Sorry Charles, but The Day After Tomorrow was the most idiotic environmental propaganda film ever created. I'm not surprised that you would reference that movie to compare to the real Earth, but you should know that everything that was shown in that movie was a lie.

@1,
But that movie was so hilariously, ridiculously entertaining!!!

Ummm... That's a satellite picture of normal winter weather over this continent. There's a whole collection of them, just like that one, dating from the launch of the first weather satellite.

@3 Oh. Please.

Do have a scientific study you can cite?

Because that's like saying people came out of Star Wars believing the holocaust wasn't a serious issue.

These movies are absurdist fantasy. They're not responsible for supporting or altering every single world view. That's just fucking idiotic. If that's what you believe then what you want is propaganda not art or entertainment.

Besides. Anybody who's world view is so precarious as to be irrevocably shattered or altered by a scifi fantasy movie is a useless idiot in the first place.

What @ 5 said. I can sympathize a bit with @ 3, who is really saying that they were irresponsible, but OTOH it's not the entertainment industry's job to educate the populace, but the media's.

@6: And guess what, the media (via Charles Mudede's post) is now citing The Day After Tomorrow to describe weather patterns.

I get that movies get to bend the laws/theories of science to fit the plot. Armageddon and Sharknado are great examples of this. But The Day After Tomorrow tried to market itself as just an exaggeration of climate change, not as a complete bullshit movie. As a result, gullible people like the author of this blog post have used it to compare with normal cyclic weather patterns. And now we see a movie that was designed to exaggerate climate change for propaganda purposes being used by climate change zealots who don't know shit about the science to support their points.

Disclaimer: I strongly believe that there is overwhelming evidence of man-made climate change (I've taken college courses on this). I just hate the ends justify the means lies and propaganda.

@1 no it was more like taking three decades changes and making them happen in a few days.

And you mean theories @7 - scientific laws are unproven observations, scientific theories are proven and peer-reviewed

@10: There is no effective difference between a scientific law and a scientific theory except that a scientific law has a lot more evidence. Newton's laws of motion are just theories that have a shitload of evidence. The fact that they are used in an axiomatic formation (which requires no evidence) does not mean that they are based on bullshit or are assumptions (unlike mathematical axioms). Science is inductive by nature, but tries to use pseudo-deductive methods when appropriate. As a result, things like the theory of relativity can be 'deduced' even though it is really based on inductive reasoning when you look closely at the 'axioms'.

Day after Tomorrow was the movie most hated by atmospheric scientists (Twister was the most beloved). I have seen many colleagues freak out much more over bad media than bad politicians -- maybe because the public know not to trust the GOP on climate issues but will believe what's on a big screen if the CGI is good. On the plus side, debunking aspects of the film make for great final exam questions.

@11 one of the things about studying climate science is that perfect strangers will reveal their opinion on science in general if they discover what I do for a living. Or they ask questions about an unrelated scientific topic. Anyway years of this leave me thinking there is a broad swathe of society who may or may not recognize a ridiculous depiction when they see it.

@11 Yeah. So there was no paper.

What you have is taste bias. Like everybody.

You're attempting to justify your taste - your dislike of the The Day After Tomorrow ( and I didn't like it either) - by making your taste seem Super Duper Important. Don't do that.

Leveling an unsubstantiated pseudo-scientific/moral case against the unmeasured negative impact of an admitted work of fiction is a fools errand.

You realize your argument is perilously close to complaining about the "war on Christmas" and claiming "Santa Claus is white," right?

That fact is it was a dumb movie. And that's it. It's impact on social or environmental policy was exactly nil.

@16

I think it was a retarded, and I think the people who liked it must be some kind of retards. AND ALSO, it was so stupid that even the people who didn't like it came out of the thing stupider for having seen it.

This!

Although in my own defense, I only like it because it's like watching a train wreck. It's so bad it's good... It's a great film to give the MST3K treatment to. My personal opinions of climate change were not affected at all by the movie.