A Hard Rain's
A-Gonna Fall
By Geroge Monbiot
15May,
2004
The
Guardian
Perhaps
it was a mistake for 20th Century Fox to invite a group of scientists
to the preview of its new disaster movie. Before it began, the climatologist
Mike Hulme asked the audience to consider whether good science and good
film-making could go together. A few minutes later, it became obvious
that the answer was no. The Day After Tomorrow is a great movie and
lousy science.
Like all science
fiction, it extracts and magnifies a few fragments of scientific truth.
The upper northern hemisphere remains habitable partly because of the
global circulation of ocean currents, which drags warm water up from
the tropics. The currents start in the North Atlantic when the dense,
salty surface waters sink to the ocean floor and begin to roll southward.
Between Greenland and the Faroe Islands there is an undersea waterfall
30 times the size of the River Amazon.
About 8,200 years
ago, as the last main glacial period was coming to an end, and the great
global thaw had permitted humans to move back into northern Europe,
an ice dam in north-eastern Canada burst. Behind it was a vast body
of meltwater, which roared through the Hudson Strait and into the North
Atlantic. The story of what happened next is now a matter of dispute,
but some researchers suggest the result was a 200-year ice age, during
which humans once more were driven out of northern Europe. The Day After
Tomorrow starts with the premise that it could be about to happen again.
In fact, it now
seems that there simply isn't enough freshwater to shut down the circulation
system, and no means, such as the bursting of the great Canadian ice
dam, by which it could enter the ocean quickly enough to cause a dramatic
effect.
But movies, of course,
are all about dramatic effects, and a film about the slow-rolling, complex
transformations induced by climate change would be about as gripping
as a speech by Geoff Hoon. I suppose we just have to accept that a major
movie house would never dream of tackling this subject if it had to
stick to the facts.
What we get instead
is one of the best disaster movies ever released. Dennis Quaid plays
that stock sci-fi figure, the dissident scientist battling against the
odds to persuade politicians to take his data seriously. Having researched
the last great oceanic shutdown, he warns that the next one could happen
within 50-100 years. No one wants to know, and no one wants to know
less than the sinister, corporate-friendly US vice-president, whose
physical resemblance to Dick Cheney is surely no accident (the president,
confusingly, is the spit of Al Gore).
The effects of climate
change are already making themselves felt - commuters in Japan are felled
by hailstones the size of grapefruit, there is snow in New Delhi and
the geese start migrating south in the summer - when the North Atlantic
weather buoys begin behaving rather oddly. One by one they start to
record a temperature fall of 13 degrees. It's inexplicable - unless
Quaid's model is correct.
Soon magnificent
tornadoes are ripping Los Angeles to shreds. In the eye of a freak storm
in Scotland the temperature drops to -150 degrees, freezing the fuel
lines of helicopters, which then crash into the mountains. For no good
reason (other than that it provides one of the most awesome sequences
ever filmed) a vast tsunami decides to engulf Manhattan. At last the
authorities turn to Quaid to find out what on earth is going on.
Within weeks, his
model predicts, a gigantic global storm will trigger off the next great
ice age. Two men inexplicably stuck in an orbiting weather satellite
watch as the face of the earth is blotted out by hurricanes. The storms
cut straight through the troposphere, dragging down columns of freezing
air from the upper atmosphere. And one of them is heading towards New
York.
So Quaid gets his
audience with the president, and tells him that the only option is to
abandon everyone in the north of the country, and evacuate everyone
in the south. The sinister Cheney twin tells him not to meddle with
politics. But (and it's hard to believe that Murdoch paid for this),
Quaid retorts that if the politicians had listened to the science, the
scientists wouldn't have had to get political. When Cheney suggests
that Quaid doesn't care about the people in the northern states, he
is told that his son is trapped is New York.
And there indeed
is the scientist's only child, played rather well by Jake Gyllenhaal,
stuck in the Manhattan Public Library with the girl he fancies and the
handful of character parts he persuaded not to try to walk south, with
nothing but M&Ms to eat, but no end of rare books to burn.
The Quaid character,
of course, has promised his son that he will come to the rescue. With
his Antarctic survey team he crosses the frozen wastes of Philadelphia,
desperate to reach New York before the ice storm strikes. Meanwhile,
in the municipal library, the heroine is dying of septicaemia, which
the boy can cure only if he can venture out for long enough to find
the penicillin she needs. Needless to say a bunch of wolves has escaped
from the zoo with the single purpose of complicating his task.
Yes, it's slushy
and corny and predictable. Yes, every TV report in the film has Murdoch's
logos plastered all over it. Yes, the plot repeatedly breaks the laws
of physics. But none of this stops it from doing everything a disaster
movie is supposed to do, and quite a bit more. At times even the climatologists
stopped laughing at the story and started laughing with it, especially
when American refugees started fleeing across the Rio Grande after the
Mexicans closed the border (they reopened it when the US promised to
cancel the entire Latin American debt). Though of course the sinister
Cheney man comes round in the end, and his government in exile sees
the error of its ways, this is a curiously subversive story, whose plot
revolves around the climate change which Fox News and the rest of the
Murdoch press has tried so hard to deny, and the reluctance of the powerful
to respond to the needs of the people.
So will The Day
After Tomorrow wake people up to the realities of global warming? The
danger is that the movie bears so little relation to the science that
it will encourage people either to dismiss the entire climate change
story as fantasy, or to keep waiting for the effects they have seen
in the film before they accept that climate change is really happening.
On the other hand, the film makes the subject much harder to ignore.
I think it is fair
to assume that audiences know the difference between a movie and a scientific
paper. They don't expect to learn anything useful about reptile physiology
from Godzilla, or about life in outer space from Independence Day. People
watch films like The Day After Tomorrow because they love to see treasured
places smashed to bits while heroes struggle against impossible odds.
If The Day After Tomorrow leaves them no wiser about climate change,
that scarcely distinguishes it from the rest of the mainstream media.
But at least we're now talking about it.
· George
Monbiot's book The Age of Consent: A Manifesto for a New World Order
is out now in paperback. monbiot.com