The Day After Tomorrow – Entertaining Adventure

I’m writing this in February 2011 near St Louis, where we’ve gotten an unusually large amount of snow. And we’ve gotten off lightly. Other parts of the United States have received an overwhelming amount, even in the South. In Boston, where lots of snow is normal, my sister reports it’s worse than usual. They have up to four feet in their front yard. New York City has had a record amount of snow.It’s times like this that make people make fun of Al Gore and the contention of many others that the Earth is warming up. It is apparently why many “global warming” prophets have changed the phrase to “climate change.” After all, a “change” can be up or down. Maybe the Earth is really cooling. No matter, they still want us to give up carbon fuels.So it’s interesting that this science fiction movie, which is intended to warn us of the perils of global warming, should use a massive freeze to make its point.And “massive” is an understatement. By the end of the movie, almost the entire Northern Hemisphere is under ice – thick ice.In the early scenes of the movie, Dennis Quaid as Jack Hall gives as speech outlining the possibility of global warming sending polar ice into the North Atlantic current, triggering a spiral of events resulting in large blizzard super-storms. Since I’m not familiar with the arguments of the global warming prophets, and not a paleoclimatatologist, I can’t evaluate its credibility.At least it doesn’t account for this current winter, which is no doubt simply a statistical fluctuation, and not proof for either global warming or cooling, and not proof against either one either.As part of the government’s weather team, Jack Hall is safe, but his son went on a trip to New York City for a school contest. So Jack and a buddy borrow some equipment and head for the Big Apple which is now under many feet of snow and ice, with temperatures around minus 100 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s cold enough to kill fast. That’s cold enough to make the water around the Titanic feel like hot springs.The boy, his friends and a girl he likes have meanwhile been fighting for their survival, taking shelter in the New York City Public Library and burning books for heat.The rest of the movie is basically a fairly well done adventure movie with good special effects.Of course it has a happy ending, at least for the main characters, with Jack finally finding his son and friends not yet frozen to death in the library.The southern half of the United States is allowed to go to Mexico to escape the ice. (Get the irony and propaganda? The Mexicans let us go to their country when we need to, so they should be able to come here now.)So it’s a fairly entertaining piece of propaganda. I don’t take it as seriously as it wants me to, but I could be wrong.

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