For the most part, "The Day After Tomorrow" is your typical disaster movie, albeit one that combines virtually every weather disaster you can imagine.
RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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Al Gore has called the movie "honest fiction," which he meant as a compliment.
This is a bad thing?
They are pulling out all the stops this election. Every device in the propaganda arsenal is being utilized.
I read that they banned the press from attending the party after the premiere Monday night, a move that is usually reserved for movies that totally suck; they don't want to have to deal with the media ready to pounce on the kill.
I've seen the trailers. This movie looks like a modern remake of "Earthquake". Anybody remember "Sensaround"?
As a scientist, I bristle when lies dressed up as "science" are used to influence political discourse. The latest example is the global-warming disaster flick, The Day After Tomorrow.
This film is propaganda designed to shift the policy of this nation on climate change. At least that's what I take from producer Mark Gordon's comment that "part of the reason we made this movie" was to "raise consciousness about the environment."
Fox spokesman Jeffrey Godsick says, "The real power of the movie is to raise consciousness on the issue of (global warming)."
'Nuff said.
Oh, the plot. Global warming causes the Gulf Stream to shut down. This current normally brings tropical warmth northward and makes Europe much more comfortable than it should be at its northerly latitude. The heat stays stuck in the tropics, the polar regions get colder, and the atmosphere suddenly flips over in a "superstorm." The frigid stratosphere trades places with our habitable troposphere, and in a matter of days, an ice age ensues. Temperatures drop 100 degrees an hour in Canada. Hurricanes ravage Belfast. Folks in Japan are clobbered by bowling-ball-size hailstones. If we had only listened to concerned scientists and stopped global warming when we could.
Each one of these phenomena is physically impossible.
Start with the Gulf Stream. Carl Wunsch, a professor of physical oceanography at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, knows more about ocean currents than most anyone. He thinks the nonsense in The Day After Tomorrow detracts from the seriousness of the global-warming issue. So he recently wrote in the prestigious science journal Nature that the scenario depicted in the movie requires one to "turn off the wind system, or to stop the Earth's rotation, or both."
The stratosphere will become the troposphere when all three laws of thermodynamics are repealed. Hailstones can't reach bowling-ball size because their growth is limited by gravity. Hurricanes can't hit Belfast because the intervening island of Ireland would destroy them.
How do I know so much about a movie that isn't out yet? I've seen the promos, and I've read and reviewed the book upon which it is based, The Coming Global Superstorm by Art Bell and Whitley Strieber. In Strieber's previous work, Communion, he explained that he was told of the Earth's upcoming apocalypse by aliens. And how this knowledge was communicated is much more the purview of an adult Web site than a family newspaper. What's on the movie's Web site is worse — nothing but out-and-out distortion.
It also insists that what is depicted on the screen has already started.
"Did you know," says the site, that there were more tornadoes recorded in May 2003 than in any other month?
I looked up federal tornado statistics, and indeed they're going up, and there was a peak in May 2003. Then I determined the number of radar stations and their type. When our first radar-tracking network was established in the 1960s and '70s, the number of tornadoes rose proportionally, then leveled off until the new Doppler radars came online in 1988. It took a decade to put this system in place, and the number of reported tornadoes went up accordingly.
Then I plotted the number of severe tornadoes. If anything, it's going down. So the flashy Doppler radars are merely detecting more weak storms that cause little, if any, damage.
The Web site also implies that global warming is making hurricanes worse. Christopher Landsea, the world's most aptly named hurricane scientist, has studied the maximum winds in these storms as measured by aircraft and finds a significant decline.
Global warming? Some scientists think climate change strengthens El Niño, the large atmospheric oscillation responsible for a variety of weather — both good and bad. El Niños are known to rip apart hurricanes. So it's more likely that climate change is weakening these storms than enhancing them.
Will Godsick and Gordon get their way? They're sure being aided and abetted by MoveOn.org, the liberal advocacy group and billionaire George Soros' policy toy. They've got Al Gore front and center, plumping the film. They've got their Web site using the movie to drum up support for legislation by Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., to reduce carbon-dioxide emissions, which only failed by 12 votes last fall. There's a huge drought out West, which a New York Times editorial blamed on global warming. The issue is hot enough to influence votes out there.
Remember that humans have slightly warmed the planet some in recent decades, but the correlation between Western drought and warming is zero.
Far be it from me to criticize anyone's freedom of expression. But remember that propaganda can have consequences. McCain's and Lieberman's measure mimics the United Nations' infamous Kyoto Protocol on global warming, which many scientists know will do nothing measurable about planetary temperature within the policy-relevant future. But it will cost money.
This isn't Hollywood's first attempt to scare people into its way of thinking. How about Jane Fonda in the 1979 anti-nuclear-power flick, The China Syndrome?
Twelve days after its release, the accident at Three Mile Island occurred. Despite the fact that it released only tiny amounts of radiation, the politics of that hysteria effectively killed any new nuclear plant.
Analogize the Western drought to Three Mile Island, and you get the idea.
Or how about the 1983 movie The Day After, whose purpose was to strengthen the nuclear-freeze movement. It failed.
The Day After Tomorrow is only one more day than The Day After, and it deserves the same fate. Lies cloaked as science should never determine how we live our lives.
Patrick J. Michaels is senior fellow in environmental studies at the Cato Institute and author of the upcoming book, Meltdown: The Predictable Distortion of Global Warming by Scientists, Politicians and the Media. Find this article at this link.
I'll rent the DVD because I'm a special effects geek.
Other than that, it's entertainment, an escape for a few hours. It's no different than Harry Potter. This is not a plot that will allow/force us to examine ourselves.
Anyone who takes this movie seriously probably soiled themselves at "The Blair Witch" and probably spent months in abject fear and utter terror of the water after "Jaws".
This is the dems' "Passion"...
For the most part, "The Day After Tomorrow" is your typical disaster movie, albeit one that combines virtually every weather disaster you can imagine.
RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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Let me guess: every cultural/artistic monument in the world will be hit, with computer-like precision.
It seems as though the hype for the movie barely mentions its being based upon a book by Art Bell and Whitley Strieber, the latter of whom claims to have been abducted by aliens, implanted with an alien device, and tracked now wherever he goes by creatures from Alpha Centauri or some such place. That puts the "global warming" fairy tale in perspective.
The movie stinks.
"Attack of the Killer Tomatoes" has a better plot and more character development.
So I'll probably go see it tomorrow. And even if it's bad, watching liberals get their knickers in a twist over a silly science fiction movie should be almost as much fun as watching Christians foam at the mouth over a silly murder mystery called The Da Vinci Code.