Environmental Issues in
Northern Ontario
GREEN - Greater Renewable
Energy and Ecodesigns Now
THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW - A Movie Review
“For
years we thought we could consume our planet’s resources without thought
for the consequences, we were wrong and I was wrong,” said the new
President of the United States at the end of the movie, The Day After
Tomorrow.
He was speaking from a refugee camp for
Americans in Mexico after gigantic tornadoes smashed Los Angeles,
blizzards blasted New York City and the former President’s own motorcade
failed to outrun an advancing super storm.
The Day After Tomorrow is a $125 million
motion picture that takes an emotional look at climate change.
Paleoclimatologist Jack Hall (Dennis
Quaid) and his co-workers, Frank (Jay O. Saunders) and Jason (Dash Mihok)
are drilling for cores in the Antarctic when a piece of ice shelf the
size of Rhode Island breaks away beside their research station.
From there the scientists desperately try
to convince a skeptical Dick Cheney like U.S. Vice President (Kenneth
Welsh) that a new Ice Age is immanent.
“It was really an incredible movie,
showing just how wrong we are in what we do,” said movie patron Angela
Meinzinger. “It was a reality check, the message from the movie is we
have to change,” she said.
While critics may laugh derisively at the
Hollywood portrayal of abrupt climate catastrophe that quickly develops
in the movie, some scientists and environmentalists might agree there
are kernels of truth described.
In fact, a document prepared for the
Pentagon, entitled An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its
Implications for United States National Security was completed last
October. Only months ago it was leaked to the public.
“We have created a climate change
scenario that although not the most likely, is plausible, and would
challenge the United States national security in ways that should be
considered immediately,” said authors Peter Schwartz and Doug Randall.
The authors conclude that recent research
indicates that global warming could lead to an abrupt slowing of ocean’s
thermohaline conveyor, responsible for bringing warm Gulf waters to the
north Atlantic regions like England.
“This could lead to harsher winter
weather conditions, sharply reduced soil moisture and more intense winds
in certain regions that currently provide a significant fraction of the
world’s food production,” state the authors.
Once a temperature threshold is reached
changes could be abrupt causing drops in some regions of 5-10 degrees F
in a single decade. Food shortages and increased natural disasters could
lead to human conflict.
Robert Gagosian, Director of the
prestigious Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution prepared a paper on
abrupt climate change for the World Economic Forum in Davos Switzerland
in 2003.
“Fossil evidence clearly demonstrates
that Earth’s climate can shift gears within a decade, establishing new
and different patterns that can persist for decades to centuries,” said
Gagosian.
In fact, Gagosian cites a 2002 report by
the US National Academy of Sciences. It said that available evidence
suggests that abrupt climate changes are not only possible but likely in
the future, potentially with large impacts on ecosystems and societies.
“This new paradigm of abrupt climate
change has been well established over the last decade by research of
ocean, earth and atmospheric scientists at many institutions worldwide,
but the concept remains little known and scarcely appreciated,” he said.
In the 1982, one scientist, John Hamacher of England, in The Survival of
Civilization, pioneered the theory of global cooling following initial
global warming. The Scottish actor at the research institute in Scotland
in the Day After Tomorrow bears a resemblance to Hamacher, which prompts
me to believe that is where the idea for the movie came from.
In the U.S. in the midst of an election
year, environmental organizations are being careful in how they approach
the film.
“Sorting fact from fiction in these
stories like the Day After Tomorrow is crucial, we have the technology
to fix the problem with more efficient technology but what’s needed is
the political leadership to make it happen,” said a press release from
The Natural Resources Defense Council in March.
In Canada, implementing the Kyoto Accord
is being debated as part of our own national election. But as Laurentian
Univeristy Earth Sciences Professor Dave Pearson said at the recent
Kyoto conference in Sudbury, Kyoto is only the beginning of what needs
to be done. To ignore the reality of climate change, whether it comes
today as in the movie, or in the next decades according to science, is
to court disaster.
Maybe our politicians should watch The
Day After Tomorrow as part of their Kyoto education!
(And how did Canadians fare in the movie?
We froze first. No survivors.)
