The summer blockbuster is back with "Twisters," a loose sequel cum spiritual successor to 1996's megahit "Twister." This film has more action, more special effects wizardry and, yes, more of the eponymous whirlwinds wreaking havoc. But for a movie premised on cinematic excess, there's an absence in "Twisters" as well. Despite its focus on catastrophic weather, the film elides any mention of climate change and its real-world contributions to the meteorological bedlam onscreen. That is by design. "I wanted to make sure that we are never creating a feeling that we're preaching a message," the director, Lee Isaac Chung, said to CNN. 

Chung's omission has raised questions from critics and viewers wondering how a film about extreme weather works without addressing an underlying factor. Others have celebrated the movie's embrace of straightforward storytelling over broader moralizing. 

'Safe and sanitized'
Rather than focus on climate change, "Twisters" "proposes a "different idea: Don't sweat it. Science has got this," said Slate. The "geoengineering solutions" designed to combat tornadoes in the film are "especially attractive because they don't require any change." 

"Twisters" offers viewers a "safe and sanitized way to experience a natural disaster: as a fantasy," The New York Times said. And while climate change may not be mentioned, "Twisters" is "much more accurate" scientifically than its predecessor, former National Severe Storms Laboratory meteorologist Sean Waugh said at Nature.

'Studio caution during polarized times'
"Twisters" seems like it would have been "well positioned to explore the realities" of the complicated "relationship between climate change and tornadoes," The Verge said. By pointedly not addressing "factors like limited data collection methods," which "still make it difficult for researchers to establish concrete connections" between climate change and tornadoes, "Twisters" misses an opportunity to be a "thoughtful [evolution] of a franchise." Instead, it makes the whole project "seem even sillier than it already does." To not mention this at all is a "reflection of studio caution during polarized times when looking for a summer movie hit," added The Verge.

"It's not 'preaching' to acknowledge the world we all live in," said climate journalist Anna Jane Joyner on X. "Ignoring it sends a clear message too."

Since the post-1968 reforms that led both the Democratic and Republican parties to use binding caucuses and primaries to choose their presidential nominees, the nominating conventions have largely been scripted events whose outcomes were rarely in doubt. But Democratic and Republican leaders rightly see the conventions as free advertising and have often doled out prime speaking slots to politicians who are considered rising stars or whose supporters were vital to victory. 

Whose speeches made them political celebrities?
By far, the most meteoric rise out of a plum speaking spot was an obscure Illinois state legislator named Barack Obama. Obama's keynote speech called for unity. "There's not a liberal America and a conservative America — there's the United States of America," he said to thunderous applause. In 2004, the concept of "red" and "blue" states was only a few years old, and Obama's address spoke to a yearning to transcend that nascent division. It didn't work, of course, but it did catapult him into the Senate and then the presidency in 2008.

Twenty years earlier, New York Gov. Mario Cuomo's keynote at the 1984 Democratic National Convention in San Francisco electrified the crowd. Democrats, reeling from their 1980 shellacking at the hands of Republican Ronald Reagan, were searching for their footing as New Deal liberalism's appeal was fading. While many Democrats wanted Cuomo to run for the party's presidential nomination in 1988 and 1992, he never did. 

Whose speeches influenced party platforms?
Other speakers have been successful in pushing the party in a different direction. That was the case for insurgent "paleoconservative" Pat Buchanan, who had run against incumbent President George H.W. Bush in 1992. Buchanan said America was in the midst of a "culture war," that was "as critical to the kind of nation we shall be as was the Cold War itself, for this war is for the soul of America." Buchanan's positions on issues like free trade would later be adopted more successfully by Donald Trump.

Intraparty ideological struggles were also the reason for Sen. Elizabeth Warren's 2016 address to the DNC. Part of the party's progressive wing, Warren was tasked with shoring up support from disappointed supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders (Vt.).