I have yet to meet a doctor who doesn’t dismiss the TV drama ER as hopelessly unrealistic, and yet who doesn’t tape it religiously if they happen to be on call. I’ve also yet to meet a doctor who doesn’t regard meteorologists and oceanographers as spotty geeks who couldn’t possibly be doing anything glamorous enough to be worth a TV series, never mind a blockbuster Hollywood film. So, with the release of The Day
After Tomorrow, a blockbuster-and-a-half inspired by the issue of human-induced sudden climate change, we must be careful not to confirm the medics’ worst suspicions by pedantically carping on about the film’s portrayal of geophysical fluid dynamics.
 
A medic watching this film would learn as much about climate as I would learn about cardiology watching ER — not nothing, but I would prefer the surgeon standing over me with a scalpel, or the politician pondering
my petrol taxes, to have had some additional training. So I find the fuss about the film’s possible impact on climate policy rather
disturbing. Bjørn Lomborg vehemently attacked the film recently in the Independent on Sunday for bouncing politicians into signing the Kyoto Protocol. It’s a film, lighten up. I’m sure the world’s teenagers can work out that this is hardly exam revision material, and if it inspires a few of them to stick with physics for a couple more years and perhaps
consider a university course in the geosciences,then it will have more than justified its special-effects budget.
 
Could The Day After Tomorrow do for  meteorology and oceanography what Top Gun did for US Air Force recruitment? The special effects are stunning and the filmmakers have clearly gone to some lengths
to base them all on natural phenomena, although the connections between them are more tenuous. A tidal wave could indeed hit New York, albeit one more likely induced by a submarine landslip than a gigantic storm
surge. Strange things do happen in the eyes of hurricanes, although to get stratospheric temperatures at sea level you have to be fairly
creative with your thermodynamics. I draw the line at someone embedding a hurricane model into a global weather model in 48 hours, but perhaps it is wise not to tell the teenagers what climate modelling actually
involves until after they have signed up.
 
I believe that the public takes a much more sophisticated line than Lomborg fears. I am involved in a public-participation
experiment (www.climateprediction.net) that is looking, among other things, at how the atmosphere might reinforce a thermohaline slow-down. Contributions from the public on the discussion boards have generally
been level-headed. Everyone understands that there’s a link to issues raised by the film without mistaking the film for a forecast.
So, the film is well worth a lab night out, particularly if your model is giving trouble.
 
Perhaps the hardest part will be judging how to respond to questions in the pub afterwards about whether this has anything to do with our actual projections for humaninduced climate change. We have to be
clear that the film is science fiction, but we also have to make sure we don’t belittle what is actually going on. A prescient dinosaur,
gazing future-wards over the millennial undulations of global temperatures, would probably just about make out the warming
spike representing our humble contribution to the twenty-first century. It’s quite an egoboost, isn’t it? The last species to have this
much influence on the climate was almost certainly green, slimy and inarticulate. A teenager signing up for the geosciences today
is guaranteed an interesting career, for while unfettered anthropogenic climate change will certainly not turn out exactly like The
Day After Tomorrow, it should still be a show worth watching — after ER,of course. ■
 
Myles Allen is in the Department of Physics,
University of Oxford, Parks Road,
Oxford OX1 3PU, UK.