We are all, of course, pretty well doomed. We know that because Al Gore told us so in his documentary An Inconvenient Truth. But just in case we didn’t get the message, the producer of that film, Scott Z Burns, has come up with a series of dystopian mini-dramas, Extrapolations, which are supposed to give us a window into the future. The series, the first three episodes of which have just dropped on Apple TV, is the latest in a genre which has given us The Day After Tomorrow and Don’t Look Up.

The good news is that we have at least 47 years left, because 2070 is the date of the last of the dramas reaches (we will have to wait until 21 April for that one). Given that that episode is entitled Ecocide, however, that may be just about our lot. But in the meantime, the future looks reassuringly familiar. Come 2037 and the world will still be being ruined by capitalist bastards who pretend to be green (and who are now out to cover the melting Arctic with upmarket condos), COP meetings will still be ending in inaction and climate rag-haired protesters will still be preaching the end of times. The only difference is that by then they won’t just be glueing themselves to the roads; they will be self-immolating in front of motorists – something which I suspect will have your average van driver on the M25 crying bring it on!

By then we will have learned how to communicate with whales – or rather the world’s one remaining humpback whale

A decade further into the future, and most adults will still be too preoccupied with their busy lives to appreciate the peril we are all in – then, as now, only gobby children will have the insight to realise this (or at least the gobby children who aren’t confined indoors because of a new medical phenomenon known as summer heart). We will, however, by then have learned how to communicate with whales – or rather the world’s one remaining humpback whale. Sadly, though, this creature isn’t much of a conversationist; hectoring humans is about as far as she goes. In fact, she seems a bit like Greta Thunberg wrapped in blubber – she’s terribly angry when she discovers she has been deceitfully wooed by the recorded call of a male humpback whale who died years earlier. Whales, she says, don’t lie to each other.

By now, half the world’s species have gone the way of the dodo; though one corporation is making a song preserving them in the form of DNA, so that they might be brought back to life one day when the climate has calmed down. And the climate really has gone quite bizarre. The entire world seems to be gripped by forest fires and drought – which is pretty impossible. If the weather is hot in one place, promoting the rapid evaporation it must be cool and rainy somewhere else – the water vapour has to come down somewhere. In 2037, the US suffers 41 hurricanes in a single year, the last of which pretty well wipes out Miami – all the more remarkable given that, as of 2023, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) records that there has been no increase in the number of landfalling hurricanes in the US in the past two centuries.

In its moral simplicity, Extrapolations comes across as a great big kids’ film – although the liberal sprinkling of the ‘f’ word suggests that this isn’t its target audience. The heroine even says ‘f*ck’ while talking to the whale, though sadly the whale doesn’t seem to pick this up. Whales don’t appear to have swear words any more than they lie to each other. If only they did go about effing and blinding about the poor quality of today’s plankton, these films would be a lot more entertaining than they are.

Ross Clark is the author of Not Zero: How an Irrational Target Will Impoverish You, Help China (and Won’t Even Save the Planet)