The Day After Tomorrow : An Actual Event or Fiction?

Last nite I went out to watch the movie, The Day After Tomorrow. As usual, Hollywood did a good job on capitalizing the natural disaster in order to generate profit to support its filming industry (phewww...a strong political statement nih!). However, I very much in doubt if the movie ever creates an awareness to its audience about the importance of maintaining the nature balance.

According to this movie, the world is repeating its own history by doing a major overhaul on its system, thus creates another ice age (the last one happened 10,000 years ago). The whole northern hemisphere is blanketed with white snow with freezing temperature - a killing temperature. At such temperature, any sudden drop in temperature to its extreme subzero cooling will create a state of cryogenic which preserves everything at its initial condition except that of course, the being will be dead and frozen. The climate has gone wild and it creates major tornadoes as well as tropical storms which actually are rare on America's soil. This definitely will lead to catastrophic destruction on major cities on northern hemisphere.

The way the director built up his argument was pretty convincing by manipulating some scientific data - sea current, the ice core analysis, space observation etc. But I like to know, if such occurence will ever take place, eventually?

I came across with this article today, "A New Ice Age? None Soon, Snow 2 Miles Deep Implies" in The New York Times dated on Thursday, June 10th, 2004. The article written by Andrew C. Revkin concurs with the movie's claim that the last ice age occurred about 10,000 years ago. Now, although many scientists believe that we are going into another ice age, a recent development lead by climate and ice experts shows that we are not even closer to the end of the warm era. This simply means, we don't have to worry about the new ice age. Hehehehe..good Lord!!

According to these specialists, the ice core which they dug in deep Antartica, provides them with ample evidences to support their hypothesis. The ice core, dated 740,000 years ago and it is located some 10,000 feet down under the thick Antartica ice, tells the researchers about the past air temperatures due to the presence of certain forms of hydrogen in the ice. By far, this is the oldest ice core ever dug from Antartica. Therefore, it makes sense to welcome the data from this ice core as valid as it can be because of the length of time period it covers.

However, some scientists cast a doubt over the current model of climate pattern build from this data. Supposedly everything has been going on very well for the last 10,000 years but it happened years before the advancement of technology, what if the current technology could become a catalyst to speed the time to reach ice age? Or what if, the current global warming effect could lead the weather to behave out of its ordinary? You see, some 10,000 years ago, we men did not have such capabilities to produce abundant of carbon monoxide into the air. We also didn't bring down timber as much as we do now. And certainly we didn't pollute the water as much as we are doing right now. So, all these could astray the development of weather development module developed based on the past weather profile.

These are just questions I share with the writer of this article. Knowing the technology and the science practice of today, I have no doubt that we are doing anything we can to prevent the second ice age to come. But the capitalist economic would certainly go against us. The more pollution they do, the more money they make. History has shown that the environmental activists and big corporation do not match well.

I guess this is the time which everyone needs to forget his/her own personal agenda but to focus on one thing - saving our planet!