Why does the earth freeze?

(Source: Far Out / 20th Century Fox)

Tuesday, September 17, 2024, 5:00 a.m., United Kingdom

When The day after tomorrow When The 40 Years of Climate Change was first published 20 years ago, scientists were already warning of a global climate crisis. But witnessing it before our eyes was a spectacle reserved only for science fiction films.

Today, with wildfires and seasonally unusual flash floods raging across the Earth, global temperatures reaching a dangerous tipping point, and entire ecosystems and food supply chains teetering on the brink of total catastrophe, Roland Emmerich's vision no longer seems so far-fetched. And it's almost refreshing to see a blockbuster that dared to address this issue so long ago rise up the global Netflix charts, leaving other disaster movies with less real-world relevance behind.

Even the allegorical mixture Don't look upproduced and distributed by Netflix itself with much fanfare three years ago, does not have quite the same emotional impact on viewers as tornadoes sweeping through cities, huge hailstones destroying cars and sheets of ice swallowing the Empire State Building. Some of these scenes in The day after tomorrow has anticipated phenomena that have now become real. And so the scale of the deadly destruction that the film's weather systems unleash on the world, especially in the good old USA, makes it clear how close we could be to absolute catastrophe.

Dennis Quaid's climate researcher Jack Hall predicted it. However, he himself did not expect it to happen so soon. Before he could convince the world's political and economic strategists of his predictions, the entire northern hemisphere was hit by a wave of superstorms the likes of which had never been seen before. Jack's son, a student in New York, played by the young Jake Gyllenhaal, is in great danger when a tsunami floods Manhattan and then freezes over.

He and his friends survive by seeking shelter in the New York Public Library, an apt metaphor for the safe haven of reason and scientific knowledge in the face of impending natural disasters. When Jack and his colleague Jason reach the library, Sam's friends are the only survivors.

But what are the causes of this new ice age?

At a climate change conference in New Delhi, Jack is presenting to world leaders his model of the dramatic climate changes he believes global warming will bring. “The Northern Hemisphere owes its temperate climate to the North Atlantic current,” he explains. “The heat from the sun reaches the equator and is carried north by the ocean. But global warming is melting the polar ice caps and interrupting this current.” If enough ice falls into the Atlantic, it could block the flow of the current completely. “If that happens, our warm climate is gone.”

Paradoxically, it is global warming and the melting of the Arctic ice that are creating a new layer of ice in The day after tomorrow. This storyline is more or less based on actual phenomena in the world today and is backed up by science. There is indeed a North Atlantic current that brings warm weather to much of the Northern Hemisphere, and it is actually being disrupted by the melting of the polar ice caps.

However, the currents in our oceans will never be disrupted to the extent that all of North America, Europe and northern Asia freeze over. Instead, this disruption to the circulation of our oceans will likely result in various small-scale climate changes and weather phenomena, many of them occurring simultaneously. At the same time, sea level rise caused by the melting of ice caps poses a significant threat to coastal regions around the world.

Still, the film serves its purpose by providing a snapshot of how serious the situation could become if global warming is not curbed in the short term. While there may not be a new ice age on the horizon, many other disasters are certainly to be expected.