The Days Before "The Day After Tomorrow"

by William Severini Kowinski


It's one scary movie. "Climate change is a far greater threat to the world than international terrorism!" says the elder science advisor to the British government. "Temperatures are getting hotter, and they are getting hotter faster than any time in the past!" says the international weather expert. "Climate change is now with us, and poised to change our pattern of life!" says the African ecologist. But the U.S. President won't listen.

The number of extreme weather events double from a decade before! Lethal heat waves in Europe! Floods in Africa! Droughts in Asia and the U.S.! A record 300 million flee their homes from natural disasters! The rate of carbon dioxide rise in the atmosphere goes up, hits record level! Warming is increasing the range and virulence of diseases! Trees dying in New England! Glaciers melting faster in Alaska! Major influx of fresh water in North Atlantic and slowdown of ocean circulation below the Arctic Circle! Antarctic ice flowing faster into the ocean!

What could be next? Rising sea levels swamp coastal cities! Famine in Europe! Nuclear wars for water! A million species threatened with extinction! The de-creation of Earth as we know it!

Sounds exciting---but these aren't scenes from "The Day After Tomorrow," the global warming disaster film set to open worldwide on May 28. They're from the real world. Everything in the first two paragraphs has happened or is the statement of a real person (including Sir David King, chief science adviser to the British government.) Everything in the third paragraph is science-based speculation.

The movie itself takes huge liberties with known science, in the speed with which global warming brings on a new Ice Age. The paradoxical possibility of heat leading to ice is real: if cold water from melting glaciers change ocean currents like the Gulf Stream, Manhattan could get colder pretty quickly, though in a decade, not a New York minute. But all by itself, heat is already causing problems-like drought, crop failures, disease, violent storms---and is threatening much more as the century proceeds.

"The Day After Tomorrow"'s director, Roland Emmerich, has substituted climate change for the alien threat of his blockbuster "Independence Day" (and the radiation monster of his unsuccessful remake of "Godzilla".) Though scientific credibility hasn't limited the film's special effects, its web site includes references to the real problem. The film's ambition to raise awareness is suggested in the title's echo of the landmark 1983 television film, "The Day After," which changed public perceptions with its dramatization of nuclear holocaust.

That this movie might make global warming seem ridiculous, a threat as credible as Van Helsing's vampires, Harry Potter's dementors, Spiderman's Doctor Octopus or the other summer movie villains, had scientists and environmentalists dismissing it at first. But that's changed: the Worldwatch Institute and the National Resources Defense Council are providing information on their websites for hits the movie might inspire, the Weather Channel has announced some special programming, and Al Gore spoke at a premiere of the film sponsored by MoveOn.org.

Maybe they were all inspired by the Bush administration's attempted muzzling of NASA scientists (who earlier were talking openly about the ice age scenario) from responding to questions about the movie. Or maybe it's just that global warming couldn't be taken less seriously in the U.S. than it is already. While 72% of Americans said they were concerned about it in 2000, only 58% say so now, and only 15% believe it has anything to do with fossil fuel consumption. Yet it seems likely that the threat and the nature of the challenges ahead are unprecedented.

So why are we so determined to be oblivious? The list of possibilities might include:

Monstrous message: Torrid temperatures for decades, abandoned coastal cities, food and water shortages, diseases, resource wars, not to mention no more SUVs---it's too big, too terrible, too far ahead in time; it's too extreme to believe, and if true, too awful to think about. Denial conceals despair: with no apparent easy solutions, we lack faith in our creativity or character. Besides, after the Cold War's thermonuclear threat, and while trying to cope with international terrorism, we're suffering from apocalypse fatigue.

Dueling Experts: It's comforting as well as apparently sensible to buy the Bush line that if all scientists don't agree, it doesn't get on the agenda. Poor media reporting on science adds to the impression that this is another case of experts saying coffee is good for you on Tuesday and bad for you on Wednesday. In fact, given the incredible complexity of what's involved in a number of disciplines taken to their current limits, it's remarkable that a hefty scientific consensus exists on the basic notions that climate change is real, that our fossil fuel use is largely responsible, and that consequences will be profound and possibly catastrophic.

The Usual Suspects: On the assumption that if Americans believed in global warming they might expect their government to do something about it, major elements of fossil fuel industries have conducted a skilled and relentless p.r.campaign of denial, while pressuring politicians to remember who is buying them. So even when it comes up, it becomes part of the ideological and political shouting show, and America is either entertained or wearily tunes out.

Numbing nomenclature: In a world of warm and fuzzies, and "happiness is a warm puppy," it's hard to get upset about something that sounds so moderate and nice as "global warming." Even the old "greenhouse effect" sounds decidedly unthreatening. Who's afraid of a greenhouse? It sounds green, and warm. The currently popular "climate change" is similarly gentle and bland. People eagerly travel long distances for a change in climate. Various attempts have been made to heat up the nomenclature: "the climate crisis," "Thermageddon," but nothing has caught on.

Failed focus: If this is really such a serious threat, wouldn't environmental organizations stop dissipating their energies on their separate brand-name issues, work together and set priorities? For after all, the climate crisis is the keystone issue: not only the most crucial, but a crisis that addresses virtually every other significant environmental problem, including deforestation, pollution and species extinction.

No Rachel Carson: Books continue to be published that contribute solid information, but none has had the simple eloquence or impact of Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring," which got DDT banned and jump-started a new kind of environmental awareness. Hence the hopes for this heavily advertised movie.

But the highest hurdle to overcome may be the time-lapse nature of the problem. What is newest and most challenging about global warming is that once its effects are clearly apparent, it's too late to stop them. Positive feedback can even make them self-perpetuating for a long time. Plus the short-term solutions (as simple as more air-conditioners) eventually make the problems worse (by adding more carbon to the atmosphere.)

This means we can't just wait until it gets bad, then fix it and go back to normal. The climate crisis will change normal, both because of its effects and the changes necessary to slow it down. Whatever the climate does, the world faces interacting phenomena with interlocking environmental, economic and political consequences. Climate and its effects interact with everything, especially the resources we depend on that are getting scarcer, like fresh water, and oil (here's a parenthetical for you: according to estimates from within the industry, the world's oil is due to start running out within a decade.)

Almost inevitably, many of the changes will be in how we approach life, as individuals and societies. If we get ahead of the curve, these changes will include global cooperation, common commitment, a surge of creativity, community, shared sacrifice and adjustments in values. If we let the crisis overwhelm us, the changes will be just as great but a lot harsher and more destructive.

We'll need a series of attitude adjustments about the future. We need to anticipate problems, not just react to them. We have to anticipate what might happen, and have the courage and confidence to act on those anticipations.

We need to anticipate the consequences and opportunities of complex interactions---to think more comprehensively, as Buckminster Fuller used to say, and imagine alternative futures. But first of all we need to take responsibility for the future, for the effects of what we do now on the lives of our children and grandchildren. We need to find meaning in acting on their behalf, for the heroes of battling the climate crisis will probably never see the outcome of their efforts.

Some tools exist, in approaches to conceptualizing the future developed throughout the twentieth century, and in moral and ethical attitudes that go back a lot further than that. For instance, the Great Law of the Haudenosaunee: "In every deliberation we must consider the impact on the seventh generation to come."

"If I were a young person being handed this problem by indulgent predecessors," writes James Speth, co-founder of the National Resource Defense Council, in his new book, "Red Sky at Morning, "I would be angry." Perhaps that's why a couple of new documentaries on global warming produced by Stonehaven Productions (one already aired in Canada, the other tentatively scheduled for PBS in October) are being hosted by singer Alanis Morissette, and actors Keanu Reeves and Leonardo DiCaprio.

Maybe "The Day After Tomorrow" will nudge bigger audiences for such educational efforts, and for political change, beginning in November. Perhaps it will revive what remains for me the most cogent media treatment of the subject, the 1990 international television production, "After the Warming." Host and writer James Burke examines the crucial role of climate in western civilization and presents a plausible history of global warming from the perspective of a citizen in 2050. (It would be plausible, that is, if humanity had delayed action until only the year 2000, as he supposed it would.) Burke's future self compares us today-in the do-nothing days before the day after tomorrow-- to the man who falls from the top of a tall building. As he passes the 17th floor, someone asks him how he's doing. "So far, so good," he replies.

A shorter version of this piece appears in the San Francisco Chronicle Insight on May 30, 2004.

Postscript: After the Movie

The above was written before the movie was released. So at this point, fan sites would require SPOILER notices so readers who hadn't yet seen the film would not have the experience spoiled by information contained in it. Consider yourself forewarned. SPOILERS!

I don't want to review it, just add some comments on matters I haven't seen in print yet. Like a couple of small but intriguing touches supporting the patterns of hope found in reconciliation and selflessness. There's the usual heroics, of course, in the current fad for absent- parents and their wayward children (father/daughter or father/son usually)rediscovering the depths of their affection, but there's also a nice post 9-11 touch in a situation that resolves counter to expectations: the mother, who is a doctor and has elected to stay behind with a seriously ill child, looks like the usual sacrifical victim, waiting for the ambulance that never comes, especially with the killer storm outside. Only it does come: exactly the kind of heroism displayed in New York, for example, on and immediately after 9-11.

And there's an even smaller scenario that is at first played for laughs, when a group of mainly high school students marooned in the New York Public Library burns books for warmth, and a young woman radical feminist argues to burn Nietzsche because he was a male chauvanist who was in love with his sister. An older professorial type man objects. One of the young geeks solves the conflict by finding a whole section on tax law that everyone agrees is expendable...Later however the professor is clutching an ancient copy of the Gutenberg Bible, so it will not be burned. It is the first book ever printed, and it is his way of saving something of civilization, of the Age of Reason. His passion impresses the young woman, and they are reconciled. It is accompanied by a more obvious moment in which a homeless man shows a rich boy how to insulate himself with paper. But the message is pretty much the same: we have more common ground than we usually admit or recognize, and we can also delight in our differences which themselves suggest our common humanity. There's hope in that.

These scenes indicate the heart of this film---to scare us and provide a cautionary tale about doing what we want with natural resources regardless of the consequences, and dooming our civilization, but it also give us some constituents of hope and models of some of the kinds of behavior we'll need, in order to deal with the climate crisis.

Still, the film misses the larger dimensions of even its over-the-top scenario: for example, its scenes of destruction are limited to big cities. We don't see the storms crushing forests, and except for the fleeing birds, the only animals we see are caged or urban pets. But the natural world, not just natural resources, are essential to our survival, and will bear the brunt of an induced Ice Age or just the global heating we're really inflicting.

The filmmakers rather bravely parodied the current president and v.p., although it also gave them both moments of redemption. This film may be more effective in encouraging that elusive "emotional consensus" on the climate crisis that it is being given credit for in the press, and more than I expected before seeing it---because it offers models of hope in how we are capable of behaving in such a crisis, while the film bookends the scary if unlikely disaster content with straightforward statements on the basic peril of using fossil fuels like there's no tomorrow, let alone the day after.