Climate Change: The Movie

A fictional movie about climate change greatly exaggerated the science, but the ploy didn't work, society wasn't scared by special effects into doing the right thing.

A documentary movie about climate change used reason and data charts, to much acclaim but for little result. The truth of climate change is still inconvenient.

What a movie about climate change has not tried is reverse psychology, which just might do the job, not on believers but on the deniers.

Here's the formula: 1) Choose which audience you want to scare; 2) Appeal to the fear they hold most dear.

The people who understand that climate change is real—that the disappearance of summer arctic ice, the acidification of the oceans and the release of methane from melting permafrost are all world class catastrophes—these rational, informed people are not the audience a fictional movie should address. They are plenty scared already, for good reason.

By contrast, the smug confidence of climate deniers will never be shaken by the evidence and logic of a careful documentary. Nor will a fictional movie ever make them feel afraid of an actual threat.

No, conservative climate deniers would much rather be afraid of things that don't exist, and they reveal these considerable fears in their attacks on climate science. That vulnerability, the conservative bubble of delusionary paranoia, should be the target of a climate change movie.

Deniers say they are afraid that the scientific community is joined in a conspiracy so vast that all the mounting evidence from field expeditions, satellite monitoring and direct measurements are completely confabulated, a lie breathtaking in scope being perpetrated by the smartest people in society. There's plot point number 1.

Deniers say they are afraid that liberals wish to use climate change as an excuse to expand government power into every aspect of our lives, controlling our behavior and restricting our marketplace freedoms. There's plot point number 2.

So, here's the story premise that exploits these fears:

Conservative opposition successfully forstalls effective action on climate change when a seemingly liberal senator flips his position on the issue and joins them, mouthing the rhetoric of plot points 1 and 2.

Soon, major disaster strikes. Frozen methane deposits in the deep ocean suddenly belch immense quantities of the gas into the atmosphere. The Ross Ice Shelf breaks up, thus making way for rapid glacier movement from the Antarctic highlands into the ocean, raising sea levels dramatically. Ocean acidification wipes out entire food chains, devastating global fisheries. Major ocean current circulation systems simply shut down, radically altering local climates.

The once liberal senator now running for president suddenly flips again. He says these catastrophes can all be blamed on the conservative climate deniers, and that the nation needs to punish them for betraying the national interest.

As conservatives see their most treasured fear coming true, they realize they've been tricked into serving as scapegoats. The liberal senator was setting them up to take the fall. Climate change was never in doubt and the denial enablers would most certainly be blamed for making it worse.

The conservatives, from religious right to neocon, realize too late that they were on the wrong side of an issue that should have been theirs. They could have used climate change as an excuse for asserting global power aggressively to suit American business interests. They could have justified in the name of saving God's Creation, the conquest of all other nations.

They witness a liberal president living out the conservative wet dream, preaching and implementing the gospel of green imperialism, and realize their own traditional strong hand has been taken away from them, even as they face trials for treason and calls for the death penalty.

Yes, a terribly paranoid scenario, in which climate change plays a secondary part. What conservatives fear most is their oppression by liberal policies, and their foolish opposition to dealing with climate change dooms them to that very fate.

If a movie about climate change wasn't really about climate change, it was about the conservative fear of liberal power reinforced by climate change consequences, then conservatives might start thinking about doing the right thing, albeit for the wrong reason.

Reverse psychology doesn't try to make people afraid, it leverages the fear that already exists by showing how people can bring their own worst nightmares upon themselves.