Fri, May 14, 2004 page6

• Film on climate change is not exactly factual

  • THE GUARDIAN
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  Hail stones the size of tennis balls are knocking people out in Japan. Shortly afterwards it is snowing in India. But that is only the beginning. The fuel in the helicopters sent to rescue the British royal family from their Scottish castle freezes in flight and within days all those living north of Washington have been abandoned by the US military as beyond help of evacuation. Meanwhile, those from the southern states plead for refugee status in Mexico as they flee to the border to escape the cold.

  This is a Hollywood blockbuster, which in the tradition of the disaster movie plays ruthlessly on the irrational fears of the average American. It also has unexpectedly strong political content, and a loose relationship with scientific fact.

  But on Wednesday, The Day After Tomorrow won praise from both the research establishment and the environment movement.

  The new film bizarrely plunges the earth into a new ice age as a result of global warming. While concentrating on New York it incidentally freezes the British royal family to death in their Scottish retreat.

  Among the film's unexpected fans after a sneak preview are the UK government's chief scientific adviser, Sir David King, and Geoff Jenkins, head of the UK's Hadley Centre for Climate Change, who both regard the film's stunning special effects as good fun and welcome the blockbuster as raising public awareness and debate about a vital issue.

  Sir David, who recently stirred political debate on both sides of the Atlantic by saying that global warming was a greater threat than terrorism, said the beginning of the film was particularly realistic -- both scientifically and politically.

  cheney lookalike

  The political content of the film, in which the US administration is seen to rubbish scientific theories of global warming and paying a heavy price for it, is a double surprise because the film comes from Rupert Murdoch's 20th Century Fox studio, and has been billed by environmental groups as a strongly anti-Bush movie in an election year.

  The realism Sir David praised was where the film's hero, Jack Hall, a scientist played by Dennis Quaid, seeks to convince a high-powered but skeptical audience including the US vice president, that the Gulf Stream is weakening because of climate change.

  The Cheney lookalike rejects the idea of global warming being a threat, and says the US economy is more fragile than the climate.

  It is then that the film's grip on science begins to ease. Special effects go into overdrive with tornadoes in Los Angeles -- one of the US' recurring horror fantasies.

  New York suffers in just six days the kind of weather-related disasters that could be expected over 100 years of the most severe climate change.

  But Jenkins said: "It is a blockbuster movie. Let us not be too po-faced, they need a return on their money."

  Millions of people are wiped out in the film which King said was also justifiable poetic license, pointing out that 21,000 people died in Europe last summer because of a heat wave linked to climate change. "There was little attribution to the cause, man-made climate change, and little public response, although it was a very extreme event."

  Although fact and fiction are tangled, the main scientific information in the film is that the Gulf Stream, which warms the coast of northwest Europe, is slowing down and then suddenly stops.

  The fact that the Gulf Stream is slowing down is an established fact but how fast this is happening and how long it will take is still a matter of scientific uncertainty.

  good publicity

  Meric Srokosz, from the Southampton Oceanographic Centre, England, who has just been given ?20 million (US$35.3 million) by the UK government to find out more about this potentially frightening phenomenon, said it had happened twice in the last 12,000 years over a decade and not the six days depicted in the film.

  Temperatures had plunged as a result but not as disastrously. He was trying to find out if the chances of it happening again were one in 10, one in 100 or one in 1,000.

  He rejected suggestions that the hype of the film would damage the cause of climate scientists and play into the hands of skeptics.

  He worked on the basis that "any publicity is good publicity for the climate cause" -- mainly because there had not been enough.

  The scientists assembled yesterday to comment on the film and explain the "real science" said that without the Gulf Stream, Britain could be as cool as Newfoundland or Nova Scotia.

  In the movie, the Gulf Stream -- also known as the Atlantic Conveyor -- switches off, to precipitate blizzards, hailstones, ice storms and widespread instant hypothermia.

  In real life, as far as anybody knows, any such switch-off would take a decade, and lower the average temperature of central England by 3?C to 4?C.

  This would be pretty uncomfortable. The difference between the so-called medieval warm period in the 13th century, when grapes flourished in England, and the Little Ice Age in the 18th and 19th centuries, when the River Thames in southern England froze over, was no more than 1?C to 2?C, on average.

  Some scientists were not so enthusiastic about the bending of science. "It breaks the laws of physics. What is proposed as climate change is the opposite of what we think will happen. It's a parable that doesn't do anything for me," said Mike Hulme, director of the Tyndall Centre for climate change research, University of East Anglia, in eastern England.
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