Environmental Science: The Day after Tomorrow Film

Environmental science
Student’s Name
Institutional Affiliation
ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE
Introduction
There have been raging debates concerning climate and environmental change. Both ecological and climatic change is among the topics that top in scientific and socio-political discourses. The domain of discussion on this theme has extended its wings to the entertainment and art industry. Expositions in thrillers, fantasy, and fictional stories in books and movies unravel the intricacy surrounding the topic of climate with its related issues. Fantasies' narratives are currently emerging to capture the environmental devastation, and the idea of escaping to space is becoming a reality. The role of fantasies and fictional narratives act as a springboard upon which we gain motivation and challenges. They also provide a purview for relooking at consequences of environmental crisis in the context of environmental imagination in both the 20th and 21st centuries. This paper is an exploration of two films, The Day After Tomorrow Film and   Interstellar, in terms of environmental crisis is and consequences, vital motivating factors, and their relevance in the 20th and 21st centuries.
The Day after Tomorrow Film
The Day After Tomorrow is a 2004 American science film directed by Roland Emmerich and is based on the book The Coming Global Superstorm by Art Bell and Whitley Strieber. The frustrations led to the development of the film that the scientific community suffered as they strive to create awareness of the dangers associated with human-induced global warming to the public and politicians (Von Burg, 2012). As a result of ineffective public awareness regarding the risks of global warming, the scientific community embarked on an unconventional approach of deploying the film ‘The Day After Tomorrow (TDAT)’ to portray and to dramatize the adverse effects of global warming.
When The Day After Tomorrow (TDAT) was released in 2004, it caused palpable discussions across the globe (Bilandzic & Sukalla, 2019). The majority of environmental activists and agencies supported the film’s issue, but the scientific community was a bit skeptical. The film was quite spectacular, unconventional, and shocking. Many people expected that temperatures were subject to insidious rise but with variation in time and space. However, the film's portrayal climatic changes were abrupt, i.e., there was a climatic change towards the Ice Age, .but this did not create pessimism; instead, it reinforced people’s willingness to intervene in climatic issues.
A glimpse into film’ plot illustrates intertwining stories that unfold environmental and climatic conditions at episodic times. Jack Hall, also called Dennis Quad, in the film, is on an expedition with his colleagues to Antarctica. They went to drill ice core samples for National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The ice broke off from the rest of the content, which proved nearly fatal to Jack, who almost falls to death. Jack presented his findings presented to the United Nations conference. He reported that global warming changed the earth’s climate into Ice Age about ten thousand years ago and cautions that this could reoccur again in about a hundred to a thousand years if humans do not take measures to contain atmosphere pollution. Most of the diplomats at the conference were skeptical about Jack’s postulation. Later, Jack visited Prof. Terry Rapson to seek further information about the global warming phenomenon: Prof. Terry explained that the polar ice caps undergo melting leading to the increased influx of freshwater into oceans, and this causes a dip in ocean temperatures as well as dilution of water, that result in lower salt levels. Buoyed by this information, the scientists embarked on a journey of reconstructing data to predict the reoccurrence of Ice Age, it atmospheric pollution goes unabated, and the ice continues to melt at polar points (Vaidyanathan, 2018). At the same time, the earth was marked by remarkable unpredictable and episodic events, including Tokyo being hit by hail, snow being witnessed at New Delhi, storms, hurricanes, strong winds, flooding, extremely low temperatures and tornadoes phenomena in Los Angeles.
The Day After Tomorrow was quite a sensational film that raises a wave of awareness, question, and concerns about climatic issues around the globe. This film also causes scientific distraction but still harbors the potential to shape the scientific discourse in a productive way Von Burg, 2012). The film is quite educational and enlightening because of the unconventional form of arguments regarding public controversies challenge the norms of accepted arguments, and this unravels new discursive landscapes. The discussion in the film surrounding global warming provides a way of debating broader contours of what is considered to belong to credible science (Bilandzic & Sukalla, 2019). In the light of global warming critics, the scientific approval of The Day After Tomorrow, the film shows how desperate and alarmist the discourses on global warming are. For the environmentalist advocates, the film depicts both dangers of global warming and non-scientific discussions that influence scientific arguments and propositions. There is a need to re-examine the role of ‘‘Hollywoodization’’, which endorses the scientifically legitimate premise of global warming as destructive and real (Von Burg, 2012). Thus, the film’s veracity needs to be established, and its ability to magnify the dangers of climate c...