Bjorn Lomborg throws cold water all over the radical environmentalist agenda behind the upcoming disaster flick The Day After Tomorrow. He notes, quite correctly, that the movie is displaying a completely ludicrous situation and trying to imply that A:) such a thing could happen and B:) we should immediately pass public policy trying to stop it.
It’s as if someone gave me a $200 million budget to produce The Day Mikey’s Head Exploded, a movie that graphically depicts the dangers of consuming Pop Rocks and soda, while arguing that the government must do something to stop the spread of Pop Rocks now or millions might die from sudden candy-related explosions.
Of course, the environmentalists will argue that a 100-foot title wave really could swamp New York, ignoring the fact that climate change is perfectly natural. When Eric the Red visited Greenland a millennia ago it was a verdant land of prarie where cattle could graze – now it’s a vast sheet of ice. If anything, our current climate could be an aberration – there simply is not enough of an understanding of the Earth’s natural climate cycle to start making half-assed and usually completely wrong predictions – see the 1970’s cries of "a new Ice Age" and Paul Erlich’s cries that half the Earth would starve to death by 1980.
The environmentalist movement is based entirely around fear-mongering, the same professional class of worryworts who staffed the offices of the Witchfinder General centuries ago and argued that those newfangled "horseless carriages" would suffocate their drivers if they passed the incredible speed of 20 miles per hour. Yet these same people running around like Chicken Little want the rest of us to bear an incredible burden, costing millions of jobs, plunging millions into poverty, and draining trillions from the world economy in order to fix a problem that doesn’t exist. The fact that we take such things seriously is proof that we really to live in The Demon-Haunted World.
Well, at least it is not the President himself who goes out surfing the Big Wave, as the Independence Day Prez might have done. Same movie maker, same shtick: it’s the end of the world, and politics could not prevent it. (Was there any politician in Godzilla?) “The Day After Tomorrow” is a movie, Emmerich is good at making movies, and if he thinks he can change anything in Real Life by making a movie, he will have another think coming.
The article you linked up to seems to provide sufficient info to debunk the science of the movie. At the same time, it does say that climate change and global warming is a reality. And you are right, Jay, our present climate might be the abbe.. aberrrr… not the normal thing. Does that mean we should just let the people in Bangladesh (as mentioned in the article) drown when their time comes?
Well, true enough, we cannot tell the future. We have not starved to death in the 1980’s. Thankfully all that starving business goes on in Africa or wherever.
So now they are setting up Copenhagen Consensus. The question is, will we be willing / able to accept their predictions? Will we be willing / able to do what they recommend?
I should hit you with something large and blunt if you were really expecting real science from Hollywood. It’s just a movie… calm down already. After calming down about it, see the movie and tell me if it still sucks.
(Disclaimer: I have not nor intend to see this movie anyway as it looked pointless and dumb as all Emmerich movies that I’ve seen are.)
Alex, alex, alex- you can’t just sit back and enjoy mindless popcorn flix? Independence Day, Stargate, and The Patriot were all great movies in my book- bad films, but good fun, if you don’t take them seriously. Anyway, it’s a shame you won’t be back in Sioux Falls this summer, at least for a week. 🙁
Anyway, I’m more worried about the impact that “Troy” will have on our plans to covertly invade Turkey, and what “I, Robot” and “The Stepford Wives” will do to our burgeoning robotics industry. 🙂