Why Did Futurama Remake Its Climate Change Episode, But Worse?

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[00:00:00]It's November 2002.

[00:00:02]The soontobe canceled Futurramama tackles climate change, saterizing our collective inability to address the obvious looming catastrophe that threatens life on Earth. It's September 2025.

[00:00:15]The inevitably to be canceled Futurama tackles climate change, satarizing our collective inability to address the obvious looming catastrophe that threatens life on Earth. I can't stop thinking about this episode. I can't stop wondering why does it exist?

[00:00:33]Why does it seem barely aware of its own predecessor?

[00:00:37]And most importantly, didn't they kill off that bear biologist like two seasons ago?

[00:00:48]I don't think the Hulu seasons of Futurama are very good.

[00:00:52]>> Professor, you're a teddy bear. I assure you I am not. which is fine. Actually, [laughter] at this point, Futurama exists primarily so middle-aged nerds have a show they can put on while they fall asleep. But there's one episode in the most recent season I cannot get out of my head. Season God help us 13, episode 2, The World is Hot Enough, which first aired in September 2025.

[00:01:13]This is the second episode of Futurama that tackles climate change, following on from season 5, episode 1, Crimes of the Hot, which first aired thousands of years ago in November 2002.

[00:01:23]>> Global warming. Wobble wapu.

[00:01:27]>> Yeah, >> normally retwing a story line like this might be weird and kind of lazy, but since the real world is, you know, [music] continuing to heat up, Futurama may as well use its Gollumlike unnaturally long lifespan to examine how much has changed on Earth while the show was busy getting cancelled over and over again. So, what has changed in that time, you might ask? Well, just for some definition of fun, here's how much the global surface air temperature has risen on Earth between when these two episodes came out. The world is hot enough picks up the thread by once again mixing up weather and climate.

[00:01:58]>> It's just such a hot, sunny day.

[00:02:00]>> But I've got bigger nits to pick before introducing the main conflict. The previous plan to combat global warming by dropping a giant ice cube into the ocean every now and then isn't working anymore. The planet's still getting too hot. We need another solution. So, wait, hang on. Actually, we got to back up.

[00:02:16]See, this is also the main conflict in Crimes of the Hot back in 2002. In that episode, Haley's comet has run out of ice >> that don't have bugs in them, >> and they need a new solution. At a global climate summit, Professor Farnsworth reveals that while working for mom's friendly robot company, he designed robots that absolutely blast carbon emissions. The billionaire industrious wants to make money, though, >> we'll just call it a sport utility robot and classify it as a light truck.

[00:02:41]>> And Farnsworth says, >> I suppose the environment can take one more for the team. and goes along with it. At first, Professor Worst and President Nixon's plan is to destroy all robots to cut off the greenhouse gas problem. But in the end, the Planet Express crew figure out a way to use the full ass blasting power of all the robots on Earth to push the planet further away from the sun, thus solving the problem once and for all. BUT >> ONCE AND FOR ALL.

[00:03:03]>> The world is hot enough does not bring this up.

[00:03:07]>> As you may recall, >> nope. We've been keeping the climate emergency in check by dropping a massive ice cube in the ocean every now and then.

[00:03:16]>> I'M EVEN GREATER THAN I THOUGHT I was.

[00:03:18]And now to fulfill my destiny >> at all. It It's very confusing. And look, man, I don't want to get hung up on the little things here. It would be very difficult to tell a story about climate change if you acknowledge that you've already come up with a permanent long-term solution to climate change.

[00:03:34]But, you know, maybe lean into that. You know, cooling the planet without actually fixing the robots that are still blasting emissions is just a band-aid solution. Maybe something about how that just kicks the can down the road.

[00:03:43]>> Well, who cares? That won't be for hundreds of years.

[00:03:47]>> Exactly. It's none of our concern.

[00:03:49]>> In any case, the world is hot enough simplifies back down to the ice cube thing. But now, Professor Farnsworth is rattled by new data. Data that shows the planet is heating up too fast and the ice won't cut it anymore. In this episode's scientific conference, we get some shots of smog blasting space ships before finding out that the conference is sponsored by mom's friendly heavy fuel oil >> because we can't switch to clean fuel all at once.

[00:04:15]>> It's been a thousand years.

[00:04:17]>> And okay, all right. Now we're getting somewhere. You know how like fossil fuel companies will sponsor climate research specifically in ways that flatter their own image while still justifying everything they already want to do that's causing the problem in the first place? Okay. Okay, that's dangerously close to some insightful satire there, Futurama. So, Farnsworth presents the new climate data as a dense spreadsheet, which no one can parse obviously. Mom responds by bringing in her own bought and paid for shill, Dr. Banjo. He claims you can make numbers say whatever you want, that it's no big deal. The Earth is a few degrees warmer, etc. And then there's this.

[00:04:48]>> This is nothing but an attempt to demonize the hardworking men and women of the pollution industry.

[00:04:55]>> You just earned yourself a set of patio furniture.

[00:04:58]>> Okay. Yeah. There we go. All right. We are we are the ball is rolling in this episode. See that is drawing a straight line between the corrupting influence of money and industry and the exhausting quagmire of misinformation and bad faith discourse we have to wade through to even talk about anything all in one simple gag. Hell yeah. That's the futurama I'm talking about. And then Amy suggests turning the spreadsheet data into a graph. And let me guess, you're going to use drop shadows and color the hot part red.

[00:05:28]>> [screaming] >> HOLY HELL.

[00:05:30]>> LOOK HOW HIGH AND RED it gets.

[00:05:36]>> Well, I I guess the billionaire industrialist is easily persuaded by a simple graph. Wonder why we never thought to try that before. Then we get the first of many instances of the joke that made me want to make this video in the first place.

[00:05:48]>> If only the good people of the 21st century had had this information, they might not have suffered so horribly in the climatastrophe.

[00:05:56]>> President Nixon. Sir, your highness, what the [ __ ] are you talking about? The whole premise is that this data is from the 31st century. How How would it make any sense for it to be helpful for the people of the 21st century? Oh, I told you. I told you I had some bigger nits to pick. Well, here it is. The knit, and I'm going to pick it. Like, seriously, they say this over and over.

[00:06:20]>> If people from my day had had this information, they might have had a chance to prevent the climatastrophe.

[00:06:25]But the information they are describing is how in the 31st century global temperatures are suddenly spiking enough to merit urgent action. As in this information wouldn't be available until the spike occurs, which didn't happen until the 31st century. I know this is a show where it is a substantial loadbearing plot point that one of the main characters is literally his own grandfather. But there's only so much violation of causality I can take. Now, before you run to the comments, because yes, I have learned that dragging out a joke for four straight minutes is a bit long, but I understand. You are supposed to know from the start that the joke is that this is really about our time.

[00:07:02]Obviously, in which case I have to ask how many times >> if only the good people of the 21st century >> will this episode >> had this information >> make this joke.

[00:07:17]>> They could have saved themselves from the climatastrophe. [music] >> And don't worry, we are going to come back to this. At this point, the episode veers away from any substantive satire of the causes of climate change to a weirdly long and confusing spoof of celebrities talking about it. In my time, whenever we had a problem that seemed insurmountable, we'd pull together and rally the entire world with a feel-good anthem.

[00:07:39]>> This sounds like a job for celebrities.

[00:07:42]>> And then we get this weird song about how like no one gives a [ __ ] about saving the planet for the children, [music] but polar bears are cute, so >> let's do it for the bears.

[00:07:55]>> And it's intercut with this montage of how much waste and pollution goes into making records. I guess like it's got this weird and yet you participate in society energy, but specifically about how if you were to produce and distribute a vinyl record of a climate change anthem, that action might undercut your message about environmentalism. It's just so weirdly specific that it felt like it had to be referencing a real event. The closest I could find is this story of RM lead singer [music] Michael Stipe selling a split single for Earth Percent, an organization that says it helps music related groups raise and distribute funds to address the climate and biodiversity emerged. And so, okay, okay, something just clicked into place there. Anyway, that split single was apparently the world's first commercially available bioplastic 12-in vinyl. So, if this is a specific reference, I am truly not sure what they're on about. More generally, the point seems to be that it's kind of annoying when celebrities make a real problem about themselves, which yeah, okay, fair enough. I I guess I I guess that's true. That is a thing that happens sometimes. I don't care about that quite as much as the planet becoming inhospitable to life on Earth.

[00:09:09]But yeah, sure. I also kind of can't get over how much Let's Do It for the Bears just doesn't land for me. Like set aside that actually I do think people are generally sympathetic to other people losing [music] their homes like to fires or floods or whatnot and I do generally think that people care about human children both their own and other people's but even setting that aside bears that's your cute sympathetic animal you go with I mean like like yeah polar bears are kind of cute I guess but you sure you don't want to go with like sea otterters or turtles Wait, hang on.

[00:09:47]You You did turtles in the first episode? Is that why we're doing bears here? Because you needed a like substitute animal and already did turtles? While we're on the subject of repeated beats from the first episode, it's time to introduce a sci-fi method of cooling the earth. And I do actually like this. Futurama is at its best when it's indulging in sci-fi rigomeural nonsense. So, what kind of outlandish, impractical, yet entertaining solution have we come up with this time? In the past, large volcanic eruptions spewed clouds of ash that reflected sunlight and cooled earth temporarily. There it is, Mount Vuvius, the perfect volcano for our purposes.

[00:10:23]>> So, yeah, the idea is to manually set off a volcanic eruption, scorching the nearby land, creating a permanent cloud cover of smoke and ash, blacking out the sun, allowing free travel for the orcs of the newly formed Mort. Wait, no, wrong show. Wrong show. But hang on, would that even work? Like, would a volcanic eruption actually cool the planet? What a good question. I am so glad I have such a clever and inquisitive person like you in my audience. The rest of you could learn something from them. So, to answer your question, yes, but also no. The thick clouds of volcanic material that get spewed into the atmosphere after an eruption do affect the planet's reflectivity and can cool the planet.

[00:11:00]And in fact, this has happened much much more recently than the eruption of Mount Vuvius that the episode references. Like [music] when James Madison was president recently in 1815, Mount Tambbora erupted in what is present day Indonesia, ejecting between 8.9 and 10.8 cubic miles of volcanic material into the atmosphere. On the volcanic explosivity index, or VEI, which measures eruptions in part based on how much material is ejected into the atmosphere, it's the most recent to register at a VEI 7. For comparison, the eruption of Mount Vuvius was only a VEI 5. And yes, Professor Farnsworth is technically correct.

[00:11:37]>> The best kind of correct.

[00:11:39]>> Those thick clouds do reflect some of the sun's rays, leading to some temporary cooling. In 1816, global temperatures cooled by around 0.53° C, leading to what became known as the year without a summer. This sudden and dramatic climate change led to major crop failures and food shortages across the northern hemisphere. So, I'm not overly confident that Farnsworth's plan here is entirely without hitches. But hey, turning down the global temperature by half a degree Celsius in a single year sounds pretty good, right? For comparison, global temperatures have risen by about 0.56° between these two Futurama climate change episodes. So, we could take that as a win, right? There's just one problem. When volcanoes erupt, they spew out thick clouds of, among other things, water, [music] hydrogen, sulfur dioxide, and carbon dioxide. You might remember carbon dioxide as one of those pesky greenhouse gases that traps more solar radiation on Earth. Over the short term, sure, [music] dark clouds of ash and smoke can reflect some sunlight, but over the long term, more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere means the planet gets hotter. We can actually see another instance when this happened in the late 1800s. The Crakatoa eruption of 1883, which clocked in at a VEI of 6, caused summer temperatures in the northern hemisphere to drop by around 0.4° C.

[00:12:55]Now, sure, that's a smaller, more regional effect than the Tambbora eruption, but it's recent enough that we can see it on the chart of the global mean temperature record that the Futurama episode keeps referencing. And here's where that event occurred. Just sort of goes down and goes right back up very shortly after. One minor aside, and I really don't want to get too far into this, but part of the plot in this episode involves mixing reflective Marty Grog glitter into the volcanic eruption, which seems to be a reference to a geoengineering technique called stratospheric aerosol injection. This is a real thing, and it is an option to potentially reduce incoming heat from the sun, but it's important to note that a it's generally accepted that at this point that would need to be in addition to efforts to reduce carbon emissions, not in place of them. two, this isn't even necessarily the best possible geoengineering option on the table. And D, you absolutely do not have to deliberately set off a volcano to do it.

[00:13:51]The point is, even if setting off a volcano is a temporarily good way to reflect some of the sun's radiation to cool Earth, it's a terrible way to solve climate change longterm because it only makes the greenhouse gas problem worse, which would actually accelerate the process by which the climate gets worse.

[00:14:06]This wouldn't bother me so much if the crimes of the hot didn't already do this with the whole giant mirror in space thing. In the original episode, Worstrom puts a gigantic mirror in orbit around the Earth, reflecting 40% of the sun's rays, >> thus cooling Earth.

[00:14:21]>> And that actually makes way more sense than a volcanic eruption, at least until a tiny rock knocks it out of alignment.

[00:14:28]But like, as implausible fun sci-fi concepts go, this is way better. I I don't know. Oh, it just it seems like a bummer that the big successful sci-fi solution of the sequel episode is just a messier, less effective version of an idea they rejected in the original. And to be clear, it's not that I'm expecting scientific accuracy from my silly cartoon sitcom. What's disappointing is that after 20 plus years, we're sort of just retwredding the same sci-fi beat.

[00:14:53]Part of what makes sci-fi stories interesting is how they make you think about the world around you. How they help you learn things you might not have known before. Like when they push the earth further from the sun to cool it.

[00:15:01]Yes, it's silly. Yes, it's not practical, but it makes you think, hey, would that work? What kind of effects would that have? And then they address that.

[00:15:10]>> Hey, professor, now that the Earth's orbit is further from the sun, won't that MAKE THE YEAR LONGER?

[00:15:16]>> WHY, YES, one week longer to be exact.

[00:15:19]>> That's cool. That's interesting. Maybe you just learned something about how Earth's orbit works. Meanwhile, what did I learn from the world is hot enough?

[00:15:26]Well, I I guess I learned about the casts of people who died in Pompei.

[00:15:31]That's That's kind of neat, I guess. I don't know, man. Putting these two episodes side by side, I just can't shake how much it feels like the new episode is trying to slot in barely updated versions of the exact same story beats as the original. The wow, it's hot out opening, the scientific conference complete with a celebrity cameo, the cute animal subplot, the implausible science fiction solution, and in most cases, each new element feels like a step down. Except replacing Al Gore with Bill Nye, that is at worst a lateral move. Honestly, they're both fun cameos.

[00:16:00]But both episodes accomplish largely the same thing, which is disappointing given the rare chance to revisit such an important topic with measurable tangible changes between them. It's a golden opportunity to see how much progress we have or haven't made and say something incisive about the problem. Speaking of, at the end of the episode, when they finally reveal that the climate data they've been looking at is actually from 2025, what is the lesson we take from this?

[00:16:26]You're saying the people of my time saw this and did nothing? That's precisely what I'm saying. This that now? Yes.

[00:16:36]Those poor innocent morons.

[00:16:39]>> That's it. People saw this, but they're dumb, so they didn't do anything.

[00:16:46]I don't know. I I actually don't know if nobody did anything is quite the problem we're dealing with. I I actually think that maybe the problem is that we have a lot of very smart, very dedicated people who are doing quite a lot to solve the problem, but we also have a lot of people with a lot of money and power.

[00:17:03]People who don't like the idea of giving up any of their money and power. People who actively work to undermine and sabotage any progress towards mitigating the climatastrophe.

[00:17:15]If only there were characters in this show that could serve as analoges for those kinds of people, the billionaire industrialists or the politicians that have a vested interest in keeping things exactly as they are. Maybe instead of taking so much time to dunk on celebrities for singing about a problem and for people liking bears more than children, maybe there's room to focus more on [music] those guys. Antagonists that probably wouldn't be swayed by a colorful graph with drop shadows. Look how high and red it gets. Uh >> oh well. Maybe we can try again in another 25 years.

[00:17:59]Well, that's it. Nice and short one this time. Kind of experimenting with doing some shorter form, more light-hearted stuff. I got a few more scripts in the works that I'm hoping will be able to come out a bit on more of a regular cadence. I've got some thoughts on Pathologic 3. I've got a somewhat bigger Ready Player One video I've talked about on my Patreon. and I might just have to come out of retirement for one last smaller way less comprehensive but still anamorphs video. I've gotten some comments over the years that I just feel like I have to address. As always, I want to thank my patreons that have continued supporting me. In particular, I want to thank EMC, Gild the Gilded Dragon, Miss Eldrich, and Tyler McCarti.

[00:18:43]Thank you all so, so much. I wouldn't be able to do this without all of you and I will see you in the next one.

[00:18:54]Maybe we can try again in another 25 years and three more cancellations.

[00:18:59]Let's just hope one of those cancellations isn't Earth. Oh no, WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE.

[00:19:05][ __ ]