Extrapolations

Apple.tv's Climate series is a disappointment for climate advocates

I had great hopes for Apple TV’s original series named Extrapolations. Its ostensible subject is climate change and how it will play out between now and 2070. It touches on a number of important themes, but gets so much wrong that its net contribution to public understanding of the subject is probably negative. Given climate change’s lack of prominence in the collective mental map of what’s important, a reminder that the issue is still there has some positive value. A quote from press agent Kathleen Winsor, often attributed to Andy Warhol, says “don’t read your publicity - weigh it.” That’s pretty good advice for movie stars and others who just want to be famous. After all, we have a number of celebrities with no accomplishments to their name, people who are “famous for being famous.”

That won’t suffice for climate change. It’s already fairly famous, but it’s not being treated as the genuine emergency that it is. I’m terrible at figuring out popular taste. Something that seems like a fascinating idea to me often elicits nothing but yawns from others. So I don’t understand why we are not all running around saying the sky is falling. But I do understand that human nature is not set up to focus on things that will gradually harm far-away strangers, many of them in the future.

I don’t think we need a reminder about climate change nearly as much as we need good information and informed discussion. Extrapolations fails miserably at this. It is more misleading than informative. Nowhere does it suggest that we need to stop burning fossil fuels, for example.

One of my pet peeves is fiction that misrepresents facts. When I was much younger I assumed that the facts in any published novel would have been carefully researched and correct. That was a somewhat naive assumption, but my general impression is that the standards in this area have declined quite a bit over the last fifty years. I’m always complaining about implausibility and incorrectness when I’m watching movies and series in the evening with my wife, to the point of being a bit of a crank.

Extrapolations’ first episode, “A Raven Story” begins in 2037 with worldwide climate protests at the time of COP42 in Tel Aviv. The main issue they seem to be considering was whether to change the limit for temperature increase from 1.5 to 2 degrees. It would be great if the world could agree on an enforceable temperature limit, but there are so many contributors to global heating that a simple limit won’t be very effective. Look at the Paris Agreement, in which the world set a goal of holding temperature increases to 1.5˚C and “well below” 2˚C. We’ve missed the 1.5˚ goal. It’s not that we’ve passed that limit now--global average temperature has risen about 1.1˚C above pre-industrial levels. But we’re on a socio-economic path that will result in more than 1.5˚ of warming. The implication in the first episode id that we can make meaningful changes to our global temperature trajectory just be declaring a temperature limit; this is wrong.

In the second episode, “Whale Fall,” the last humpback whale goes extinct in 2046. A character played by Meryl Streep converses with the whale using an AI system that translates between human and whale speech, a sort of extended Google Translate. Two rival corporations are fighting over the last whale. One wants to capture it for a zoo; the other wants to kill it and collect its DNA so it can be reconstituted in the future, when the global warming crisis is over. Showing the death of the last humpback whale is one way to dramatize species loss, but it continues our unfortunate focus on “charismatic megafauna.” It simplifies the problem too much by ignoring the loss of thousands of less charismatic species and the harm these losses cause to habitats of all kinds and species that aren’t glamorous, but are very important in their ecosystems.

Episode 3 takes us to Miami, which is being flooded due to sea-level rise in 2047. It focuses on the local politics of saving a Miami synagogue. The drama here, as in most of the episodes, is only tangentially related to climate. A young congregant asks whether God is using climate change to punish us for misdeeds. The government is offering “relo deals” for those moving to places like Milwaukee or Winnipeg, where climate impacts will be smaller, or even beneficial.

Episode 4 takes on geoengineering. A rogue corporation sends dozens of large cargo planes and thousands of smaller drones to sprinkle calcium carbonate in the atmosphere, to reflect sunlight and cool the earth. I can’t see what incentive a corporation would have to do this, since it doesn’t make money. In one of Kim Stanley Robinson’s novels a rogue country that has had too many bad heat waves sprays sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere from planes. Countries may, in the future, have incentives to take such actions, which is one reason we need a stronger international global-warming treaty, which would, among other things, prohibit geoengineering without the approval of the international body overseeing the treaty.

Episode 5, which also takes place in 2059, focuses on India, which has a daytime curfew. Most people venture out only at night because it’s too hot during the day. Poor people pay small amounts for oxygen at a public stand. This makes no sense: climate change won’t reduce the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere. There’s visible haze in the air, which also is not an artifact of climate change, though I suppose that conventional air pollution could get a lot worse if India continues its spree of building coal-fired power plants. The main action in the episode is the illegal transport rom Mumbai to the Indian town of Amritsar of drought-tolerant seeds stolen from the Svalbard seed vault. Alpha, the big Google-like corporation, sends an assassin to stop the transport, but we don’t know why. It’s an engaging episode, mostly because of the banter between the two men transporting the seeds, but I can’t see that it has much to do with climate change.

Episode 6 takes place in 2066, and deals mostly with a tech service called CacheCloud that seems to be a social-media storage service for memories. The protagonist has a role-playing job pretending to be his clients’ friends and lovers. He’s losing his memories, because of physical stress from too much heat, but he’s having trouble coming up with enough money to keep his memories on CacheCloud, and has to delete some of them. This all has little to do with the climate.

In 2068, in Episode 7, Auggie, a character played by Forest Whitaker, is holding a new year’s goodbye party for himself. The guests arrive wearing oxygen tanks, protection against the high level of smog in San Francisco. Again, this is not good climate science. California is currently doing well on ridding itself of fossil power plants and switching to EVs. Conventional air pollution is likely to be greatly reduced by 2068, even if global heating proceeds apace. Auggie is about to be scanned for upload to the cloud so that his mind can be reconstituted in software once the climate crisis is over. His departure comes as a surprise to his dinner guests, who include his wife, played by Marion Cotillard. She is none too pleased about being left behind. Though it is championed by tech luminaries like Ray Kurzweil, this idea of becoming immortal by transferring the mind to a silicon-based computer has always seemed far-fetched to me. It makes an assumption that the operation of the human brain can be accurately simulated in silicon-based computers, but the brain is a completely different sort of device. It’s not a Turing machine. The idea will probably never work.

In the last episode, in 2070, Nicolas Bilton, the CEO of Alpha, is tried by the International Criminal Court for the crime of ecocide, because of his company’s contributions to climate change. The court proceedings make no sense. It turns out that his company has been sitting on effective direct-air carbon capture (DAC) technology for years. Bolton goes to prison for this, his technology gets deployed, and the series ends with his adoptive daughter strolling on a beautiful sunny beach with no pollution, saying “I think we’re going to fix it now.” This sends a very harmful message: that DAC will be developed to pull CO2 from the atmosphere at the necessary scale at an affordable cost. If we were certain this could be done at a lower total cost than phasing out the burning of fossil fuels, it might be a viable solution, but there is no evidence to support this. I realize it’s a better story arc for Extrapolations to end on a positive note, with climate change fixed by 2071. But ending the story this way plays into the hands of the new climate deniers, who have given up arguing that climate change isn’t happening, or isn’t caused by humans, and have switched to the argument that we should avoid taking drastic action on climate because it would harm the economy too much. They’re saying it’s better to just wait for the technological fix that human ingenuity surely will provide. The problem is that the fix may never come.

The Extrapolations series is well produced and entertaining to watch. The episodes all contain a climate element, such as sea-level rise, species loss, or geoengineering. But the climate elements were awkwardly grafted on to the stories, which do not integrally involve climate change. And some of the science is wrong, such as air quality bad enough to require oxygen tanks.. But, worst of all, the show promotes a solution, direct air capture, that is unlikely to solve the problem.