Imagining the climate crisis: notes on Extrapolations

How can we imagine the climate crisis in its full complexity, menace, and possibility?

Answering this question is what climate fiction (never call it “cli-fi”) attempts to do. I’ve been exploring the field (some examples here), and wanted today to share notes on a new example: the new tv show Extrapolations, the first three episodes of which Apple TV just released.

A quick summary: “2037: A Raven Story” takes us fourteen years ahead to a world much like our own, with smartphones, COP meetings, and feuding families. A pair of rich men scheme to build a casino in the largely ice-free Arctic. “2046: Whale Fall” advances nine years and focuses on a cetologist, Rebecca Shearer, whom we saw in the first episode, studying what may be the last whale. She works for a company trying to rebuild animal species, while caring for a child stricken with heart problems. “2047: The Fifth Question” turns to the first episode’s rabbi Marshall Zucker, who has moved to Florida after all, where a massively underpopulated Miami is gradually sinking beneath the ocean. It’s also the funniest.

Across all three episodes the climate crisis is getting worse. Temperatures have risen, causing health problems. Fires are more widespread than now, sometimes choking cities. There are fewer animal species. One character sums things up by…