- And then the other half of me looks at
the current coronavirus situation
and the climate change as like yeah, actually,
we know what to do in these situations too,
and we're still doing nothing about it.
(dramatic music)
Hello, my name is Dr. Victoria Petryshyn.
I am a professor of environmental studies
at the University of Southern California.
I have a PhD in geobiology, and for the past 10 years
I have been reconstructing past climates on Earth.
Today, we're gonna be looking at
a number of different disaster movies
and trying to figure out which one of thems did it right,
which ones did it wrong,
and how maybe they could have been improved.
We're gonna start with one of my all-time favorite
disaster movies, The Day After Tomorrow,
in which the North Atlantic Current is disrupted,
which causes global cooling,
a lot of weather catastrophes,
and the dawn of a new ice age.
Here we go, a giant tsunami is about to hit Manhattan.
Probably not, no.
A tsunamis is gonna be caused usually by an earthquake,
so a tsunami happens when the sea floor
suddenly goes up and down.
The East Coast of the United States
is what's known as a passive margin.
There is nothing on the sea floor
that is gonna cause a giant tsunami
unless an asteroid hits in the middle of the ocean.
Now, what might happen is that if you have
the melting of the Antarctic ice sheet
and the Greenland ice sheet,
you will get sea level rise
that will start to flood New York,
and in fact, this is something
New York is very worried about.
They have proposed a billion dollar sea wall
to try to keep out rising sea water.
It will never be in the form of a massive tsunami
that comes and levels the city in 30 seconds.
It's the super freeze.
Could a huge air mass come in
and freeze everything in its path that quickly?
No, that's not going to happen.
So, in order to do that, you would essentially have to
stop the sun from existing.
Could New York be plunged into some sort of deep freeze?
Well, there are a couple of scenarios in which yeah,
that could happen.
In fact, the northeast experiences frequently now
what is known as a polar vortex,
and that happens, you get a lot of really, really
deep cold temperatures.
What's happening is that normally all of that
really cold air stays around the Arctic Circle.
What's happening with climate change is that
that air mass is destabilizing,
and it's dipping down into the continental U.S.,
which is actually kind of hard sometimes
for people to wrap their minds around
because the polar vortex reaching into New York,
or Boston, or anything like that
is an actual effect of warming in the Arctic,
so it seemingly getting colder at times
is a direct result of warming instead of cooling.
Our next movie is The Swarm,
which I don't know much about,
but we're gonna watch the trailer for the movie,
so we will learn about it together.
- [Man] For more than 20 years,
scientists have known that a swarm of killer bees
has been headed towards the United States.
Now, Warner Brothers presents Irwin Allen's--
- And they've done nothing?
The Swarm. - The Swarm.
The Swarm is now a movie I must watch immediately.
But could this happen?
So yeah, there are animal migrations
that do kind of invade.
I don't think their target is the human race.
Most of the time they're mostly looking for flowers.
Can a swarm of something, a plague of locusts,
something like that, come and move into the United States?
Sure, absolutely.
There's no reason to say--
I mean, it's not gonna be like us and the 70s Roberts
taking them on with flame throwers,
but we are definitely seeing
insects creeping up into our domain
that haven't been here before.
In Los Angeles, we used to never have mosquitoes.
Now we have a lot of mosquitoes
that carry things like West Nile, maybe Zika,
and the big culprit behind this
is that so much of our climate is changing,
that the insects are now moving north
looking for more favorable climates,
so could a giant swarm of killer bees invade Texas?
It might not be bees, it might be mosquitoes
that carry disease with them, but yeah, sure.
We'll give this a why not.
Our next movie is Wall-E,
an adorable cautionary tale
where excessive consumerism has really made the Earth
an enormous garbage dump,
and the human race now lives on a spaceship
waiting for the day when they can return to Earth
and when life is again possible on Earth.
I love this movie.
They got the space junk pretty right.
Is the premise of Wall-E possible?
Could we have actually trashed this planet
to the point where all of humanity
has to leave and go someplace else?
And then we're just gonna send some robots
back in to clean it up.
I don't think it would actually--
I'm a little more optimistic.
I don't think it would ever get to the point
where we would actually take off on a spaceship,
if only because we don't have the ability
to get on a spaceship and go someplace else
at this moment, so we really do have to
sort of take care of what's here
because there is no other option for us at this point.
I thought it was actually really interesting
that they had the wind turbines up there
in the beginning.
There's a big problem in environmental studies right now
with even if you have renewable energy,
if you have solar panels or if you have wind turbines,
there are parts of those that are enormous,
especially the giant fiberglass blades.
They're huge and they're not recyclable.
We don't really have good answers to that yet,
so overall I'm optimistic that no,
we would actually pump the brakes on this
before we got as far as Wall-E,
and then the other half of me
looks at the current coronavirus situation
and looks at climate change as like yeah,
actually we know what to do in these situations too,
and we know how it's damaging our country,
damaging the world, and we're still
doing nothing about it.
So I cling to optimism.
I know there are very smart people,
very passionate people,
my students, I see, are working on these problems,
but you know, there's a lot more to help us.
Up next we have San Andreas.
In this movie, the San Andreas Fault ruptures,
causing a bunch of major earthquakes around the fault,
and the only person who can save the day
is of course, The Rock.
(helicopter whirring)
Hollywood sign's going down.
First of all, if the San Andreas Fault ruptures,
like the big one, the big one,
if you have, let's say, a magnitude eight
earthquake in Los Angeles,
will all of the buildings start to crumble instantly?
Probably not the way they show in this movie.
All of the buildings in Los Angeles
are built to withstand a certain amount of shaking,
so even, and if you've ever been in Los Angeles
in an earthquake, what you see is the buildings
kind of sway back and forth.
They're on rollers, so what you have in an earthquake
is the first wave hits,
and that's the shaky up and down, okay?
That is what's known as the P Wave.
Then what you have is the S Wave.
The S Wave comes in and that's the rolling.
Now if you have one big enough and sustained enough,
like the earthquake took enough time,
eventually those safety measures
aren't gonna do anything anymore
and your buildings would start to fall.
Would it be that like all of downtown is affected?
Probably not, because the San Andreas Fault
doesn't actually run through downtown Los Angeles.
The San Andreas Fault, the system is actually
a little more north and east of here.
Now if there was a big earthquake on it,
depending on where it was in the fault,
that energy could get reflected back into the L.A. Basin,
and take out downtown Los Angeles,
at least do a huge chunk of damage,
but it's not actually going to happen
in downtown L.A.
There are other faults, of course,
that run through the entire city,
but the San Andreas does not.
Up next is Mad Max: Fury Road,
a personal favorite of mine,
where an apocalyptic wasteland,
where both water and oil
have become incredibly scarce.
This has collapsed civilization
and turned the world into a desert wasteland.
- [Immortam Joe] I am your redeemer.
It is by my hand you will rise
from the ashes.
- Could we ever worldwide be in a scenario
where fresh water is so scarce
that we have entered a Mad Max: Fury Road scenario?
Or the entire globe?
Probably not.
Basically, with climate change,
you can just think of wherever you live,
whatever the worst part of your weather is,
that's the thing that's going to get worse.
So here, kind of the worst things we have to worry about
are drought, wildfires, and high temperatures in the summer,
and that's what we can expect to get worse.
We can expect less fresh water.
We can expect more intense storms
delivering less water overall.
We can expect way more over 100 degree days,
but if you look at say, what's going to happen
in the Eastern U.S. or maybe in the Gulf regions,
so Texas, Louisiana, what can they expect?
It's gonna be more intense storms,
more flooding, more hurricanes, things like that.
So there will still be water on Earth.
It will still rain unless we've done
some kind of horrible nuclear war scenario
where we've literally screwed everything up,
but in that case, chances are
humanity is not making it anyways.
So there would still be fresh water in some areas,
just not in all the areas.
It's also interesting to note
that these movies are filmed in Australia,
and Australia is already at this point,
largely a desert, so could it get there?
Well, parts of Australia are already there.
And as we've seen, the huge wildfires
that have spread through the east coast of Australia
have really kind of done a number,
so we're already seeing these things start to happen,
so it's gonna be very, very region dependent
on whether or not you get to live out
your favorite Mad Max: Fury Road scenario.
So thank you for watching disaster movies with us today.
It's really interesting to see what Hollywood
kind of continually does right
and continually does wrong in these scenarios.
You know, Hollywood has really latched onto the idea
of climate as an impending disaster,
and they're right in that respect.
It is this slow moving train wreck coming our way.
What they get wrong is that it will be
a lot of small changes rather than some
big technological thing that comes and saves us all.
So keep watching disaster movies.
They're fun, they're enjoyable.
I love them.
Just keep in mind that a lot of these things
don't have an actual basis in science,
and could probably never happen.
You are never going to freeze solid in 30 seconds,
so go on, get in the water.
(dramatic music)