Climate Change, Environment, Headlines, North America

ENVIRONMENT DAY: Climate Change Film Has Potential to Change Minds

Stephen Leahy*

BROOKLIN, Canada, Jun 3 2004 (IPS) - It is easy to dismiss Hollywood’s big movie on climate change, ‘The Day After Tomorrow’, as fantasy, but small low-lying island states like Tuvalu take it seriously. It is already the day after tomorrow there, with rising seas forcing residents of the South Pacific nation to emigrate to New Zealand.

“Reality may not be as dramatic (as the movie); climate change is nevertheless devastating for small island developing states like Tuvalu,” the government there said in a recent press release.

Released May 28, ‘The Day After Tomorrow’ is a special-effects-laden film about an implausibly abrupt shift in global climate that results in giant tornadoes twisting through Los Angeles, New Delhi inundated by a massive snowstorm and grapefruit-sized hail bombarding Tokyo. And for good measure, New York City and much of the northern hemisphere plummets into an instant ice age.

Silly right? Surprisingly, there is some science behind all of this Hollywood mayhem.

Abrupt changes in climate have happened in the past, but they have been over 10-year periods not days. And the film accurately portrays what many scientists believe: that a slow-down or halting of the North Atlantic (Ocean) current that brings warm tropical waters north would lead to much cooler temperatures in eastern North America and Europe.

While there is some evidence that this may be happening, it would not result in a global ice age, according to experts at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in the U.S. state of Massachusetts, on the Atlantic Ocean.

Scientific accuracy aside, one important question, on the eve of World Environment Day on Jun. 5, is whether the film trivialises global warming or raises public consciousness on what is arguably the biggest global challenge of the 21st century.

“At the cinema, people reacted with great interest,” says Raúl Estrada Oyuela, director for environmental affairs at Argentina’s Foreign Ministry.

“I saw the audience stand and applaud, and that is going to be very useful, because climate change is otherwise seen as some remote issue and is not always associated with changes that are already occurring,” he told IPS.

Estrada Oyuela is the organiser of the 10th United Nations Conference on Climate Change to be held in Buenos Aires, Dec. 6-17.

With its 20-40 million dollar advertising budget the movie has done a great deal to bring the issue to the general public says Jon Coifman of the Natural Resources Defence Council (NRDC), a U.S. environmental non-governmental organisation (NGO).

Whether it is all that ad money or the subject, the 125-million-dollar movie – considered a bargain for a summer blockbuster – amassed a whopping 86 million dollars from ticket sales in its first three days.

There has been an enormous amount of media attention as well, Coifman told IPS. “We’re surprised and delighted that the movie has resulted in a good airing of the facts that global warming is happening.”

The vast majority of the media coverage has been sophisticated and accurate, with environmental NGOs fielding calls about what can be done to curb or slow down global warming, he says.

While the movie may confuse people – for instance, how can global warming produce an ice age? – it is an opportunity to raise awareness and provide information, says Julia Verville, staff scientist at the U.S.-based Union of Concerned Scientists, another NGO.

“Will it turn global warming into an election issue? I hope so.”

A U.S. presidential election is scheduled for November.

In its exaggerated portrayal of the dangers, it will probably move people beyond the mistaken notion that a warming world is a good thing for those living in the north, Verville added in an interview.

Coifman says the NRDC was initially worried the film would be “too over the top”. Instead it has become an excellent opportunity to educate people on an important issue. “Hopefully after seeing it people will be sitting around their dinning table talking about it.”

Verville also likes that fact that movie has some political bite about the role the United States plays in global warming.

In one early scene, the U.S. vice president, who looks very much like real Vice President Dick Cheney, mocks the Kyoto Protocol at a U.N. conference in Mumbai, India. At the end of the film, living as an environmental refugee in Mexico along with millions of fellow Americans, he apologises to the world for being so wrong about global warming.

Washington under former President Bill Clinton signed the Kyoto Protocol, an international agreement that binds countries to cut emissions of gases like carbon dioxide that are thought to cause global warming, but current President George W Bush announced after coming to office in 2001 that he would not ratify the agreement.

Roland Emmerich, the director and scriptwriter of ‘The Day After Tomorrow’ takes the issue very serious, saying in an interview with the ‘Los Angeles Times’ newspaper, “abrupt climate change is the biggest threat the world faces and what does the government do? They try to keep it a secret!”.

In January the U.S. Defence Department leaked to the media a study it had commissioned on the possible results of abrupt climate change in 2010.

Researchers concluded that within a decade, temperatures would plunge – an average 3.5C in Europe and 2.8C in eastern North America. Massive droughts would affect key agricultural regions, and the average annual rainfall in northern Europe would fall by nearly 30 percent with its climate becoming more like that of Siberia.

Violent storms, extensive flooding and drought would likely force 400 million people to migrate from uninhabitable regions, the report added.

According to Emmerich, ‘The Day After Tomorrow’ “is a parable about how we’re slowly destroying ourselves.”

Countries on the frontlines of this slowly rising wave of destruction, such as Tuvalu, are demanding action from the global community. First on their list is for the world’s nations to move quickly away from fossil fuels and to environmentally friendly renewable energy sources.

“No nation, no matter how big or small, can ignore the fact that climate change is here. It is happening,” reads the Tuvalu government statement.

(*With reporting from Marcela Valente in Buenos Aires).