Hollywood’s latest blockbuster about weather disasters, “Twisters” (a standalone sequel to the 1996 film “Twister”), features plenty of extreme weather, but displays a somewhat incongruous disregard for the scientists who study weather.
The discordant note is subtle, but at the same time hard to miss entirely. Without spoiling too much of the plot, “Twisters” portrays most of its doctors and other professional scientists as cynical, selfish, cold, and intellectually narrow. In contrast, the film’s fictional YouTubers and amateur storm chasers are presented as idealistic, compassionate, colorful, and far more knowledgeable about science than these stuffy official scientists.
“It’s a regrettable missed opportunity that speaks to the pusillanimous nature of Hollywood today.”
Despite this smug attitude toward the scientific profession, “Twisters” never once mentions climate change, which might seem odd for a film about a climate catastrophe in 2024. But that’s no accident. As director Lee Isaac Chung told CNN, “I wanted to make sure that we never created the feeling that we were preaching a message, because that’s certainly not what I think cinema should be. I think it should be a reflection of the world.”
Global warming is one of the greatest existential threats to humanity, a threat responsible for increasingly frequent, erratic and intense weather events, including cyclones and tornadoes. The question, then, is whether a film about climate disaster can be an “accurate reflection of the world” if it fails to acknowledge this major element of humanity’s scientific knowledge. Many real-world climate scientists argue that it cannot.
“I think this is a missed opportunity that speaks to the pusillanimous nature of Hollywood these days,” said Dr. Michael E. Mann, a climate scientist at the University of Pennsylvania. “The science suggests that we are seeing larger disease outbreaks and more destructive tornadoes because of human-caused climate change.”
Dr. Kevin Trenberth, a senior research scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research who has published more than 600 papers on climate science, said that while “Twisters” avoids direct mention of climate change, it is “flawed.” After all, the film is based on a series of freak tornadoes, and Trenberth is convinced that climate change is producing exactly those kinds of storms.
“Climate change is adding heat to the system, and it’s particularly warming the ocean,” Trenberth said. “This is resulting in about a 10 to 20 percent increase in water vapor in the atmosphere. Both of these effects (increased temperature and humidity) contribute significantly to the instability of the atmosphere, which leads to increased convection. This is happening at all scales, and it’s helping to fuel storms and hurricanes.”
Supercells harbor tornadoes, Trenberth added, and are particularly likely to create them when they experience enough wind shear (sudden changes in wind direction or speed) that they can turn into rotation. “That factor is not clearly related to climate change, but the instability is,” Trenberth added.
Dr. Twila Moon, deputy chief scientist and science communications officer at the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC), referred Salon to two studies published in the journals Geophysical Research Letters and Weather and Climate Extremes. Both papers found that as humans increase the Earth’s temperature by emitting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, tornadoes are likely to occur more often and with greater intensity.
“Some recent research suggests that tornadoes may increase in intensity or frequency, depending on the seasons and times of day,” Moon said. “Of course, geography is important.”
Michael Wehner, a senior research scientist in the computational research division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, was a little more skeptical than his peers. Wehner said the omission of climate change in “Twisters” was glaring because global warming could be linked to the unusual proliferation of tornadoes in recent years, but the science is not entirely clear-cut.
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“I would like to see more entertainment that has good climate actions in the background.”
“There’s a lot that’s not well understood about how climate change is affecting tornadoes,” Wehner said. “Has tornado alley moved east? Is that due to climate change? I don’t see a problem with that.”
Wehner also observed that there are more days than ever with tornado clusters.
“This seems consistent with global warming to me, but the evidence is far from complete,” Wehner said. “I also expect that the most intense storms will become more intense. While there is plenty of evidence that this is happening for other types of storms, the evidence is still far from complete for tornadoes.”
Wehner is not alone among his colleagues in questioning the link between climate change and tornadoes.
“I think it’s premature to say there’s a link between climate change and changes in tornado activity,” said Dr. Mark Serreze, director of the NSIDC. “Certainly, more water vapor in the air can promote stronger convection, but a tornado is a very local event and requires a very specific set of weather conditions, such as appropriate wind shear.”
Some might argue that a movie like “Twisters” — which includes deliberately exaggerated sci-fi nonsense, such as scientists dissolving a tornado — doesn’t need to include climate change to do its job. Chung implies this, saying that blockbuster films like “Twisters” have no responsibility in this regard as long as they are entertaining. Yet there is ample evidence that movies influence audiences’ perceptions of important real-world issues. There is only one Hollywood blockbuster that explicitly focuses on global warming, 2004’s “The Day After Tomorrow,” and because it was a box-office success, it had a quantifiable and demonstrable influence on public opinion.
In his 2007 book Hollywood Science, Emory University physics professor Sidney Perkowitz said that a study conducted by environmental science and policy expert Anthony Leiserowitz found that the film “had a significant impact on climate change risk perceptions, conceptual models, behavioral intentions, and policy priorities.” Viewed by an estimated 21 million Americans in theaters, “the film led viewers to become more concerned about global warming and to take personal, political, and social action to combat climate change and make global warming a national priority… The film even appears to have influenced voter preferences.”
This potential for cultural influence is why Hollywood has now implemented something called the Climate Reality Check, launched earlier this year by Matthew Schneider-Mayerson of Colby College in partnership with the group Good Energy. The paper argues that films set in the present or near future, on Earth and in our shared universe, have a public responsibility to mention climate change. If a film both mentions global warming and has a character acknowledge it, it passes the Climate Reality Check, a distinction earned in 2023 by films like “Barbie,” “Nyad” and “Mission: Impossible – Part 1.”
Anna Jane Joyner, founder of Climate Reality Check, praised the film, even though it doesn’t directly address climate change. She said the characters do manage to indirectly acknowledge the climate crisis.
“I’m grateful that Twisters addresses the climate crisis through the characters of Javi (Anthony Ramos) and Cathy (Maura Tierney), who both say what they’re seeing is unprecedented,” Joyner said. She believes “Twisters” can, in its own way, raise awareness in a positive way.
“Our research with the USC Norman Lear Center Media Impact Project found that most viewers think they care more about climate change than they do about characters in TV and movies,” Joyner said. “Of the top 250 movies of the last decade, those that addressed the climate crisis generated 10 percent more box office revenue. People want those stories.”
Moon added that Hollywood had “good and bad examples” of scientific accuracy.
“I prefer to highlight areas where progress has been made and long-term investments to integrate sound science – including climate science – into entertainment,” Moon said. “For example, the upcoming Hollywood Climate Summit or the Science & Entertainment Exchange. A quick Google search turns up many other efforts as well.”
At the same time, Moon believes Hollywood can do better: “I would like to see more entertainment that has climate goodness embedded in the background. So the story is not focused on climate at all, but the visuals and the context provide cultural examples of how we can live, work, and play in climate-friendly and climate-conscious ways. Social and cultural change is essential to addressing the climate crisis.”
These cultural exchanges may even prove prophetic about the climate crisis. “The Day After Tomorrow,” for example, depicts climate-change-driven tornadoes ravaging Los Angeles, which seemed ridiculous in 2004 but has become a terrifying reality in 2023 — as, of course, does the script for “Twisters” in 2024. But the marketing meeting in which the “Day After Tomorrow” creative team learned a shocking fact about how the film was to be promoted is equally prophetic. Co-writer Jeffrey Nachmanoff recalled to Salon last month that when the creators “went to the very first marketing meeting after we sold the script,” someone on Fox’s marketing team said, “To be clear, per Fox policy, we will not use the words ‘global warming’ when we market this movie.” I nearly spit my water out!
Global warming has certainly changed in the two decades since that conversation, but apparently Hollywood’s reluctance to fully acknowledge that reality hasn’t.
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