Movie Night: 'Before the Flood' (2016)

“Right here, right now is where we draw the line. The world is waking up. And change is coming whether you like it or not.”

Greta Thunberg at the United Nations General Assembly, 2020

Before The Flood: This movie is great for a public audience. This movie was shown March 30th, 2021. The way this movie was put together to demonstrate how climate change is and will affect the planet was easy to understand and gave many great scientific facts and visuals. Some main points in the movie show that 1) climate change is real and happening, 2) fossil fuel influence is seen throughout the government, 3) the U.S consumes way too much and produces too much waste, 4) solutions are out there and available now to make a change. DiCaprio used his large influential platform to raise awareness for something that needs to be addressed and acted upon immediately.

Before the Flood (2016), with Leonardo DiCaprio

Before the Flood (2016), presented by National Geographic, follows the journey of actor Leonardo DiCaprio who meets with scientists, activists, and world leaders to discuss the dangers of climate change and possible solutions. As we know, climate change is an ongoing fight and if no immediate changes are made right now, there will be severe consequences that we and our future generations will suffer greatly from.

We created a survey based on questions from the Yale Climate survey and asked the FPU population to take it and give feedback. We recorded 97 responses and found some interesting results.

A bar graph to show different opinions among the Average US citizen (Yale 2020), Environmental Science majors at FPU, and non- ES majors at FPU. Data for the Average US Citizen came from the Yale Climate Opinion Maps. Percentages for FPU students were calculated by converting the amount of those who agree strongly/moderately with the question out of total students within the Environmental Science/Studies major, and then again with non-ES majors.

100% of students who took the survey agreed that global warming is happening. The Yale climate maps reported that 72% of Americans agree with this statement.

90.7% of total students think that global warming is caused mostly by human activities.

82% of students at FPU strongly support funding research into renewable energy sources.

90% of FPU students agree that global warming will harm people in developing countries. 65% of US adult citizens agree with this statement.

Paris Climate Agreement

The Paris Climate Agreement was mentioned numerous times during the movie and was an important moment in seeing true action being taken. It was a landmark international accord that was adopted by nearly every nation in 2015 to address climate change and its negative impacts. The agreement aims to substantially reduce global greenhouse gas emissions in an effort to limit the global temperature increase in this century to 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels while pursuing the means to limit the increase to 1.5 degrees. The agreement includes commitments from all major emitting countries to cut their climate pollution and to strengthen those commitments over time.

CO2 causes warming

Carbon dioxide (CO₂) is an important heat-trapping (greenhouse) gas, which is released through human activities such as deforestation and burning fossil fuels, as well as natural processes such as respiration and volcanic eruptions (NASA 2021). Over the past 171 years, human activities have raised atmospheric concentrations of CO₂ by 48% above pre-industrial levels found in 1850 (NASA 2021). As of February 2021, [CO2] is at 416 ppm in the atmosphere. [CO2] has increased every year since 1950.

Oil

Oil releases a huge amounts of carbon when burned - approximately a third of the world's total carbon emissions. Carbon dioxide is most often emitted as a result of the combustion of fossil fuels. Common uses of oil include transportation fuels, fuel oils for heating and electricity generation, asphalt and road oil, and feedstocks for making the chemicals, plastics, and synthetic materials that are in nearly everything we use.

Coal

Coal is another harmful fossil fuel but luckily, its usage has decreased in recent years. It used to be the popular energy source but as the climate crisis has worsened, the transition to switch to less harmful energy sources has been sped up. The uses for coal have developed and changed over the years, trains and ships used coal for fuel and factories used coal to make iron and steel. However today, we burn coal mainly to make electricity.

Natural Gas

Natural Gas is another fossil fuel that emits CO2 and methane into the atmosphere. By pipeline leaks and combustion of natural gas. Natural gas use is for heating and generating electricity, but some consuming sectors have other uses for natural gas. The electric power sector uses natural gas to generate electricity. Natural gas accounted for 38% of total utility-scale U.S. electricity generation by all sectors in 2019.

References

Before the Flood. Before the Flood. (2016). https://www.beforetheflood.com/.

Climate Change: Vital Signs of the Planet. Global Climate Change: Vital Signs of the Planet. (2021). https://climate.nasa.gov/.

Marlon, J., Howe, P., Mildenberger, M., Leiserowitz, A., & Wang, X. (2020). Yale Climate Opinion Maps 2020 - Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. https://climatecommunication.yale.edu/visualizations-data/ycom-us/.

This page created by Nicole Thibeault, Sam van Oostrum, and Jacob Lopes

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