Filmmaker and writer Scott Z. Burns is not known for science fiction, but he has an uncanny track record of foretelling the future.

Burns wrote the 2011 movie Contagion, which anticipated the Covid-19 pandemic. Before that, he was a producer of Al Gore’s prescient 2006 climate change documentary, An Inconvenient Truth. And next week will see the arrival of Extrapolations, Burns’ star-studded Apple TV+ series that dramatizes a near-future in which the climate crisis intensifies. It’s the first time a scripted television show has attempted to depict the all-too-probable realities of daily life in a world where carbon levels continue their inexorable rise.