Primal Screen Zombie time!

Donal O’donoghue watches a screen at bedtime

“Is Greenland lost? Evidently it is.”

On the night that Dave Bautista was battling zombies in a futuristic Las Vegas, I opted for another horror film. Even scarier than Army of the Dead is Breaking Boundaries: The Science of our Planet. It doesn’t have a zombie tiger or gazillions of flesh-eating thingies, but it does have raging bushfires, acres of bleached coral, oceans becoming ever more acidic and the very likely scenario that Greenland may be already lost.

The graphics are scary too (and not just because they look like they were created by some guy with a wonky computer in 1984). Lots of faceless humanlike creatures apparently sleepwalking towards their doom as the planet goes into the red zone of destruction. Yep, there are also millions of zombies in Breaking Boundaries and no sign of ass-kicking Dave to deliver a happy ending.

But we do have Dr Johan Rockström, a big cheese on global sustainability. Here is Johan on a mountain peak in Sweden. Here is Johan in the African bush. And here is Johan’s head floating in front of some graphics magicked up by that guy with the ancient computer. But the message from the scientist in the baseball cap is bigger than anything Zack Snyder’s movie-making can deliver. Specifically, and I’m paraphrasing here, if we don’t get our s **** ce together before 2030, flesh-eating zombies will be the least of our worries.

Apart from Dr Johan (aka The Rock) we also have David Attenborough (aka The Voice), the conscience of the cosmos and who must be at least 137 years old. With those inimitable tones, still warm and comforting as a furry hot water bottle, the great broadcaster can make the end of the world sound like a fairytale. Except there is an urgency now in a decade seen by most (apart from former US presidents and the like) as decisive. “We have no time to lose,” says the man who brought us Life on Earth and is now warning of Death on Earth. Listen to the science, says The Voice, and act now.

The science is the science of ‘The Rock’, the architect of the planetary boundaries framework – in other words, nine boundaries we need to safeguard for the planet to allow humans to continue to live here. Breaking Boundaries gives us the latest on how we are doing in each category. It’s not a healthy picture. We are deep in the red zone on the loss of biodiversity, deforestation is increasing (with the Amazon being chopped and burned down), the world’s oceans have become 26% more acidic in recent decades and the Great Barrier Reef could become a graveyard.

As the end credits rolled on Breaking Boundaries, the Netflix algorithm (maybe its AI descendants will inherit the earth?) suggested three other shows that I might like to watch. These were the climate change classics, Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous, Bumblebee and The New Legends of Monkey. And I wondered where was Army of the Dead? At least that had zombies, which is how many of us seem to be, in a world stumbling towards the red zone of extinction.

Breaking Boundaries: The Science of Our Planet by Johan Rockström and Owen

Gaffney is published by Dorling Kindersley