Then Hurricanes Irma and Maria,
both of which reached the strongest Category 5 status, brought severe
weather to the Caribbean and southeastern United States just a couple of
weeks apart. Island nations and territories in the region are still recovering from the devastation.
Road to ruin: Houston’s Interstate Highway 45 was submerged by Hurricane Harvey.REUTERS/Richard Carson
Around the same time, the Indian subcontinent experienced a particularly wet monsoon season. Flooding in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Nepal killed more than 1,000 people and affected tens of millions more.
Other parts of the world experienced their own severe weather events. Whether it was summer heat in Europe or wildfires in California, 2017 dished up plenty of extremes.
In many cases, especially for heat extremes, we can rapidly identify a human influence and show that climate change is increasing the frequency and intensity of such events.
For other weather types, like the very active hurricane season and other extreme rain or drought events, it is harder (but not always impossible) to work out whether it bears the fingerprint of climate change.
What’s in store for 2018?
The main problem when trying to offer an outlook is that extreme
weather is hard to predict, even on the scale of days or weeks in
advance, let alone months.
For Australia, with a weak La Niña in the Pacific, there are few clear indications of what the rest of the summer’s weather will bring.
There is a suggestion that we can expect a slightly wetter than average
start to the year in parts of the southeast, along with warmer than
average conditions for Victoria and Tasmania. Beyond that it is anyone’s
guess.
The La Niña is also likely to mean that 2018 won’t be a record hot
year for the globe. But it’s a safe bet that despite the La Niña, 2018
will still end up among the warmest years on record, alongside every other year this century.
Rising global average temperatures, along with our understanding of the
effect of greenhouse gas emissions, are one of our clearest lines of
evidence for human-caused climate change.
So it’s hard to say much about what extreme weather we’ll experience
in 2018, other than to say that there’s likely to be plenty more weather
news to wrap up in a year’s time.
NEW YORK / TEPIC, MEXICO:A clutch of high-profile legal cases over responsibility for the effects
of climate change will be fought out in courtrooms next year as claims
stack up against both governments and some of the world’s biggest oil
and energy companies.
Lawsuits in the United States brought by young activists and several
Californian cities are most likely to make waves, but legal action by a
Peruvian farmer in Germany and Greenpeace in Norway could also cause
ripples, said lawyers and academics.
“There is a trend towards more litigation around climate change, and
probably the lack of political action in the United States may increase
that trend,” said Sophie Marjanac, a London-based lawyer at non-profit
environmental law group ClientEarth. “Where there’s an abdication of
leadership on climate action, I think the courts will have a greater
role to play," she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
Lawyers and campaigners are closely watching the looming legal battles
they say could set the stage for fresh claims against major oil and
industrial companies and pressure governments to ramp up action on
climate change.
JULIANA V UNITED STATES
With US President Donald Trump and his cabinet members named as
defendants, the Juliana v United States case brought by 21 young
activists from Oregon is set to be one of the most closely followed in
2018.
In the federal case, scheduled for trial in February, the plaintiffs
hope to establish that the government’s climate change policies have
failed to protect their constitutional right to live in a habitable
environment. The case remains locked in legal limbo, however, as the
government tries to block it from proceeding.
Lawyers and academics say Juliana builds on the groundbreaking Urgenda
case brought by hundreds of Dutch citizens in 2015, which saw the
government ordered by a district court to accelerate reductions of
greenhouse gas emissions. However, that outcome is now being appealed,
with a decision likely early next year.
Elsewhere, a January judgment is expected in a case brought by
Greenpeace Nordic and environmental group Nature and Youth against
Norway, which they claim has breached its pledge to combat climate
change by granting oil and gas exploration rights.
HISTORY REPEATING?
Some lawyers and researchers say claims seeking specific damages from
energy and industrial companies for actions that may have contributed to
climate change could have a bigger impact than constitutional cases.
A successful ruling against a heavyweight corporate could potentially
unleash a wave of similar claims, say case watchers, who reference
long-running fights against tobacco, asbestos and pesticide
manufacturers over harm to human health.
At least seven Californian cities and counties have brought lawsuits
against major fossil fuel companies. San Francisco and Oakland are
seeking billions of dollars to help protect against rising sea levels
they blame on climate change. “Why should taxpayers and impacted
communities alone bear the growing costs of climate impacts when fossil
fuel companies have played an outsized role in making the problem
worse?” said Peter Frumhoff, director of science and policy at the Union
of Concerned Scientists, after Santa Cruz city and county both filed
lawsuits this month.
Tracy Hester, a lecturer at the University of Houston Law Center, said
such claims could “redefine the rules of the game”. “They’re essentially
not trying to bring a global claim that’s going to lock up all these
issues in one court... they’re different in that they’re seeking
damages,” he said.
Trump’s move to pull out of the Paris climate change accord and roll
back environmental regulations means campaigners are increasingly
resorting to litigation, as they did under former President George W.
Bush, said case watchers.
MITIGATION NOT LITIGATION
While climate-related suits are not new, scientific advances could
bolster plaintiffs as they try to pin responsibility for climate change
on particular polluters.
A German court has agreed to hear evidence in a case brought by Peruvian
farmer SaŴl Luciano Lliuya against RWE AG, asking the power giant to
pay to reinforce a lake above his village dangerously swollen by glacial
melt he says is caused by global warming the company contributed to.
Yet, while there has been a steady rise in cases seeking to hold
corporations and governments to account, few make it to court and legal
action is largely limited to richer countries.
Despite a few exceptions—including a farmer who successfully sued
Pakistan’s government in 2015—mitigating rather than litigating against
climate change is favoured in poorer countries where legal success is
less likely, according to Cosmin Corendea, a legal expert at the United
Nations University in Bonn.
But the knock-on effect of rulings on companies and governments could
eventually be felt around the world, including in countries already
struggling with climate change impacts. “The decision of the court
echoes,” said Corendea. “It’s important in climate change litigation to
have this kind of momentum.”
Following a year of weather extremes, disasters and policy clashes,
we asked our readers to help us pick out the most important climate
stories from the U.S. in 2017. Here's what you said.
HURRICANES This was a brutal year for hurricanes in the U.S. A trifecta of storms (Harvey, Irma and Maria)
battered Florida, the Gulf Coast and Puerto Rico, causing deaths and
widespread destruction, driving many from their homes. Climate change is
fueling hurricanes
by increasing their rainfall, wind speeds, and storm surges. Our World
Weather Attribution team was among the groups of scientists that found
climate change increased the amount of flooding rainfall from Harvey.
SEA-LEVEL RISE SCIENCE Sea-level rise projections got worse for U.S. coastal communities. New research factoring in the projected effects of warming on Antarctic ice
outlined new scenarios for Gulf Coast and East Coast cities, where more
than 10 feet of sea-level rise is possible in places this century.
Sea-level rise could be kept to less than two feet if we aggressively
curb our greenhouse gas emissions, reducing risks and impacts.
THIRD HOTTEST YEAR ON RECORD 2017 is likely to be the third-hottest year on record for the U.S.,
behind 2016 and 2012. This record heat is particularly astounding
considering the absence of an El Niño, which usually boosts global
temperatures. If the final data matches expectations, five of the 10
hottest years on record will have come since 2006.
SOCIAL INJUSTICE OF CLIMATE CHANGE The homes of Americans were destroyed or threatened by extreme weather and rising seas, with the poor hit the hardest. Hundreds of thousands of people had to flee Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria devastated the island, relocating to Florida and other areas. Thousands more in New Jersey and Louisiana
are hoping for federal help as they grapple with the ongoing effects of
flooding linked to rising seas and climate change-fueled storms.
SOLAR ENERGY SHINES Production of clean energy climbed as prices continued to come down. In March, 10 percent of all electricity
generated in the U.S. came from wind and solar, with help from Texas
(America’s number 1 wind provider) and California (the largest solar
producer). Bloomberg New Energy Finance concluded in the summer that solar energy can now be as cheap as power from new coal plants in the U.S.
TRANSPORTATION POLLUTION Your car is contributing to the biggest source of U.S. emissions. Transportation recently overtook electricity generation
as the biggest source of greenhouse gases from the U.S., as coal power
plants were retired and replaced with renewables and natural gas
facilities.
By the end of the century, climate change may drive 660,000 additional asylum seekers per year toward Europe. Growing mass migration is only one of the social and environmental consequences of increasing temperatures.
Creative Commons
Climate Threat Multiplier
Climate change doesn’t just warm the air and melt glaciers. It acts
as a “threat multiplier,” playing on the vulnerabilities of ecosystems
and communities in ways that we are yet to fully understand.
Migration is a case in point: the way it’s changing, and is projected
to change in the future, highlights how the impacts of climate change
on one place spill over to other parts of the world. A new study in Science finds that as crops fail in agricultural regions of the world, more people will seek asylum
in Europe in the coming decades. If the current warming trends were to
continue, the research predicts that by 2100 Europe will receive around
660,000 extra applicants each year.
The authors analyzed the relation between localized changes in
weather and the number of asylum applications by that country’s migrants
between 2000 and 2014, discovering that when temperatures in the source
country changed from a moderate average of 20° C (68° F), applications
increased.
They modeled future migration patterns by comparing present trends
against the global warming scenarios set out by the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). They found that under a pathway where
the concentration of greenhouse gases does not significantly decrease, and global temperatures increase by 4.8° C (8.6° F), asylum applications are likely to rise by 188 percent by the end of the century.
Speaking with the BBC,
lead author Wolfram Schlenker, of Columbia University, acknowledged the
uncertainty that comes with such models: “We basically have to assume
that the relationship we uncovered between 2000 and 2014 is going to
remain unchanged for the next 80 years,” he said.
He explained that “there are many reasons for why it could go either
way. We could start adapting to warmer temperatures, so the impacts
would be less, but if you shock people every year with the same thing,
it could be much worse. We could be under or overestimating the
effects.”
Breaking Point
While our resilience as a species means we can adapt to a great deal
of change — by upgrading our infrastructure or breeding heat-resistant
crops, among other actions — we too eventually reach a breaking
point. New research in Environmental Research Letters finds that by 2100, rising temperatures combined with increased humidity will make some areas of the world uninhabitable for humans.
Humans cool their bodies by sweating. As sweat evaporates off the
skin, it disperses the excess heat; but in an air thick with moisture,
this process is slowed down or halted altogether. Under these
conditions, organs start to fail, eventually leading to death. Previous
papers have identified this upper limit as a sustained temperature of 35° C (95° F).
The new study maps the areas of the planet most at risk to experience
not only greater heat but also higher density of vapor in the air.
Among the regions likely to be affected are the Amazon, western and
central Africa, northern India, eastern China and the southeastern part
of the United States.
“It’s not just about the heat, or the number of people. It’s about
how many people are poor, how many are old, who has to go outside to
work, who has air conditioning,” said study coauthor Alex de Sherbinin,
of Columbia’s Center for International Earth Science Information
Network, in a statement.
He said that even if the weather does not lead to a sudden collapse of
the affected human systems, working in farms or in non air conditioned
environments may lead to chronic health problems
such as kidney disease — another case of climate change as a threat
multiplier. It is likely that over time, many will eventually seek a new
home elsewhere.
Although the science is not conclusive, there is evidence that climate change-induced drought might have exacerbated the
social unrest that led to some of the most brutal conflicts of this
century, including the Syrian war. The science of extreme weather
attribution is developing fast, but there is still a long way to go
before we can identify with certainty the role played by climate change
in any extreme event.
What scientists now know is that what happens in one particular part
of the planet will most likely trigger a cascade of consequences that
will be felt far away. These are not only environmental consequences,
but also social, and will increasingly involve the movement of large
numbers of people. As mass migration is already causing tensions all over the world, leaders will have to find new strategies to manage the growing nomad communities of the future.
Less than a month after Tesla unveiled a new backup power system
in South Australia, the world's largest lithium-ion battery is already
being put to the test. And it appears to be far exceeding expectations:
In the past three weeks alone, the Hornsdale Power Reserve
has smoothed out at least two major energy outages, responding even
more quickly than the coal-fired backups that were supposed to provide
emergency power.
Tesla's battery last week kicked in just 0.14
seconds after one of Australia's biggest plants, the Loy Yang facility
in the neighboring state of Victoria, suffered a sudden, unexplained
drop in output, according to the International Business Times.
And the week before that, another failure at Loy Yang prompted the
Hornsdale battery to respond in as little as four seconds — or less,
according to some estimates — beating other plants to the punch. State officials have called the response time “a record,” according to local media.
The effectiveness of Tesla's battery is being closely watched in a region that is in the grips of an energy crisis. The price of electricity is soaring in Australia, particularly in the state of South Australia, where a 2016 outage led
1.7 million residents to lose power in a blackout. Storms and heat
waves have caused additional outages, and many Australians are bracing
for more with the onset of summer in the Southern Hemisphere.
The Hornsdale battery system, which uses the same energy-storage tech
found in Tesla's electric cars, is one of chief executive Elon Musk's
newest projects. In March, Musk, who is known for setting high goals and
only sometimes meeting them, vowed on Twitter
to deliver a battery system for South Australia's struggling grid
within 100 days or it would be free. By early July, the state had signed
a deal with Tesla and the French-based energy company Neoen to produce
the battery. And by Dec. 1, South Australia announced that it had switched on the Hornsdale battery.
Fed
by wind turbines at the nearby Hornsdale wind farm, the battery stores
excess energy that is produced when the demand for electricity isn't
peaking. It can power up to 30,000 homes, though only for short periods — meaning that the battery must still be supported by traditional power plants in the event of a long outage.
A spokesman for Tesla didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.
Nonetheless,
the Hornsdale reserve has already shown that it can provide what's
known as “contingency” service — keeping the grid stable in a crisis and
easing what would otherwise be a significant power failure. And, more
important, the project is the biggest proof-of-concept yet that
batteries such as Tesla's can help mitigate one of renewable energy's
most persistent problems: how to use it when the sun isn't shining or
the wind isn't blowing.
"When you think about energy storage, it's not a [power] generation
resource," said Stephen Coughlin, the vice president of energy storage
platforms at the Arlington-based AES Corporation, which is behind
several battery projects in California, the Netherlands and several
other countries. "What it's really doing is providing a much-needed
injection of reliability and resiliency into the network overall."
Where
it can take as much as 10 minutes to spin up a traditional turbine in a
pinch, added Coughlin, it's not uncommon to see systems such as Tesla's
intervene in fractions of a second.
This isn't Musk's only experiment with large-scale batteries. Last year, Tesla said it had equipped a small island in American Samoa
with thousands of solar panels and batteries that could serve the
area's 600 inhabitants, shifting them almost entirely off fossil fuels.
In October, Musk responded to the hurricane crisis in Puerto Rico by
offering to discuss building a solar grid for the island. Parts of Puerto Rico are still without power, months after Hurricane Maria ripped down power lines and other energy infrastructure.
An electric grid consisting of distributed solar panels, paired with a
large battery, could prove transformative for some island economies,
analysts say. Under normal circumstances, the price of imported fossil
fuels can become a drain on local businesses. But the abundant sunshine
at tropical latitudes makes solar energy extremely cost-efficient.
"[Big
batteries] definitely can be a game changer for island or island-type
economies," said Ravi Manghani, director of energy storage at GTM
Research, a market analysis firm. "Hawaii, for instance, has one of the
highest retail rates in the U.S. [for electricity], and
that's because of the cost of shipping diesel or other fuel oils which
currently are used by a lot of the existing facilities."
What's
more, he added, spreading solar panels out across an island reduces the
likelihood of the entire grid going down because of storms.
Other battery projects, including in the United States, have already helped manage spikes in demand. For example, a major 2015 gas leak
near Los Angeles that kept some gas-fired plants from producing energy
at peak times prompted Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas and
Electric to announce energy storage projects that were completed earlier
this year, according to Sam Wilkinson, an industry analyst at IHS.
In an April report, Wilkinson highlighted the rapid rise of China and Australia as energy storage leaders.
"For
the first time Asia accounts for more than one third of the global
pipeline" for energy storage, the report read. "This underscores the
importance that China, Australia, South Korea and India are all
predicted to have in the global market."
New research suggests human-caused emissions will lead to bigger impacts on heat and extreme weather, and sooner than the IPCC warned just three years ago.
Scientists warned in 2017 that not enough has been done to
protect millions of people from an expected increase in dangerous heat
waves. Credit: Chris Hondros/Getty Images
In the past year, the scientific consensus shifted toward a grimmer and less uncertain picture of the risks posed by climate change.
When the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued its 5th Climate Assessment in 2014, it formally declared that observed warming was "extremely likely" to be mostly caused by human activity.
This year, a major scientific update from the United States Global Change Research Program put it more bluntly: "There is no convincing alternative explanation."
Other scientific authorities have issued similar assessments:
The Royal Society
published a compendium of how the science has advanced, warning that it
seems likelier that we've been underestimating the risks of warming
than overestimating them.
The American Meteorological Society
issued its annual study of extreme weather events and said that many of
those it studied this year would not have been possible without the
influence of human-caused greenhouse gas emissions.
While 2017 may not have hit a global temperature record, it is
running in second or third place, and on the heels of records set in
2015 and 2016. Talk of some kind of "hiatus" seems as old as disco music.
'A Deadly Tragedy in the Making'
Some of the strongest warnings in the Royal Society update came from
health researchers, who said there hasn't been nearly enough done to
protect millions of vulnerable people worldwide from the expected
increase in heat waves.
"It's a deadly tragedy in the making, all the worse because the same
experts are saying such heat waves are eminently survivable with
adequate resources to protect people," said climate researcher Eric
Wolff, lead author of the Royal Society update.
Atmospheric scientist Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for
Atmospheric Research said climate science has progressed in all
directions since the IPCC report was published in 2014. He works with a
group of scientists trying to update the IPCC reporting process to make
it more fluid and meaningful in real time.
"The need to build resilience is clear and missing in
action," Trenberth said. "The result is we suffer the consequences at
costs of hundreds of billions of dollars."
One of the starkest conclusions of the Royal Society update is that
up to 350 million people in places like Karachi, Kolkota, Lagos and
Shanghai are likely to face deadly heat waves
every year by 2050—even if nations are able to rein in greenhouse gas
emissions enough to keep the average global temperature increase to 1.5
degrees Celsius, as per the Paris climate agreement.
There's also an increasing chance global warming will affect a key
North Atlantic current that carries ocean heat from the tropics toward
western Europe, according to a 2016 study.
It shows the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Current weakening by 37
percent by 2100, which could have big effects on European climate and
food production.
Melting Ice and Risks to Oceans and Ecosystems
The Royal Society report also notes:
An increasing risk that ocean acidification will rapidly and significantly alter many ecosystems and food webs;
A concern that crops grown in high-CO2 conditions could be less nutritious, leading to mineral deficiencies;
That the commonly accepted wet-areas-wetter and dry-areas-drier
scenario has regional nuances with important implications for local
water management and food production planning; and,
That scientists are finding more links between melting Arctic sea
ice and weather extremes like heat waves, droughts and blizzards.
The U.S. Global Change Research Program, an interagency group
whose work went through exhaustive peer review and emerged from the
Trump administration's political review mostly unscathed, also cited several emerging conclusions that are much clearer today than five years ago.
Among them are changes in ocean ecosystems that go far beyond rising
sea levels. Ocean acidification is increasing, as is oxygen loss, and
scientists are more acutely aware than before of the severity of their
impacts. In some U.S. coastal waters, these trends are "raising the risk
of serious ecological and economic consequences," the report noted.
The most ominous of its chapters
addressed the risks of surprises like "tipping points" or "compound
extremes"—sucker punches, combination punches, and even knockout
punches. "The more the climate changes, the greater the potential for
these," it said.
"Uncertainty is not our friend here," said Penn State climate
scientist Michael Mann. "We are seeing increases in extreme weather
events that go well beyond what has been predicted or projected in the
past. We're learning that there are factors we were not previously aware
of that may be magnifying the impacts of human-caused climate change."
Among those are "subtle mechanisms involving the behavior of the jet
stream that may be involved in explaining the dramatic increase we've
seen in floods, droughts, heat waves and wildfires," he said.
"Increasingly, the science suggests that many of the impacts are
occurring earlier and with greater amplitude than was predicted," Mann
said, after considering new research since the milestone of the IPCC's
Fifth Assessment, which served as the scientific basis for the Paris
Agreement.
"We have literally, in the space of a year, doubled our assessment of
the potential sea level rise we could see by the end of this century.
That is simply remarkable. And it is sobering," he said.
In general, there should be more monitoring of global warming
impacts, but all those programs are threatened under the current
administration, Mann said. "Continued funding to support research is
critical," he said, "and here, again, we encounter a very unfavorable
political environment where fossil fuel-beholden politicians that run
the White House and Congress are doing everything they can to defund and
suppress research on climate change science and impact assessments."
I don’t know about you, but I spent a good portion of this year
escaping. When your day job involves running fact-checks on the bizarre
and short-sighted decisions that will determine the future for you and
everyone you know, well, it helps to take a time-out every once in a
while.
And there was some high-quality escapism on offer this year, from
superhero blockbusters to dystopian page turners. But even in the
fluffiest, most candy-coated realms of pop culture, our anxieties about
the world have a way of creeping in. We’ve been steeping in this stuff
and it shows, from the increasingly beleaguered comedians of late-night who have to keep coming up with new jokes about Paris climate talks to robo-future shoot-em-up Blade Runner 2049’s thinly veiled warnings about devastating environmental change.
So here are some of the most notable pieces of entertainment that brought the Grist staff down to earth this year:
The Leftovers
The best thing on TV in 2017, and maybe ever, was the last season of The Leftovers.
The premise is that 2 percent of the population spontaneously
evaporated from the earth one day, and those remaining — the leftovers,
you see — have to deal with the disappearance of their loved ones. One
story line follows the Guilty Remnant, a cult dedicated to remembering
the event with tactics that range from annoying to emotionally
terrorizing to literally terrorizing. The overwhelming public response
to the Remnant is: “Leave us alone, so we can stop thinking about what
we’ve lost.”
I don’t believe it’s meant to be an analogy for the climate
conversation, but I saw so many similarities. Part of the resistance to
acting on climate change comes from an unwillingness to acknowledge what
is already lost — certain sea-level rise, locked-in temperature
increases, and irreversible change to our environments. It requires a
kind of reckoning, a mourning, that most people would rather not
undergo. If you watch the show as a portrayal of that kind of internal
struggle, it’s really jarring. Eve Andrews, Associate Editor Geostorm
I love disaster movies. The Day After Tomorrow, 2012, Deep Impact
— give me a ridiculous global threat for our main characters to race
against, and I’ll watch every rerun on SyFy. This year’s disaster flick
is Geostorm. Given its
13 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes, let’s just say this
climapocalyptic blockbuster won’t be taking home any statues this award
season.
The plot hinges on a government-run satellite system that controls
all weather on Earth. Things go wrong, the satellites malfunction, and
extreme weather starts leveling cities. It’s an overblown portrayal of
the threat posed to life on earth by geoengineering and climate change.
Is this movie at all scientifically accurate? Nope! But if you, like
me, enjoy watching people get frozen by ice storms, thrown around in
tornadoes, and wiped out by skyscraper-leveling tsunamis, it’s worth a
watch. Preferably in 4DX. Cody Permenter, Social Media Manager
Science Vs
“Alternative facts” was the final straw: America has kind of lost its grip on reality. Gimlet Media’s podcast Science Vs cuts through the crap: Do vitamin supplements do anything? Is 100 percent clean energy possible? Do women’s menstrual cycles actually sync up?
The podcast’s fearless host — Australian science journalist Wendy
Zukerman — combs through the latest science, chats with experts, and
cracks jokes that would make your dad proud. You might not always like
all the answers (listen to the organic episode, dear Grist reader). But
that’s sort of the point. It’s the antidote — not the anecdote! — that
America needs right now. Kate Yoder, News Editor Bill Nye: Science Guy
If you grew up watching Bill Nye give zany televised lessons on the
fundamentals of science, you’ll probably enjoy this introduction to the
man behind the bow tie. Directors David Alvarado and Jason Sussberg
originally set out in 2014 to make a fun documentary about Nye’s legacy
of communicating science by being irresistibly goofy. But then 2017
happened. “With the Trump administration, it became so much more
serious,” Alvarado says.
The resulting film follows
Nye on his quest to protect science education from creationists and
climate change deniers, venturing into creation museums and theme parks
to debate evolution. It’s not a purely flattering tribute, though it
also delves into questions about Nye’s pedigree as a scientist (he has
B.S. in mechanical engineering) and about how much he loves the
limelight. Justine Calma, Justice Fellow
Okja
This movie
is deranged, in the best possible way. If you know anything about
director Bong Joon Ho, that won’t surprise you at all — his last feature
to hit American theaters was 2014’s Snowpiercer, a parable of class warfare and global warming set on a perpetual motion machine of a train. Talk about a plot device! Okja takes on globalization and animal agriculture
with the same off-kilter enthusiasm, pitting terrifying, twinned Tilda
Swinton against a South Korean farm girl and a friendly giant of a
genetically engineered pig. The filming famously turned the director
vegan (at least for a few months) and having watched it, I can see why!
But its charms outweigh the ick factor, largely thanks to Ahn Seo-hyun’s
performance as Mija and her bond with the lovable Okja. Amelia Urry, Associate Editor Chasing Coral
Many people I know are truly scared to watch this documentary because they think it is all doom and gloom, and we’ve got enough of that going around as it is. But Chasing Coral is
more than that — it’s luminous, honest, funny, and moving, a love
letter to the magic of nature and the joy that we get from exploring the
world. The filmmakers take us underwater to some of the most exquisite
coral reefs and fish communities remaining on the planet, giving us a front-row seat to climate change in action.
I’m going to host a showing of the film for friends in the new year.
Eulogy or wake-up call, I think it’s worth being moved by the stunning
and humbling complexity of our oceans and the coral that has been its
seedbed. Kate Jackson, Director of Networks
Sourdough Sourdough is a ridiculous and playful novel
by Robin Sloan (who, full disclosure, wrote a blurb for one of my
books). I mean, c’mon, it’s about sentient sourdough starter. It’s also
the most realistic and compelling guide to the modern food debate I’ve
encountered.
The story takes place in the San Francisco Bay Area, the scene of an
ongoing struggle between two very different versions of foodie utopia.
On one side is an Alice Waters–like character who champions tradition,
artisanal labor, and the flavors of nature. On the other side there’s a
Soylent-inspired company promoting exploration, efficiency, and new
creation. According to the classic sci-fi formula, the story would be
about how technological advancement creates a monster that must be
defeated. But this book refuses to take sides. Like most of us, the
novel values culture and tradition, but also yearns for newness and
exploration. Like most of us, it’s wonderstruck by technology while also
skeptical of it.
If everyone engaged in making a more equitable and sustainable food system took the lessons in Sourdough
to heart, I think the partisan debate would end. It’s the techie-hippie
divide that’s unnatural — most of us want a bit of everything. Nathanael Johnson, Senior Writer S-Town
If you haven’t heard 2017 breakout podcast S-Town,
please tell me what rock you’ve been living under so I can build a
nuclear bunker there that would make John B. proud. The story, from the
producers of This American Life and Serial, documents
the life of one disillusioned, brilliant, misanthropic horologist as he
alternately despairs and rejoices in the human capacity to muck up the
best intentions. And, yes, that means he talks about climate change A
LOT. As narrator Brian Reed laments, that doesn’t always make for
uplifting conversation. (SORRY for boring you, Brian.) But it does make
for some pretty gripping radio. Amelia Urry, Associate Editor Terrestrial Terrestrial is an environmental podcast like you’ve never heard (case in point: Its unofficial tagline is “We’re fucked. Now what?”). Currently in its second season, the show profiles individuals making tough choices in the face of climate change, like a conservative hunter who breaks rank to defend public lands or a teenage girl
who joins a group suing the government over climate inaction. The show
tackles big issues — like climate change, air pollution, and
environmental justice — and tells those stories in a way listeners can
relate to. Jesse Nichols, Contributing Assistant Video Producer Thor: Ragnarok
I was worried about the planet turning into a giant garbage patch
where violent cage matches serve as the only distraction from pollution
and massive income inequality. Then, I watched Thor: Ragnarok.
Now, I’m thrilled about our planet turning into a giant garbage patch
where violent cage matches serve as the only distraction from pollution
and massive income inequality, as overseen by emperor Jeff Goldblum. Now
there’s a magnetic personality! Darby Minow Smith, Senior Managing Editor
