The Day After Tomorrow Movie – Is It Our Future?

Through the cinematic drama of The Day After Tomorrow, I saw what our actions and words could do to the innocence of nature. The storms and the snow-ravaged city of New York, as well as a group of U.S. citizens, tried to survive the few days they had under extreme conditions. In actuality, the few days of a massive change in climate is one of the most improbable events of the movie.

Throughout the 19th century and 20th century, we have known about climate change and drastic global warming like it’s a popular saying. What most of us know as well is that we are not going to see a tower of waves come to us out of the blue. Through many years of hard work, scientists have figured out that the earth is, in fact, warming up at high rates but yet, here we are, still standing. Earth's average temperature will climb to 1.5 °Cto 4.5°C if our action to generating tons of greenhouse gases increases. That may sound like a lot over just a small period but here, we are talking in about one-hundred years. In The Day After Tomorrow, the temperature increased and dropped within a few days which is very implausible thanks to the evidence shared above. As well, in the movie, they lost the city of New York in a span of few days but with other sources of data, scientists say major cities like Miami and Bangladesh will collapse within a century which is far longer than just a few days.

As we all may know, the earth will eventually no longer be able to carry life and the sun will go out in a burst of flames. What a lot of people actually don’t know is that there were 5 major extinctions that happened on this planet many many years ago. The last greenhouse gas extinction was 252 million years ago. That is a very long time frame but that still doesn't mean it’s not an issue for us to face in the future. By the rate of how much greenhouse gases we produce, this “doomsday’ may come to us 10 times sooner than expected but as said above, that is much more time than 3-4 days. Mind you, it would be very boring do document 252 million years of the earth in just one cinematic movie. What I think we can document about has been the increased temperature of the earth over 100 years. It may seem small but 0.6°C-0.9°C can have drastic events on this world such as rising sea levels and more drastic storms. What we do know from this movie is that climate change will not just happen in an instant but long years of change.

As many years as I have lived on this earth, there have always been some sorts of hurricane or superstorm targeting the U.S. As a person living in urban Alberta, I am very lucky to not have to deal with those things but I may be mistaken. A few years back, Calgary faced a terrible storm called a supercell. Now, in the time of climate change and environmental changes, we have seen supercells come up more frequently and much worse. In the movie A Day After tomorrow, there was a scene where the main characters faced a terrible storm. That was one of the things this cinematic film got right about climate change. The two ingredients to make a supercell include the following; a strong speed of the wind and a directional wind shear. These wind patterns create a mesocyclone which is a deep, persistently rotating updraft. These supercells also have weaknesses as well. Stable air that has been cooled by the rain from the downdraft of the storm will go updraft, slowing down its power. Unfortunately, these storms are very hard to document due to them evolving so fast. In other words, they are way too fast for our liking.

Through many years of research and time, we can see that these storms are very much growing in intensity and amount which can be very scary for our society. Sea rising levels have a huge contribution to the cause of more supercells due to the extra water vapor in the air and we all know these storms love a humid climate. These situations can have very damaging effects on the way we see things and the way we live in life. In 2012, 11 weather disasters altogether crossed the billion-dollar threshold in economic losses. That amount of money could have been directed to so much more than this. America has dealt with the most supercells and this is because of their CAPE. CAPE stands for “convective available potential energy”. This energy will contribute to the intensity of the storm causing much more damage than needed. It may take sheer effort and a lot of global help, but to end the destruction of our planet, we start the creation of new, abundant life.