Quelle: Intellectual Conservative; auch in anderen Medien erschienenBad Science, Bad Movie
by Alan Caruba
24 May 2004
The Day After Tomorrow is intended to convince you that global warming will lead to a new ice age in America.
Coming to a theater near you on Memorial Day is The Day After Tomorrow, a movie intended to convince those foolish enough to see it that global warming will lead to a new ice age in America. As science fiction goes, this is as fictional as one can get because there is absolutely no scientific basis for the story this movie depicts.
Just like global warming, it is just a story, but it is one intended to further the aims of the theory that has been kicking around now since the original effort in the 1970s by environmentalists to convince people that an Ice Age was coming.
Having failed to scare enough people, this was converted into a theory that the world was warming too much from greenhouse emissions. These were said to be creating too much carbon dioxide and other “greenhouse gas” elements in the atmosphere. The automobile received the largest blame for this, along with the use of every other “fossil fuel” such as coal and natural gas.
Real scientists, not the ones who sold out to the environmentalists, know a lot about the way the Earth really functions. It is, by the way, an estimated 5.4 billion years old. While climate is probably one of the least predictable things that occur any time and anywhere on Earth, there is enough known to dispute the cockeyed global warming theory. Some very brave voices have been speaking out against it for a long time and most people by now, whether they know a thing about the science involved, have probably concluded it is nonsense.
The Day After Tomorrow will no doubt use some wonderful special effects to suggest that millions are doomed by the fictional ice age, but Hollywood is hardly the place to turn to for anything other than a brief respite of entertainment. Indeed, the early critical word on this film is that it is pretty awful.
To understand what drives the climate on Earth, one need only look up into the sky and see the Sun. It, more than any other factor, determines climate. As the Earth moves around it, various portions experience the different seasons in different ways. When it is winter in America, it is summer in Australia, and vice-versa. And, even when it is winter in America, parts of it like Florida, being in a semi-tropical zone, don’t even experience it at all.
In addition to changing solar activity, other factors affecting the climate are the oceans, clouds, and even varying levels of volcanic activity. The effect that mankind has on the climate is minimal. Global warming is largely based on the view that humans have to change their behavior or the Earth is doomed from our use of various forms of energy.
In reality, if there was more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and temperatures were a bit warmer overall, life on Earth would improve, not the least from longer periods of agricultural production, increased forest growth, and the general comfort we associate with warmer weather. If one just considers the hardships associated with winter blizzards, this would seem obvious to anyone. Almost invariably, in the midst of each major winter blizzard, some environmental organization issues a news release blaming it on global warming. It has become a favorite topic of cartoonists.
The Day After Tomorrow is best seen as a cartoon. A figment of someone’s imagination. There is something called the Atlantic Meriodonal Oscillation (AMO) and scientists acknowledge that were it to become inactive, “substantial short-term cooling would result in western Europe, especially during the winter.” This scary scenario has been already been put forth by the United Nations International Panel on Climate Control in 2001. The only problem is that even their own computer models don’t predict it.
When it comes to the weather, even the most sophisticated computer models used by our National Weather Service often can fail to predict a blizzard or, at least, the area it will cover and how much snow it will produce.
In a recent edition of a newsletter published by the Cooler Heads Coalition, Canadian scientists Andrew Weaver of the University of Victoria and Claude Hailaire-Marcel of the Universite de Quebec a Montreal, have stated that, “In light of the paleoclimate record and our understanding of the contemporary climate system, it is safe to say that global warming will not lead to the onset of a new ice age.”
“These same records suggest that it is highly unlikely that global warming will lead to a widespread collapse of the AMO…” When scientists use words like “highly unlikely” they mean it just won’t happen. Wallace Broecker, an oceanographer, weighed in to add, “Exaggerated scenarios serve only to intensify the existing polarization over global warming.” In other words, the worse the doomsday prediction, the less likely it will occur.
So The Day After Tomorrow will show up in theaters and, no doubt, after a short run, find its way to your local video store and then later on be broadcast on television. None of which means that its doomsday message is worth worrying about.
Alan Caruba is the author of Warning Signs, published by Merril Press. His weekly commentaries are posted on the Internet site of The National Anxiety Center.
Man beachte insbesondere das Fettgedruckte. Dazu fällt mir nichts mehr ein...
Glücklicherweise gibt es da auch andere Stimmen:
Quelle: www.nationalgeographic.comDay After Tomorrow Movie: Could Ice Age Occur Overnight?
Stefan Lovgren in Los Angeles
for National Geographic News
May 18, 2004
Snow falls in New Delhi. Tornadoes rip through Hollywood landmarks. Grapefruit-size hail pounds Tokyo. Manhattan is buried under hundreds of feet of snow. The ice age is here.
It may just be a movie. But to environmentalists, there is more than a kernel of truth in the catastrophic scenarios depicted in the upcoming summer flick The Day After Tomorrow. Some activists hope the special effects blockbuster, in which global warming leads to a new ice age, will spark debate about environmental damage.
"Climate change is already happening now, not the day after tomorrow," said Janet Sawin, director of the energy and climate program at the Worldwatch Institution in Washington, D.C. "I'm hoping more people will become more aware of this problem [as a result of the movie] and start thinking about what we can do to address it."
The film's director, German-born Roland Emmerich—the man behind such popcorn fare as Independence Day and Godzilla—welcomes the debate.
"It is a movie that should not just entertain but also make people think," Emmerich said in a telephone interview. "It is not just science fiction but something that is very real."
Global Superstorm
In the movie, which opens May 28, climatologist Jack Hall (played by Dennis Quaid) warns that global warming could trigger an abrupt shift in the planet's climate. His fears are confirmed when the melting of the polar ice caps overnight pours huge amounts of fresh water into the oceans. The influx of fresh water shuts down the Gulf Stream, the ocean current that stabilizes the Northern Hemisphere's climate system. That unleashes a superstorm that brings with it a new ice age.
Emmerich, whose first movie in Germany was about a weather experiment gone awry, got the idea for The Day After Tomorrow from the book The Coming Global Superstorm, written by paranormal experts Art Bell and Whitley Strieber. As the title suggests, the book warns of a doomsday scenario similar to the one in Emmerich's movie.
"It read like science fiction … and I quickly realized it would make for a great movie," Emmerich said. "I began researching … and found the underlying science pretty real."
There is little doubt that global warming is real. In the last century the average temperature has climbed about 0.6 degrees Celsius (about 1 degree Fahrenheit) around the world. Most scientists say the higher temperatures are a result of an atmospheric increase in carbon dioxide, caused by the burning of fossil fuels such as coal and petroleum.
Sea levels have risen 4 to 8 inches (10 to 20 centimeters) because of the expansion of warmer waters. A study in the science journal Nature this year predicted that climate change could drive more than a million species toward extinction by the year 2050. Many scientists also warn of a link between global warming and extreme weather events, like El Niño.
Too Extreme
There is some evidence that the shutting down of the Gulf Stream has happened in the distant past, leading to the dramatic cooling of temperature over a few decades in some parts of the world. But most scientists agree that the abrupt climate change depicted in the movie could not happen.
"The Earth's climate is never going to flip in a matter of days the way it does in the movie," Worldwatch's Sawin said.
She worries that the catastrophic events in the film may be so extreme that audience members may not take the climate-change issue seriously.
"There is some concern that what the movie shows is so extreme that people will say, Oh, that could never happen, so I'm not going to worry about it," she said. "That blows a very serious issue out of proportion and could cause people who are skeptical to become even more skeptical."
Emmerich dismisses such worries. "People are smart enough to know this is a movie," he said, "and in a movie everything is more extreme."
No Science Fiction
Environmentalists see the movie as an opportunity to educate and hope the film will spark public concerns about climate change. The activist group MoveOn.org is recruiting volunteers to hand out flyers at theaters when the movie is released. The flyers read: "Global warming isn't just a movie. It's your future."
Some observers speculate that the movie's distributor, 20th Century Fox, is trying to distance itself from what could be construed as a political message in the film. Having a big action movie labeled a serious "issue" film could have a negative impact on its box office prospects, observers argue.
But Emmerich believes entertainment and education can mix.
"Like many other people, I have this feeling that we're slowly but surely destroying our planet," he said. "I came [to this issue] because of science fiction, and then I realized it wasn't at all science fiction but something that is very real."
! An den beiden von Daniel geposteten Artikeln sieht man wie unterschiedlich doch die Meinungen von Wissenschaftlern sind. Deshalb finde ich es sehr unverantworlich das man in unseren Breitengraden das 'vom - menschen - verursachte - Treibhauseffekt' schon als Tatsache verkaufen will und schon kleine Kinder in der Volksschule davon lernen müssen. Von einer unbewiesenen Theorie! 
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). Als sie sehen das die Ölreserven nun wirklich fast zu Ende sind beginnen sie ernsthaft zu forschen und es gelingt ihnen tatsächlich die kalte Fusion in Griff zu bekommen - damit gibt es eine fast unerschöpfbare, saubere Energiequelle für Jahrtausende. Wer ist dann der dumme 
und wer wird herzhaft lachen