My Blog for Physics in Film

I think movies like “The Day After Tomorrow” do open discussions about global warming but at a cost. Since disaster movies often embellish the origins and accelerate the onset of a man-influenced natural disaster people who are intrigued by the movie and start looking at outside material may be upset when they realize the truth and perhaps may even think they have been tricked and will move to the anti-believers side. The truth is scary enough. Movies that have an environmental message should speak from the truth. Hence, my idea of a good global warming disaster movie is one based on the Earth 50 years in the future. This would show consequences of global warming in a truthful manner.

“The Day After Tomorrow” was loosely based on fact. Yes, there would be an ice age from global warming, but it would not happen quite that fast and there would not be giant “anti-hurricanes” fueled by cold air forming to consume the entire northern hemisphere. Furthermore, sea levels would also rise, but not in such a dramatically quick way. I feel that movies such as this and “An Inconvenient Truth” seek to lure people to environmentalism by fear. However the opposite may occur and one may feel tricked or lied to by the films and become more stubborn. I think a better approach would be to inform based on the truth instead of scare tactics. Furthermore, we can work to dispel the evidence contrary. Most of the evidence I have seen cited talk about how the warmest days in the US happened in the 1930s, which is true. However, as a globe, most of the warmest years happened most recently and activists need to make that clear to the public.