This was one reason I asked ...

Gore Stumps for "Tomorrow"
by Joal Ryan
May 17, 2004, 5:30 PM PT

It's the most surprising plot twist of The Day After Tomorrow: Rupert Murdoch working together with Al Gore.

To be accurate, Murdoch and Gore aren't technically working together, but they are working toward the same end: The conservative media mogul's selling a movie, and the liberal former vice president's helping him selling it.

The movie is The Day After Tomorrow, a $125 million summer disaster flick from Murdoch's Fox, opening May 28.

Paul Dergarabedian, of the box-office tracking firm Exhibitor Relations, calls the would-be blockbuster "a popcorn movie with a message."

Its message: The world's going to hell in a hand basket. Tornadoes in Los Angeles. The ice age in Manhattan. Earthquakes, tidal waves, unbelievable gridlock.

The cause of all this consternation, Dennis Quaid's professor character in the film tells us, is global warming. The movie was said to be inspired by the cataclysmic tome The Coming Global Superstorm.

Murdoch presumably is hoping the special effects, if not the topic, will fatten the Fox bottom line. Gore definitely is hoping the topic, if not the end-of-the-world imagery, will make audiences think about the environmental bottom line.

"I do want to take advantage of the opportunity presented by the movie...to talk about what the real issues are," Gore told reporters in a telephone press conference last week.

To that end, Gore has teamed with the activist group, MoveOn.org, to publicize an education campaign on global warming and the greenhouse effect timed to the release of The Day After Tomorrow.

MoveOn.org volunteers are being encouraged to buy tickets to the film's Memorial Day opening weekend, and hand out informational flyers to other moviegoers.

The flyers, MoveOn.org executive director Peter Schurman told reporters, "will answer questions people will have" after seeing the film. (Make that, questions about global warming. It's unlikely the organization knows what Day After costar Jake Gyllenhaal's intentions are toward Kirsten Dunst.)

Schurman said Fox has been notified of its plans, and its representatives invited to a May 24 so-called town hall rally in New York City featuring Gore and environmentalist Bobby Kennedy Jr.

Fox, for its part, has agreed to screen the film for Gore and a small group of others before the film's gala premiere, also scheduled for May 24 in New York City.

Outside of that lone coordinated effort, the two sides will go their own ways. Fox will push Day After as a big-budget summer flick from the director of Independence Day (with a nod to the environment through its partnership with Future Forests, a London-based company that shows businesses how to minimize their carbon-dioxide emissions); Gore's camp will push Day After as an important, if exaggerated, cautionary tale.

If MoveOn.org is a group with a political bent unlike Murdoch's, his studio isn't griping.

"We think it's wonderful for the movie," Fox spokeswoman Florence Grace says of the MoveOn.org campaign. "The issues addressed [make the film] all the more topical, all the more interesting. We think it's great."

www.eonline.com/News/Items...124,00.html

And this was another ...

It May Be a Cheesy Movie
But ‘The Day After Tomorrow’ has a message for President George W. BushWEB EXCLUSIVE
By Gersh Kuntzman
Newsweek
Updated: 5:12 p.m. ET May 28, 2004May 28 - How do I know that George W. Bush can actually be defeated in November? Simple, I've just seen the big summer blockbuster movie.

That may not sound like the best way to determine the president's vulnerability—after all, summer blockbusters typically concern themselves with high body counts rather than high approval ratings—but this time, the summer blockbuster is "The Day After Tomorrow," a rabidly pro-environment, anti-Bush lecture released by Twentieth Century Fox.

Let's put that another way: when conservative media magnate Rupert Murdoch releases a movie that depicts President Bush as little more than a vapid pawn of Vice President Dick Cheney and decries him for, of all things, his environmental policies, you know the president is in trouble.

And what a movie this is! With its unassailable B-movie pedigree—its director, Roland Emmerich, also helmed the timeless classic "Independence Day"—"The Day after Tomorrow" is nothing if not action packed. The special effects are terrifying! The close-ups are extreme! Computer monitors are always beeping incessantly! Polar ice caps are breaking off in continent-sized chunks! Product placements are really obvious! (The hero scientist drives a fuel-efficient Honda.)

And the arguments between scientists and the government officials are extremely bitter! And scientists are all heroes while the small-minded, myopic, government officials are all, well, small-minded, myopic, Bush administration officials who spout things like, "With all due respect, Dr. Hall, but our economy is just as fragile as the environment." (Cut to footage of the entire Northern Hemisphere turning into an ice cube!)

And just tell me another summer blockbuster that has the guts to slam the White House for pulling out of the Kyoto Accord (extra credit if any of the target audience of 12- to 18-year-old boys knows that the Kyoto Accord is a treaty to reduce greenhouse gases and not some new Honda sedan).

A brief plot summary follows (avert your eyes if you are so unschooled in summer blockbusters that you don't know how such movies will end from the minute you sit down): National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) paleoclimatologist Jack Hall (Dennis Quaid) discovers that the greenhouse effect is melting the polar ice caps much faster than once anticipated. How fast? Let's put it this way, by the end of this sentence, the polar ice caps would have already melted (that's fast). Of course, no one in government—least of all the vice president, who is played by Dick Cheney look-alike, Kenneth Welsh—believes him. In fact, they demean his computer models and, worse, his manhood (yes, that Cheney guy plays rough). Thanks to the tenets of the summer blockbuster, though, Hall is right about the melting ice caps. The subsequent glut of fresh water in the oceans shuts down the Gulf Stream and triggers a worldwide megastorm that doesn't end until the entire Northern Hemisphere is frozen. The United States is evacuated to Mexico (which seals its border, forcing millions of Americans to become illegal aliens), the president freezes to death and the Cheney guy has to give a speech admitting that his environmental policies have been a disaster (he eats so much crow that we can only hope he's on the Atkins).

As fact, this movie is to environmental science what “JFK” was to the grassy knoll. But as an attack on President Bush, it's as dead on as “The Sorrow and The Pity.” So naturally, every environmental group on the planet is endorsing it. MoveOn.org calls it "the movie the White House doesn't want you to see" and Al Gore has even traded in his day job (which was what, exactly?) to promote it. At the same time, NASA briefly ordered its scientists to refuse any interview requests, lest the space agency appear too sympathetic to the hard-working NASA scientists in the movie who are constantly being ignored by the White House. (The paleoclimatology program at NOAA is reportedly slated for a real-life Bush administration budget cut, so maybe NASA's fears of unmuzzling its scientists were not so absurd.)

Of course, the havoc unleashed by the aliens in Emmerich's prior (and far better) B-movie is much more likely to happen than an insta-ice age killing half the planet in an afternoon—but that's sort of the point. (Unlike the pissed-off aliens of "Independence Day," Emmerich seems to be saying, we Earthlings at least have the power to stop destroying the planet by ourselves). Global climate change is happening—and if it takes a horrendously inaccurate, ham-handed, cheesy summer movie to point it out, that's good enough for me.

And, apparently, Rupert Murdoch. "Part of the reason we made this movie," said Mark Gordon, one of its producers, "was to raise consciousness about the environment."

What's next? Well, if Murdoch suddenly buys the rights to Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11," we should all get used to the phrase "President Kerry."

I actually quite enjoyed the movie, great effects, and I was PARTICULARLY pleased to find out that Jake Gyllenhaal, who I like very much, was apathetic towards any message that the movie might have had. The idea that greenhouse gases caused by automobile emmissions could cause this is ludicrous. I believe like George Carlin:

"The planet will be here for a long, long, long time after we're gone, and it will heal itself, it will cleanse itself, because that's what it does. It's a self correcting system."

Are we so egotistic that we actually believe that our scratching on the back of the earth can so dramatically change it? Like Carlin also says, we are to the earth what a bad case of fleas is to a dog, and one day, we may be shaken off. That is life. But to actually believe that we are above nature in the sense that we have the power to harm the "delicate ecological balance" of the earth is asinine. I guess it just bothered me that the bogus science in this movie might actually appear true to the 50% of individuals that, like Boortz says, are too stupid to live in a free country. It also bothered me that the Pres and the VP in this movie were CLEARLY meant to be Bush and Cheney and there was CLEARLY a negative message here about the coservative view about the environment, shown through a far-left filter. I am not saying that Bush and Cheney are great guys or that they are good for the environment, but I fear that the "stupid 50%" will actually believe that this is some sort of almost prophetic "documentary" about something that is based on a myth. I think it's also best that the "great unwashed" NOT learn politics from Hollywood. Well, let's just hope they are too stupid to find their way to the voting booth this November! ;-)

For me, I feel that we should lessen our dependence on oil NOT for the sake of the earth, which can take care of itself, but so that we don't have to depend on those *&$#%@ OPEC thugs! Give tax credits to companies to develop hydrogen-feuled cars! Anyway, take care all! -- Ry

BTW, here is another GREAT quote from Carlin:

"Planet, species, race, nation, state, religion, party, union, club, association, neighborhood, improvement committee; I have no interest in any of it. I love and treasure individuals as I meet them, I loathe and despise the groups they identify with and belong to."

Some good debunking sites:
www.junkscience.com/news/robinson.htm www.ncpa.org/ba/ba230.html
www.ourcivilisation.com/aginat...egw.htm

The Day After Tomorrow: Could it really happen?
by Dr. Jeffrey M. Masters
Chief Meteorologist, The Weather Underground, Inc.

The disaster film epic, The Day After Tomorrow™, depicts a world where global warming triggers an abrupt climate change, creating a global superstorm that unleashes unimaginable worldwide weather disasters. In the span of just a few days, tornados devastate Los Angeles, huge hail pounds Tokyo, and colossal storm surge waves and blizzards whip New York. Could it really happen? Could global warming really cause such incredible disasters?

Like much science fiction, The Day After Tomorrow™ is based on some solid scientific fact. Recent scientific discoveries show that the present day climate is unusually stable, and that "normal" climate for Earth is the climate of frequent extreme jumps--like a light switch flicking on and off. Thus, the popular conception that global warming will lead to a slow and steady increase in temperature that humans can readily adapt to may be incorrect. Global warming could push the climate system past a threshold where a sudden, irreversible climate shift would occur. This would most likely happen if the increased precipitation and glacial melt water from global warming could flood the North Atlantic with enough fresh water to slow down or even halt the mighty Gulf Stream ocean current. Without the Gulf Stream pumping warm, tropical water to the North Atlantic, average temperatures would cool in Europe and North America by 5°F or more in just a few years--not enough to trigger a full-fledged ice age, but enough cooling to bring snows in June and killing frosts in July and August to New England and northern Europe, such as occurred in the famed "year without a summer" in 1816. In addition, shifts in the jet stream pattern would bring about severe droughts and damaging floods in regions unaccustomed to such events, greatly straining global food and water supplies. Climate experts consider a sudden global warming-induced climate shift unlikely in the next 100 years, but do acknowledge their computer models are too crude to know just what the probabilities are.

But no, a sudden global warming-induced climate shift could not cause the kind of instant wild weather mayhem depicted in the movie. In this respect, The Day After Tomorrow is science Fiction with a capital "F". The laws of meteorology get seriously abused here. Consider the book the movie is based on, The Coming Global Superstorm, by Whitley Streiber and Art Bell. Whitley Streiber is a UFO expert and author of the best-selling 1985 book Communion, a non-fiction account of his abduction by extra-terrestrials. Art Bell hosts a nationally syndicated all-night radio show, Coast to Coast AM, which specializes in UFOs and the supernatural. They argue that a sudden climate shift would create such strong atmospheric instability that an incredible "superstorm" must result. Powerful clusters of thunderstorms in the Arctic would penetrate deep into the stratosphere, bringing -150°F upper atmospheric air to the surface, flash freezing any living thing caught outside. The clusters of thunderstorms would merge into a continent-sized "superstorm" that would suck energy from the oceans heated by global warming, generating winds of 100-200 mph, blizzard conditions with hundreds of feet of snow, temperature falls in Canada of 100 degrees in an hour, and incredible thunderstorms with huge hail and tornados.

The primary scientific evidence Streiber and Bell offer to support their intuition involves the discovery of wooly mammoths with partially digested plant remains in their stomachs: "The sudden freezing that killed these animals required much more than a bad storm. It required a storm that was capable of delivering unprecedented levels of extreme cold to the surface and doing it so suddenly that the animals which were caught placidly grazing, did not even have time to look up.... To all appearances they were simply frozen solid where they stood without enough warning to do more than raise their heads." It takes a pretty talented scientist to infer the existence of "superstorms" from the appearance of how a frozen animal held its head, especially when ice core, sediment core, and tree ring studies all show no evidence of historical superstorms. But Bell and Streiber are not scientists, and certainly didn't run any computer models of the atmosphere to verify their theories. Modern computer models of the Earth's weather show that the only types of storms planet Earth can manage are the current ordinary hurricanes, blizzards, and thunderstorms. The formation and evolution of the superstorm as described in The Day After Tomorrow and The Coming Global Superstorm is a meteorological impossibility. Let's summarize just a few of the scientific impossibilities in the movie:

The superstorm sucks vast quantities of frigid upper atmospheric air down to the surface, flash freezing any living thing caught outside. However, any graduate of a high school physics course could tell you that the air would warm on its descent in response to the requirements of the Ideal Gas Law, and would never be able to flash freeze anything. One scientist in the movie does remember his high school physics and asks, "But wouldn't the air warm as it descends?" But the senior scientist replies, "No, it's moving too fast!" Sorry, guy, but the Ideal Gas Law applies no matter how fast the air is moving. If you were on my thesis committee, I'd kick you off.

Clusters of thunderstorms cannot merge together to form a continent-scale blizzard with a calm eye over land. Huge storms with calm eyes can only happen over the oceans. These storms are called hurricanes, and require that the core of the storm be over warm ocean waters in order to utilize the powerful latent heat energy that water vapor gives up when it condenses into rain. And the laws of physics do not allow these type of storms to create blizzard conditions, only heavy rain.

A 300-foot high storm surge whipped up by the intense winds of the superstorm smashes through Manhattan. There's a little problem here--the winds needed to create a storm surge of this magnitude are probably at least twice the speed of sound (1200 mph), yet there is little apparent wind on the ocean's surface as the wave smashes ashore.

The superstorm is shown in many scenes rotating clockwise, and in other scenes counter-clockwise. Oops, all large-scale storm systems in the Northern Hemisphere must rotate counter-clockwise, thanks to one of the laws of physics on a rotating planet called the Coriolis force.

So, enjoy the special effects. Discuss how you wished they'd spent more money showing more special effects instead of showing so much drippy melodrama. Ponder the precautionary nature of the tale as you drive home in your fossil-fuel guzzling vehicle, and take the opportunity to learn more about the science of abrupt climate change-- but don't take the movie seriously. It's science Fiction.

For further reading
Skeptics have routinely called global warming "a hoax", and attacked the credibility of scientists promoting the idea. Are the skeptics right? To shed light on the issue, it is helpful to review how the same skeptics treated the ozone hole issue. Read the Weather Underground special feature, The Skeptics vs. The Ozone Hole [www.wunderground.com/educati...cs.asp].

From: www.wunderground.com/educati...fter.asp