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Yes, it is the name of the doomsday blockbuster that’s all set to grace the cinema halls with its much overblown but invaluable predictions starting this weekend. No, I have not seen it and ‘am not sure whether I intend to see it at all. The movie just happened to be a pebble collected during my information gathering spree. I love information, remember admitting in one of my earlier posts that I am a true info-junkie. The one thing I like more than gathering information is dissipating it and I have found this journal as a good medium for the purpose. Bad luck to all you people who take any trouble reading my posts.
Living in a place which does double duty as a barometer for global climate changes has sharpened my sense towards climate changes and my perception of the environment. I have started recognizing the seriousness of terms like permafrost, global warming and receding glaciers. Though not yet hypersensitive to the environmental cause as the Greenpeace to take out my Rainbow Warrior to the high seas and protest against the environmental atrocities committed by world governments, nowadays climate change issues move me as much as Eliot's poems, which is to say a lot.
Yesterday morning I happened to catch on NPR(National Public Radio) broadcast on how changes in permafrost is affecting life in Alaska. Permafrost is earth (not just ice) below ground which stays below 0 deg Celsius for more than 2-3 years. About 200 towns and 2000 miles of road in Alaska is built on top of permafrost which is considered a nice firm bed to build upon by engineers. So whats the problem? Thanks to global warming(several causes including you driving your car), the Artic permafrost is melting, add to this the fact that 20% of carbon dioxide on earth is trapped inside the permafrost which releases it into atmosphere when it melts. In Alaska, towns built on permafrost are moving towards the sea, highways are sinking and rural Alaskans who wait till Memorial day weekend(which is this coming weekend) to bury their dead (they keep the bodies thru’ winter and spring and wait for the ground to thaw!) can now bury them earlier! We, humans have this much power over climate and nature…whoa!!!
That brings me back to the movie, The Day After Tomorrow,where finally film makers have caught up with the environmentalists and have overtaken them sans effort. Is Roland Emmerich going to repeat the ‘Independence Day’ success? The promos have lavish CGI powered scenes like New York in a big freeze with a scene stealer of an accelerated super freeze of Empire States Building with windows popping out, snow blizzards in New Delhi and LA ripped open by tornadoes starting of course with the ripping off of the Hollywood sign on the hills.
Environmental activists who worked with Day After Tomorrow say that the exposure and media coverage they got while shooting the film was many times more than the what they received from decades of activism! Experts at Lawrence-Berkeley lab in CA warn that although the climatic changes in the movie take place at a fast-forward pace which in real time might take decades, the cause(the changes in the Gulf Stream) and the effects might be the same but not on such a compressed scale of time as depicted in the movie. In other interesting news, related to the movie, on April 1, 2004 NASA issued a memo saying, "No one from NASA is to do interviews or otherwise comment on anything having to do with ... " the film, “The Day After Tomorrow.” (which they later retracted).
A global climatic change in a compressed time scale of a few days does give tremendous freedom for CGI and special effect artists, so in all probabilities this is just another film like Deep Impact, Volcano, Armageddon and the likes. But if it succeeds in making the Americans with behemoth SUVs who drive 6liter-V8 engines in the urban jungles of San Francisco or New York (why do u need an SUV to drive in a city, to make up for you small u-know-what?), to take a second look on their choice of personal transportation, that’s the best that Hollywood can do for the environmental cause.
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