Apocalypse Soon?

Hurricanes at Belfast's latitude, as depicted in the film, would have to move from west to east, or across all of Ireland, which would kill any tropical cyclone. Oh, you say, maybe the atmosphere gets so convoluted that hurricanes suddenly move from east to west? Fine. Except that there's hardly any water, the lifeblood of hurricanes, available to feed them, because England and continental Europe are sitting in the way.

Presumably Madras is inundated when all the ice that built up during the superstorm melts. Sorry, but there's only so much water to go around. The ice that was deposited on the land came from water in the ocean, which means that when it melts, the sea level simply returns to its pre-ice level -- or just what it is in Madras today.

But wait. Wasn't there also a recent Pentagon report about the impact of sudden climate change? Indeed. Last October, two Defense Department contractors considered what would happen if global warming suddenly disrupted the Gulf Stream circulation, and concluded that England's climate could resemble that of Siberia in as little as 15 years!

Well, this is about as plausible as "The Day After Tomorrow" (and the report's authors have about as much experience in climatology as the people who made the movie). Siberia is miserable because it's in the middle of a huge land mass surrounded by mountains and the Arctic Ocean. Cold air pools there in the winter, resulting in months where the temperature is largely below zero. For England to become Siberia, you would merely have to drain the Atlantic Ocean for a few thousand miles and build up three mountain ranges. But the earth's plates wouldn't allow mountains to form in the proper places. And even if they could, it would take at least about 14,999,985 more years than 15 for that to happen.

Is a Gulf Stream "failure" that would be sufficient to produce an ice age even possible? Ask MIT's Carl Wunsch, the world's authority on oceanic currents. He's very upset at these silly scenarios and believes they can harm efforts to reduce industrial emissions by subjecting the entire global warming issue to ridicule. (After all, Gore is the pitchman.) Wunsch recently wrote in a letter to Nature magazine that the only way to trigger a Gulf Stream-caused ice age "is either to turn off the wind system, or to stop the earth's rotation, or both."

Jeffery Godsick, spokesman for the film's distributor, Twentieth Century Fox, has been quoted saying that "the real power of the movie is to raise consciousness on the issue [of global warming]."

And the movie's producer, Mark Gordon, publicly agreed that "anything we can do to raise consciousness about the environment is a good thing. It's part of the reason we made this movie." So will "The Day After Tomorrow" have a political effect? Here's a scenario that may be more plausible than anything in the movie:

In June, after "Tomorrow" has been out for a week or two, Sens. John McCain and Joe Lieberman reintroduce a bill (S 139) to reduce carbon dioxide emissions in a fashion similar to the U.N.'s infamous Kyoto Protocol on global warming. It's expensive, it won't actually do anything measurable about the earth's temperature, and it only failed by 12 votes last fall.

In the Western United States, it's likely to be a hot, fiery summer. The New York Times editorial page has already blamed the drought there on global warming, even though the correlation between global temperature and Western drought is, statistically speaking, a big fat zero. But environmental fear creates political pressure, and plenty will be exerted on a handful of senators to switch their votes on S 139. After Bush vetoes a bill that passes a panicked House, Kerry exploits climate hysteria and knocks down one more state (maybe increasingly Democratic Arizona, burning?) than Gore did. Make that President-elect Kerry.

Can't happen? Well, in 1979, Jane Fonda starred in "The China Syndrome," another scientific impossibility, about a contained nuclear reactor meltdown, that coincided with a national panic over the accident at Three Mile Island (which killed no one and released only tiny amounts of radiation). Since then, we haven't approved building another nuclear plant -- the only major power source that doesn't emit gases capable of warming the planet.

Did implausible fiction influence our national energy system? Democrats with their eye on the presidency are no doubt fervently hoping that it did.

Author's e-mail:pjm8x@virginia.edu

Pat Michaels is senior fellow in environmental studies at the Cato Institute and author of the upcoming book "Meltdown: The Predictable Exaggeration of Global Warming by Scientists, Politicians, and the Media" (Cato Books).