A doomed Earth of science fiction may well become a reality

27 months and counting

There’s a scene in the newly-restored science fiction classic The Day the Earth Caught Fire (premiered last week in the summer open air cinema at the British Museum) when The Daily Express’s fictional, bull-nosed science reporter, Bill Maguire, barks at a newsroom junior to fetch him information on the melting points of various substances. It’s to illustrate a spread in the paper which is investigating how massive nuclear tests have shifted the planet on its axis, causing chaotic weather and a heat wave to slowly marinate London.

The screening launched the British Films Institute’s Sci-Fi season, whose light-hearted tone was set with kitsch alien facemasks given to the audience. A giant promotional selfie was taken before the film began.

At the end, the friend I’d watched it with, who works for an official environmental body, went very quiet. “Do you know what I’ve been doing in the last few days?” she asked rhetorically. “Looking into the melting points of various substances in the event of worsening heat waves hitting London.” We both went quiet then.

Research into heat thresholds shows what happens when science fiction becomes science fact. At 20C legionalla bacteria start developing in normal drinking water. At 24C London Underground start work to prevent track buckling. Less than a degree more, at 24.7C for a two-day duration, and deaths and hospital admissions rise. An estimated 600 more people died in London than usual during the 2003 heat wave.

Even well-insulated houses overheat at 27C. Power cables start getting hit at around 30C and the likelihood of power outages for businesses goes up. At 33C road surfaces begin to soften and melt. For comparison, in the 2003 heat wave, there were air temperatures recorded on the tubes and platforms of 41.5C and 36.2C respectively. The UK’s highest outdoor daytime temperature recorded so far was 38.5C, outside London in Gravesend, Kent.

There’s a key moment in the film when the characters realise something serious is happening because the authorities make plans to cut the mains water supply and set up communal drinking and washing facilities.

A real 2011 report on adapting to climate change by a group within the Committee on Climate Change looked at the impact of different scenarios for global warming on London’s water supply. The gap between water supply and demand in London is growing regardless. The report shows planned options for compulsory meters, a new reservoir at Abingdon, transferring water at Longdon Marsh and other measures. But in the worst case scenario (and actual global greenhouse gas emissions are indeed jumping off the worst case scenarios), taking account of all the suggested measures, a presentation based on the report notes that, a “combination of the three adaptation pathways do not address the extreme deficit” of water supply.

Science fiction’s typical, clever conceit is that it’s not really about fantastical futures at all. Instead, it offers a magnified version of the present that better allows us to see ourselves, and the patterns and implications of our current behaviour and technology.

The American author Kurt Vonnegut was masterful at this, but you can see it readily in the work of countless other writers who use the genre from Margaret Atwood to William Gibson and Philip K Dick. In Vonnegut’s satirical Galapagos all that is left of humanity a million years in the future are sleek, furry creatures with flippers and small brains. Civilisation ended, triggered by economic collapse and people becoming redundant as a result of the inventions of their previously large brains.

The survivors evolved from a handful who managed to climb aboard a cruise ship, the Bahia de Darwin, embarking on the ‘Nature Cruise of the Century’ to the Galapagos Islands. Our tragic flaw, wrote Vonnegut, is that when we are comfortable we’re slow to acknowledge any trouble we might be in. And, “the people who were best informed about the state of the planet ... and rich and powerful enough to slow down all the waste and destruction going on, were by definition well fed. So everything was always just fine as far as they were concerned.” In Vonnegut’s posthumously published Armageddon in Retrospect he notes that the United States should have had a ‘secretary of the future.’

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Back in the film, responding to bland assurances that officialdom will sort things out and realising the impossibility of escape, one character quips with bitter sarcasm, ‘Oh, we’ll all jump in a spaceship and go live on the moon.’ The unreality of our own time in the face of accelerating exploitation of natural resources (this year humanity went into ecological debt around 19 August) is that some see relocation as a serious option, or mining the moon, or asteroids, as a practical way of ignoring Earth’s planetary boundaries. That won’t help when, for example, the latest research shows we have only around a quarter of our primary, life-sustaining, intact forests left – only 5% of which is protected – and when forests are being lost at an astonishing rate.

The Day the Earth Caught Fire was made in 1961, in the early days of the consumer age, since then much of the ecological damage from over-consumption and the burning of fossil fuels has been done. It held up a mirror to the nuclear threat (even if to a modern viewer it feels like you’re watching a film about global warming) and, in doing so, became part of the cultural backlash that helped restrain one kind of Armageddon. The actual plot may have been wildly inventive, but it was justified in getting people to see a massive nuclear experiment in perspective and grasp its implications.

One extraordinary coincidence could not have been planned. The film’s hard-bitten voice of reason, Bill Maguire, has a real life namesake: Bill McGuire, emeritus professor of geophysical and climate hazards at University College London. The latter, real McGuire, is also a science writer. His latest book, Waking the Giant, provides a factual, scientific case for how global warming can even trigger earthquakes, tsunamis and volcanoes. Who needs science fiction with reality like this?

What mirror now will allow us to see and grasp the sheer voraciousness and prejudice with which we are altering the climate and undermining our life-supporting ecosystems? How many in the film’s modern audience left that warm summer evening marvelling mostly at the novelty of the clear archive footage of 1960s London, and how many left with something very different, the prickly unease that they were real, active characters living through an uncannily recognisable scenario to the one they had just watched, in which the outcome is just as precariously balanced?

McGuire also writes a column Doomwatch for the science magazine Focus. The film ends with the fictional Bill Maguire having produced two versions of the next day’s paper, depending on the outcome of their efforts to avert catastrophe. One headline reads ‘World Saved’, the other ‘World Doomed.’ We are left not knowing which gets printed.