Reality much worse than film’s climate nightmare

We may have been distracted by other things, but an ominous cinematic milestone has been reached. The present has caught up to the future. Decades ago, the sci-fi classic film Blade Runner showed a disturbing vision of a dystopic Los Angeles. The 1982 Ridley Scott movie was based on Philip K. Dick’s 1968 book Do Androids Dream

of Electric Sheep? It was set in the Los Angeles of

November 2019.

What did the film get right and wrong?

Its gadgetry feels familiar to us now, but we are a long way from humanoid robot replicants. Today’s Boston Dynamics robot dogs are gymnastic but functional. The film presented a scary prospect of flying cars crossing a blackened cityscape lit by blast flames and smoke.

The biggest wrong turn the film took in depicting the future present is the ubiquitous rain in the outdoor scenes. An implied environmental catastrophe brought on by disasters and industrial pollution is behind the film’s setting. Blade Runner

2049, the sequel released in 2017, reworked the premise to incorporate California’s climate reality.

Modern day Los Angeles is lit by the harsh red of wildfires and the photographs of the destruction over the past week have been surreal. Smoke has choked traffic and cloaked the Carquinez Bridge. Photos and video captured horses racing from the sparks of blazes and embers flying from a tree in the Kincade fire at Kellogg.

Fires have raged in the north and south of the state, prompting mass evacuations. Power has been cut to hundreds of thousands of people because high winds could result in power lines sparking fires. After a dry summer, California has been unable to recover. There’s been a lack of easing rain and the winds have made vegetation bone dry.

California isn’t the only region dealing with a crisis.

Pollution made the air so toxic in New Delhi that Indian officials had to declare a health emergency. The problem in the capital, including smog at the presidential palace, came as German Chancellor Angela Merkel was visiting. Germany pledged €1 billion over the next five years on environmental projects such as electric buses.

Air quality during the past week reached serious levels in parts of California. Vox reported that: “Breathing the air in Oakland [last Tuesday NZT], which reached an air quality index of 152, was the equivalent of smoking seven cigarettes in a day. In Fresno the AQI reached 234.”

The state is under pressure on either side from two key climate threats — wildfires and rising seas. A Climate Central study published in Nature

Communications last week, based on revised coastal topography assessments, estimated that far more people — 300 million — are at risk from rising sea levels around the world than previously thought.

The climate challenges already on show are beyond cinematic nightmares.