UK Guardian 'Squees' on the Day After Tomorrow’s 20th Anniversary

Does anyone actually watch this movie anymore? It’s pretty much scientifically illiterate, and violates the laws of thermodynamics. But, it was perfect propaganda from the doomsday climate cult

The Day After Tomorrow at 20: a strangely prescient ecological warning

In the winter of 2013, a breakdown in the polar vortex allowed freezing cold air to escape southwards towards the North American continent. As ice storms, tornadoes and blizzards swept across the US, Donald Trump tweeted. “I’m in Los Angeles and it’s freezing,” he wrote. “Global warming is a total, and very expensive, hoax!”

OK, good grief, Trump Derangement Syndrome to start off

It was all a little too reminiscent of Roland Emmerich’s disaster flick The Day After Tomorrow – which opens with US leaders dismissing scientific concerns about the loss of a huge chunk of the Antarctic ice shelf. The researchers are soon vindicated: within days, the melting ice sets off a chain of freak weather events, culminating in a global superstorm that plunges the entire northern hemisphere into a new ice age.

The film, 2004’s summer box office hit, was lampooned by critics and scientists alike. Members of an internet chatroom allegedly paid the paleoclimatologist William Hyde $100 to see it: “This movie is to climate science what Frankenstein is to heart surgery”, he concluded.

Nevertheless, a series of studies showed that the film did sway public opinion about the climate crisis. Twenty years after its release, it remains a unique specimen: a climate disaster blockbuster that adheres to all the tenets of the genre, while also explicitly attributing its carnage to the greenhouse effect.

Well, in reality, the shutting down of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation can lead to cooling temperatures. Some think the introduction of too much fresh water into the system brought on the Little Ace Age. But, then, what about all the fresh water from the glacial melting as the last ice age ended? It really is all theoretic. But, if this all happened, it would be on the order of years for a little ace age, and at least decades for a new glacial age.

Like every disaster film, the Day After Tomorrow is riddled with inaccuracies, cliches, and strange displays of machismo (in one scene, Gyllenhaal battles wolves on a frozen ghost ship). But if anything, the film’s absurdity feels closer to our reality in 2024 than it did in 2004. After all, we live in the age of climate surrealism – it is generally understood that things are going to get weirder as they get worse. Today is the day after tomorrow, we mutter to ourselves, as we read about ancient anthrax-infested reindeer carcasses defrosting in the Arctic Circle.

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