By Dr. Robert Thorson
The climate-change disaster movie “The Day After Tomorrow” is finishing its opening run in the theaters. For most adults, I think it was a pretty neat film, especially the special effects. For schoolteachers, however, it may end up being a bigger disaster than the movie itself.
My prediction — one supported by several local teachers I interviewed — is that for every kid motivated to study Earth science by “The Day After Tomorrow” there will be at least a dozen who will require extra time and attention to unlearn what they think they’ve learned from a movie. For example, that hail can be giant blocks of crystal-clear ice, that sea level will rise instantly in one giant wave and that we’ll all have to go live in Mexico to survive. Oh, how I wish that the movie had been animated, or that the wolves had spoken in complete sentences. That way, the kids who saw it would know it was fiction (I hope).
On the plus side, impressionable young minds were thrilled by the fictional chills of the next ice age. This probably piqued their curiosity about the climate system enough that they will be able to maintain focus when subjects like humidity and pressure come up in school. On the down side, however, there probably won’t be enough time for teachers to capitalize on that interest because their curriculums are negotiated far in advance and driven by the back-to- basics content that goes with mandatory mastery testing.
As a parent, a former certified teacher, a frequent school volunteer and, to a lesser extent, a geology professor who has published papers on paleo-climatology, I suggest that we help Connecticut school systems out by home-schooling children on this subject. There is already a precedent for this type of school-to- home education in matters such as fire prevention, sex education, drug use, bigotry and bullying. So, if children who are important to you have seen “The Day After Tomorrow,” find a quiet time and place to talk, then ask them if they’ve been experimenting with climate misinformation. Let them know that if they keep putting such bad stuff in their brains, the side effects will be severe, especially for the taxpayers. Then try to deprogram them with one or more of the clarifications below. Every minute you spend on this may save a dollar somewhere in the state education budget.
The three points of information below are accepted by the vast majority of academic and government climate scientists and are published widely in peer-reviewed journals and on their websites.
1. True ice ages begin with astronomically triggered, long-term global cooling events, not transient warming events. There is little question that salinity-driven currents in the North Atlantic influence the climate system and can switch on and off at millennial- scale frequencies, especially during the deglaciation process.
2. During ice ages, the northern part of the United States doesn’t get buried by snow from the sky. It gets invaded by ice from the north, which moves down from Canada as a continent-sized puddle of ice. What happens is that an excess of snow to the north of us converts to ice, which becomes so thick that it flows slowly outward in all directions; in our case, to the south.
3. Sea level will rise because of the loss of glaciers and the warming of the oceans, not because of glacial buildup and ocean cooling. Think about it. The water needed to build a continent- sized glacier on land has to come from someplace big, like the top layer of the ocean. True ice ages are always associated with lower sea level.
If these points aren’t enough, and if you have access to the Internet, try the website that was put online to help clarify the misconceptions generated by the movie: www.dayaftertomorrowfacts.org.
Talk frankly with kids you care about. Dare to dream that we can halt the spread of geo-science misinformation before it’s too late, before we have to pay teachers overtime to mop up the mess that Hollywood has spilled on the floor of youth culture.