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.