Experts slam "lost opportunity" as disaster film "Twisters" fails to acknowledge climate change

Hollywood's latest weather disaster blockbuster, "Twisters" (a standalone sequel to the 1996 film "Twister"), features plenty of extreme weather — yet it has a somewhat incongruous scorn for scientists who study the weather.

The discordant note is subtle, but at the same time hard to entirely miss. Without spoiling too much of the plot, "Twisters" depicts most of its PhDs and other professional scientists as cynical, selfish, cold and intellectually narrow. By contrast, the movie's fictional YouTubers and amateur storm chasers are overwhelmingly shown as idealistic, compassionate, colorful and far more knowledgeable about science that those stuffy official scientists.

Despite this attitude of smug superiority toward the scientific profession, "Twisters" doesn't once mention climate change, which may seem bizarre for a weather disaster film in 2024. But that wasn't an accident. As director Lee Isaac Chung told CNN, "I wanted to make sure that we are never creating a feeling that we’re preaching a message, because that’s certainly not what I think cinema should be about. I think it should be a reflection of the world.” 

Given that global heating is one of the greatest existential threats to humanity — a threat linked to increasingly frequent erratic and intense weather, including cyclones and tornadoes — the question is whether any movie about weather disasters can be an accurate "reflection of the world" if it neglects to acknowledge this major piece of humanity's scientific knowledge. Many real-world climate scientists argue it cannot.

"I do think it’s an unfortunate lost opportunity that speaks to the pusillanimous nature of Hollywood these days," Dr. Michael E. Mann, a climatologist at the University of Pennsylvania, said. "The science suggests that we are seeing larger outbreaks and more destructive tornadoes due to human-caused climate change."

Dr. Kevin Trenberth, a distinguished scholar at the National Center for Atmospheric Research who has published more than 600 articles on climatology, said that if "Twisters" shies away from directly mentioning climate change then it is "flawed." After all, the movie's premise is about a freakish series of tornadoes, and Trenberth is confident that climate change is producing exactly those types of storms.

"Climate change adds heat to the system and especially heats up the ocean," Trenberth said. "A result is about 10 to 20% increase in water vapor in the atmosphere. Both effects (temperature and moisture) increases add substantially to the instability of the atmosphere with a result of increased convection. This occurs on all scales and adds especially to fuel thunderstorms - and hurricanes."

Supercell thunderstorms harbor tornadoes, Trenberth added, and are especially prone to creating them when they have enough wind shear (sudden shifts in wind direction or speed) that it can be converted into rotation. "This factor is not clearly linked to climate change but the instability is," Trenberth added.

Dr. Twila Moon, the deputy lead scientist and science communication liaison at the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC), referred Salon to a pair of studies in the journals Geophysical Research Letters and Weather and Climate Extremes. Both articles found that, as humans increase Earth's temperature by emitting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, there is the potential for tornadoes to occur more often and with increased intensity.

"Some recent research suggest potential for increased intensity or frequency of tornadoes, with seasonal and time of day variations," Moon said. "Of course, the geography being considered is important."

Dr. Michael Wehner, a senior scientist in the Computational Research Division at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, was a little more skeptical than his peers. Wehner said that the omission of climate change from "Twisters" is glaring because global heating may be linked to the unusual proliferation of tornadoes in recent years, but the science isn't entirely settled.

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"There is much about the influence of climate change on tornadoes that is not well understood," Wehner said. "There has been an eastward shift in Tornado Alley? Is that due to climate change? Not clear to me."

Wehner also observed that there are more days than ever with clusters of tornadoes.

"This would appear to me to be consistent with warming, but the evidence is far from complete," Wehner said. "Also, I would expect that the most intense storms would become more intense. While there is a lot of evidence that this is happening for other storm types, the evidence again is far from complete for tornadoes."

Wehner is not alone among his colleagues in questioning the climate change connection to tornadoes.

"I think that it is premature to argue for any link between climate change and changes in tornado activity,"  Dr. Mark Serreze, director of the NSIDC, said. "Yes, more water vapor in the air can foster stronger convection, but a tornado is a very local feature and requires a very specific set of meteorological conditions, such as the right wind shear."

Some might argue that a movie like "Twisters" — which includes intentionally over-the-top sci-fi absurdities like scientists dissolving a tornado — does not need to include climate change to do its job. Chung implies as much by saying that popcorn flicks like "Twisters" bear no responsibility to do so as long as they are entertaining. Yet there is considerable evidence that movies influence viewers' perceptions of important real-world issues. There is only one Hollywood blockbuster to ever explicitly focus on global warming, 2004's "The Day After Tomorrow," and because it was a box office hit, it had a quantifiable and provable influence on public opinions. 

In his 2007 book "Hollywood Science," Emory University Physics Professor Sidney Perkowitz said that a survey by environmental science and policy expert Anthony Leiserowitz found the film "had a 'significant impact' on climate change risk perceptions, conceptual models, behavioral intentions, policy priorities." Viewed by roughly 21 million Americans in theaters, "the film led moviegoers to have higher levels of concern and worry about global warming [and] encouraged watchers to engage in personal, political, and social action to address climate change and to elevate global warming as a national priority … The movie even appears to have influenced voter preferences."

This potential for cultural influence explains why Hollywood now has the so-called Climate Reality Check, released earlier this year by Colby College’s Matthew Schneider-Mayerson in partnership with the group Good Energy. It holds that movies 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 heating and has a character who acknowledges it, it passes the Climate Reality Check, a distinction earned in 2023 by films like "Barbie," "Nyad" and "Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning Part One."

For her part, Good Energy's founder Anna Jane Joyner praised the film despite it not mentioning climate change directly. Joyner argues that its characters still manage to indirectly acknowledge the climate crisis.

"I'm grateful that Twisters acknowledges the climate crisis through the characters Javi [Anthony Ramos] and Cathy [Maura Tierney], who both comment that what they’re seeing is unprecedented," Joyner said. She believes "Twisters" can in its own way spread awareness in a positive manner.

"Our research with the USC Norman Lear Center Media Impact Project found that most viewers believe they care more about climate change than characters in TV and film," Joyner said. "Of the 250 most popular films of the past decade, movies that acknowledge the climate crisis made 10% more at the box office. People want these stories."

Moon added that Hollywood has "both good and bad examples" of scientific accuracy.

"I prefer to shine a light on the areas of progress and long-term investments in getting solid science — including climate science — into entertainment," Moon said. "For example, the upcoming Hollywood Climate Summit or the established Science & Entertainment Exchange. A brief Google search provides many more efforts, too."

At the same time, Moon feels Hollywood can do better, saying that "I’d love to see more entertainment incorporating good climate actions into the background. So the story doesn’t at all focus on climate, but the visuals and context provide cultural examples throughout of how we can live, work and play in climate-friendly and climate-aware ways. Social and cultural change is key to addressing the climate crisis."

These cultural exchanges can even prove prophetic about the climate crisis. "The Day After Tomorrow," for example, shows climate change-caused tornadoes ripping apart Los Angeles, which seemed ludicrous in 2004 but became a terrifying reality in 2023 — as well as, of course, the premise of "Twisters" in 2024. Equally prophetic in its own way, though, was the marketing meeting in which "The Day After Tomorrow"'s creative team learned a shocking fact about how the movie was to be promoted. Co-writer Jeffrey Nachmanoff recalled to Salon last month that when the creators "went in for the very first marketing meeting after we had sold the script," someone on the Fox marketing team said, "Just to be clear, as per Fox's policy, we will not be using the words 'global warming' when we market this film.' I almost spit my water out!"

Global warming has certainly changed in the two decades since that conversation, but apparently Hollywood's squeamishness about fully acknowledging that reality has not.