Posted on 14-5-2004

Scientists Praise Hollywood's Global Warning
by Paul Brown, Tim Radford and John Vidal, May 13, 2004, The Guardian

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 royal family in Balmoral
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 scanty relationship
with scientific fact.

But yesterday The Day After Tomorrow won praise from both the British
research establishment and the environment movement.

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

Among the film's unexpected fans after a sneak preview are the
government's chief scientific adviser, Sir David King, and Geoff Jenkins,
head of the 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.

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 climate scientist played
by Dennis Quaid, seeks to convince a high-powered but sceptical 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 super-tornadoes in Los Angeles - one of America's
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 Dr 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 Dr King said was also
justifiable poetic licence, pointing out that 21,000 people died in Europe
last summer because of a heatwave 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 UK climate by about 5C,
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.

Dr Meric Srokosz, from the Southampton Oceanographic Centre, who has just
been given £20m by the 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 1 in 10, 1 in
100 or 1 in 1,000.

He rejected suggestions that the hype of the film would damage the cause
of cli mate scientists and play into the hands of sceptics. 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
Thames 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 Professor Mike Hulme, director of the Tyndall
centre for climate change research, University of East Anglia.

Dr Jenkins came to the film's defence: "Certainly the basic process of the
shutdown of the Gulf Stream could in principle happen in the same way that
it happened before.

"So I think it would be arrogant of us to say: we don't need to look at
this. We do need to be concerned about the stability of the ocean
circulation and why that could change in the future."

But for Bill Maguire, head of the London-based Benfield Hazards Centre,
the value of Hollywood raising the issue only goes so far: "Abrupt climate
change is a serious business and evidence is accumulating for global
warming triggering huge changes to ocean circulation. But the total
destruction of LA by tornadoes? I think not."

Could it really happen?

· A vast iceberg drops off the Antarctic ice shelf
Realistic. Bigger bergs are already breaking off

· The British royal family freezes to death in Balmoral
Unlikely, but the castle is notoriously underheated

· Los Angeles is destroyed by tornadoes
We don't think so, say climate scientists

· A 100ft tidal wave engulfs New York
The Big Apple going under is a disaster-movie staple. Unlikely in a global
warming scenario

· Three vast, hurricane storms cover the northern hemisphere
Impossible over land, say scientists

· Temperatures plummet 10 degrees Celsius a second, freezing people solid
Beyond the laws of physics

· The southern US states are evacuated
A tall order in three days

· The US president dies of cold, and his successor apologises for global
warming
Hard to imagine, even after George Bush made his half-apology this week

· US writes off Latin American debt to allow Americans to flee across the
Mexican border
Campaigners have been trying to persuade Washington to forgive more third
world debt for years, with only limited success. Raised the loudest laughs
from the audience

· Europe is covered by 15ft of snow, writing off the entire continent
The UK goes first in an entirely US-centric disaster show. Some thanks for
our special relationship