For those who haven't seen it, Don't Look Up is a satirical film by Adam McCay (the director of The Big Short, and Vice and before that straight comedies like Step Brothers and Anchorman) revolving around the discovery of a comet that is destined to hit Earth and how the political and cultural apparatus reacts to it. Politicians receive most of the skewering here, but by no means are they the only victim. The media in his world don't escape mockery or tech CEOs. Additionally, the citizenry are either knuckle-dragging denialists or pop-culture obsessed social media viewers. The only group that conducts itself well in this movie are the scientists.
That many groups are criticized in this film may lead you to think it's pretty balanced, but it's not. The politicians come off worst and their supporters come off worst of all. Both are thinly, extremely thinly, veiled stand-ins for conservatives. The president, played by Meryl Streep, is how the left imagines Republicans (not just Trump, but surely George W. Bush) act when they're in the Oval Office--nominating unqualified people in cowboy hats to be judges, ignoring the science, sending the FBI after scientists. The president's voters are told and convinced to "not look up" when the comet is clearly visible in the sky.
While this is clearly a satire, and a good one (I laughed at many points and much of the criticism was tied to how the real world functions), I worry a lot that many people believe this is truer than it is. I am confident that many people, at some level, believe this is how a Republican government behaves, and it's just not true. Democrats like to believe that their leaders conduct themselves like The West Wing while Republican leaders conduct themselves like this when the truth is clearly in between. President Biden did not follow the Science(TM), with his school masking recommendations and policies, nor when he talked about price controls, etc, etc, etc. Politics and science are always at odds in the White House. It's vitally important for everyone to understand that.
Secondly, the satire represents how McKay views the climate change debate. Viewers should understand though the many differences between the science behind a comet striking the Earth and climate change. There are immense differences in the two. To begin, astronomy is a much more developed science than climate change; it has been under study for thousands of years. From 1609 to 1619, after millennia of observing the motion of stars and planets, Kepler published his laws of planetary motion. In 1687 Newton refined Kepler's laws when he published his own law of universal gravitation, which Einstein added to in the early 20th century. The product of these (and many, many more contributions from the shoulders of others), meant that we now have a method of predicting the motion of celestial objects with an enormous amount of accuracy.
Climate science, on the other hand, is much less precise for two reasons: it's a much younger science but importantly it's a much more complex science. Climate is the interaction of a multitude of factors including atmospheric composition, tilt of the earth, temperature, wind conditions, water temperatures and currents, solar activity. In addition to these, every location on earth has its own climate, and climate change is different in them all. A comet has one and only one trajectory. This is in no way meant to say that historical observations and trends are wrong. Clearly temperatures have risen over the past century, on average, and there is also indirect evidence of this (sea level, glacier volume, etc.) and temperatures are likely to rise further, but these things are about all we know with a high amount of certainty. The projections on how high temperatures will rise are much less precise (see the most recent IPCC projection range for instance, and compare that to previous).
We also don't know what the costs of those changes will be to humanity. This is another departure from the comet allegory. For the cinematic comet, we knew with certainty (and we would also in the real world) what the damage would be: it would end the world. For climate change, there's a significant debate about the effects of any amount of temperature change. Economists predict that it will be less than 5% of world GDP (which is not the catastrophic 100% of the comet nor those that claim that it's an existential threat--it's not).
Last, as an economist, I can't avoid talking about the Tech CEO's proposed solution--to break up the comet and let its components fall safely to the Earth so we could use the minerals to keep the tech industry booming. In the movie, they claim this would make the world extremely wealthy (imagine a million tons of gold falling safely from the sky), but the comet would not create as many jobs or as much wealth as they claim. The tech industry currently is not generally limited by these minerals, and having more of them wouldn't make tech products free or ubiquitous. Tech companies would continue to use the minerals at about the same pace as they are now. Perhaps prices would drop or supply would increase some small amount, but not enough to make a huge difference in people's lives. Even if it was gold, though, the reason gold is valuable is because it's scarce. Increasing the supply of gold just reduces its price, so that, too, would not significantly add to the wealth of the world.
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