Eco-Tainment #13: The Day After Tomorrow

There's something to be said for subtlety. If you harp on about a single point forever, you run the risk of dulling your audience's sensitivity to the subject and causing them to grow bored. Unfortunately, Hollywood movie directors have rarely understood this. When presented with a controversial or polarizing subject, their usual agenda is to be as unsubtle as possible. Roland Emmerich's 2004 film The Day After Tomorrow is no exception.
As with Emmerich's other works--Independence Day, the 1998 remake of Godzilla, and 2012-- the plot of The Day After Tomorrow is thin and serves mostly to provide excuses for famous buildings and monuments to be destroyed spectacularly. The dance, in this case, is a sudden drop in the Earth's temperature brought about by man-made climate change, which results in a new ice age. The movie was a box-office success and made climate change a hot topic in popular culture. Unfortunately, the way it is portrayed in the movie is flawed.
While it is true that the Earth will eventually enter another ice age (in fact, it is technically more accurate to say that we live in an ice age now, but during a warm spell) this will not happen for thousands of years. Indeed, the Earth's polar ice caps are actually disappearing at an alarming rate. While the movie succeeded in putting the dangers of climate change in the public consciousness, it also gave many people the wrong idea of how they work.
You might well respond, "It's a movie. It's not supposed to be taken seriously!" That would be true, if The Day After Tomorrow were not specifically advertised as being based on real science. If a movie claims to be based on modern science, but presents it in an inaccurate manner, the inaccurate version is what the viewers remember
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    In The Day After Tomorrow, man-made climate change results in a global ice age. Despite the movie claiming to be solidly grounded in science, no scientists take this scenario seriously.