In the shade of a small courtyard, while sorting Mahua fruits, a young woman, in her 20s, eyes wide with curiosity, asked me a simple yet profoundly unsettling question: ‘What does climate change look like? Is it like the movies that people keep watching? Do you know when it will happen?’
It’s a question that cuts through the noise of scientific jargon and political rhetoric, a question that strips away the abstract and demands a tangible answer. As I grappled for an answer, before my eyes, stretched the water-deficient unforgiving terrain of Bundelkhand – ‘Pathar,’ they called it, the stony ground.
We’ve watched the ice caps melt in The Day After Tomorrow, where New York City is plunged into a glacial apocalypse. We’ve felt the suffocating heat and the desperate struggle for resources in Mad Max: Fury Road, a film that paints a terrifying picture of a world ravaged by drought and resource scarcity. We’ve witnessed the relentless encroachment of the sea in countless dystopian thrillers like Waterworld, where ice caps have melted and the earth is almost entirely submerged, or 2012 when a series of global catastrophes threatens to annihilate the entire mankind, or Geostorm, showcasing catastrophic weather events, echoing the threat of rising sea levels and extreme weather patterns.
The list is endless – from the stark, barren landscapes of Interstellar, the unsettling, polluted atmosphere depicted in Blade Runner 2049, animated films like WALL-E, set in an abandoned, trash-filled Earth to the recent Oscar-winning Flow, where a solitary grey cat along with its ‘unusual friends’ fights the odds in search of dry land in a newly submerged world. These films and many more serve as poignant reminders of the potential consequences of a major climatic shift. Even beyond these blockbuster examples, the imagery of climate doom has crept into other forms of media.
Popular media, while often sensationalised, has created and projected dramatic visuals, heightened emotions, stark consequences, seemingly and “not-so-seemingly” heroes, spine-chilling background scores, igniting speeches and of course the epiphanic discoveries aka solutions and we have been entertained, alarmed and awe-struck for the last few decades. However, the question that often picks our brain and consciousness is a little less “filmy” and much more psychosocial. How do these dramatic visuals and chilling narratives have impacted, if at all, our collective ideation of a climate catastrophe?
The reality behind the rhetoric
The reality of climate change transcends the dramatic flourishes of Hollywood. It is a slow, insidious creep, a subtle shift in weather patterns, a gradual erosion of coastlines, and a silent extinction of species. It reaches us in the form of a tiny news report about an untimely hailstorm that caused crop loss, a little report about the annual mean temperature of India touching 25.75 degrees C in 2024, exceeding the 1991-2020 average by 0.65 degrees, ISRO reports on expansion of 27% of the Himalayan glacial lakes since 1984 or cyclone becoming common in the western coast of India. Quite understandably, it lacks the explosive grandeur of a blockbuster disaster.
The scientific data, the charts and graphs, the complex models – they often fail to capture the attention of the masses to convey the visceral urgency of the situation. The scientific warnings or the newspaper reports do not always convert themselves into tangible, relatable fears in our minds.
However, we need to accept the fact that the climate reality does not necessarily look like apocalyptic imagery. It can feel a lot more like a slow-burn thriller; very recently WMO’s State of the Global Climate report confirmed that 2024 is the warmest year in the 175-year observational record and the first calendar year to be more than 1.5°C above the pre-industrial era, with a global mean near-surface temperature of 1.55 ± 0.13 degrees C above the 1850-1900 average.
WMO’s flagship report shows that atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide is at the highest levels in the last 800,000 years. Globally each of the past ten years were individually the ten warmest years on record and each of the past eight years has set a new record for ocean heat content. The 18 lowest Arctic sea-ice extents on record were all in the past 18 years and the three lowest Antarctic ice extents were in the past three years. The largest three-year loss of glacier mass on record occurred in the past three years. The rate of sea level rise has doubled since satellite measurements began.
This isn’t a distant threat; it’s our present. The “once upon a time” narratives are now our own, as rapid changes reshape our lived experiences. Unprecedented displacement, food shortages, and economic collapse are not future projections, but current realities. The impact is felt in our communities, among our families, friends, neighbours and beyond it, highlighting the very human cost of a planet in distress.
There’s no singular, dramatic collapse, but a series of interconnected crises, each amplifying the other. Rising sea levels from melting ice cause coastal flooding, displacing communities and disrupting economies. Extreme weather amplifies food insecurity, leading to a domino effect of hardship. We’re not facing a single “D-day,” but a daily erosion of stability. We may debate the nature of a final collapse if there is any, but we must confront the irrefutable evidence of a changing climate, a reality we cannot afford to blind ourselves to.
A call to action
Doom imagery must spark action, and shift from fear to resilience – demand change, embrace sustainability, and innovate. There is an urgent need to use these warnings as a call to collective responsibility, protecting what remains, and forging a hopeful future. Amplifying the global success stories, championing solutions: carbon neutrality policies, circular economies, and technological breakthroughs, nature-based solutions, green technologies, water budgeting, responsible consumption and production. Let us paint a new vision, let us run a reality check, let us reflect on the beauty of a restored planet, the strength of human ingenuity, and the enduring power of hope. Hope is not naive optimism, but a determined belief in our capacity for change. For in the face of impending doom, it is hope that ignites our creativity, fuels our resolve, and empowers us to build a world worthy of future generations.
Sharanya Chattopadhyay is a research associate at Watershed Organisation Trust, Pune.
