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.)
