Essay by Eric Worrall
A compelling work of fiction which a lot of people took way too seriously is “prescient” – has the Guardian finally said something we can agree with?
The Day After Tomorrow at 20: a strangely prescient ecological warning
The disaster flick is riddled with inaccuracies, cliches and gusts of machismo. But with its global climate catastrophe, it feels more relevant than ever
Lauren Collee Wed 5 Jun 2024 01.00 AEST
In the winter of 2013, a breakdown in the polar vortex allowed freezing cold air to escape southwards towards the North American continent. As ice storms, tornadoes and blizzards swept across the US, Donald Trump tweeted. “I’m in Los Angeles and it’s freezing,” he wrote. “Global warming is a total, and very expensive, hoax!”
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The film, 2004’s summer box office hit, was lampooned by critics and scientists alike. Members of an internet chatroom allegedly paid the paleoclimatologist William Hyde $100 to see it. “This movie is to climate science what Frankenstein is to heart surgery,” he concluded.
Nevertheless, a series of studies showed that the film did sway public opinion about the climate crisis. Twenty years after its release, it remains a unique specimen: a climate disaster blockbuster that adheres to all the tenets of the genre, while also explicitly attributing its carnage to the greenhouse effect.
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Like every disaster film, The Day After Tomorrow is riddled with inaccuracies, cliches and strange displays of machismo (in one scene, Gyllenhaal battles wolves on a frozen ghost ship). But, if anything, the film’s absurdity feels closer to our reality in 2024 than it did in 2004. After all, we live in the age of climate surrealism – it is generally understood that things are going to get weirder as they get worse. Today is the day after tomorrow, we mutter to ourselves, as we read about ancient anthrax-infested reindeer carcasses defrosting in the Arctic Circle.
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I really enjoyed “The Day After Tomorrow” when it first came out, and still watch it occasionally. It has a racy plot, interesting characters, sacrifice, heroism and some smoking hot intelligent women.
I’m a big fan of actor Denis Quaid, who played the science hero. Quaid’s outspoken support for President Trump is just icing on the cake.
But watching “The Day After Tomorrow”, you really have to put your scientific skepticism on hold.
The movie is loosely based on the Younger Dryas, an abrupt return to ice age conditions which occurred 13,000 years ago, but despite repeated attempts to claim we’re on track for a repeat of that event, there is very little evidence anything like that could happen again in the foreseeable future.
Even worse for “The Day After Tomorrow” believers, the Younger Dryas meltwater influx theory, which was the cause of the abrupt cooling in the movie, appears to have fallen out of favour.
Evaluating the link between the sulfur-rich Laacher See volcanic eruption and the Younger Dryas climate anomaly
James U. L. Baldini,Richard J. Brown,and Natasha Mawdsley
Abstract
The Younger Dryas is considered the archetypal millennial-scale climate change event, and identifying its cause is fundamental for thoroughly understanding climate systematics during deglaciations. However, the mechanisms responsible for its initiation remain elusive, and both of the most researched triggers (a meltwater pulse or a bolide impact) are controversial. Here, we consider the problem from a different perspective and explore a hypothesis that Younger Dryas climate shifts were catalysed by the unusually sulfur-rich 12.880 ± 0.040 ka BP eruption of the Laacher See volcano (Germany). We use the most recent chronology for the GISP2 ice core ion dataset from the Greenland ice sheet to identify a large volcanic sulfur spike coincident with both the Laacher See eruption and the onset of Younger Dryas-related cooling in Greenland (i.e. the most recent abrupt Greenland millennial-scale cooling event, the Greenland Stadial 1, GS-1). Previously published lake sediment and stalagmite records confirm that the eruption’s timing was indistinguishable from the onset of cooling across the North Atlantic but that it preceded westerly wind repositioning over central Europe by ∼ 200 years. We suggest that the initial short-lived volcanic sulfate aerosol cooling was amplified by ocean circulation shifts and/or sea ice expansion, gradually cooling the North Atlantic region and incrementally shifting the midlatitude westerlies to the south. The aerosol-related cooling probably only lasted 1–3 years, and the majority of Younger Dryas-related cooling may have been due to the sea-ice–ocean circulation positive feedback, which was particularly effective during the intermediate ice volume conditions characteristic of ∼ 13 ka BP. We conclude that the large and sulfur-rich Laacher See eruption should be considered a viable trigger for the Younger Dryas. However, future studies should prioritise climate modelling of high-latitude volcanism during deglacial boundary conditions in order to test the hypothesis proposed here.
“The Day After Tomorrow” was a great movie, a climate disaster blockbuster which even skeptics can enjoy. But the only thing prescient about “The Day After Tomorrow” is how a bunch of greens getting excited about a work of fiction when the movie was first released foreshadowed today’s mainstream climate activism.
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