In the summer of 2004, scientists and environmental advocates engaged the film, The Day After Tomorrow, in an effort to raise awareness of global warming as a serious environmental threat. The ...popular fictional film creates a dilemma for scientists and environmental advocates who highlight the dangers of global warming; while the film's underlying message has scientific merit, the cinematic depictions of such dangers push the boundaries of scientific credibility. This article examines how scientists and skeptics treat the film as a rhetorical resource to articulate claims about global warming science often obscured in existing public discussions of climate change. I argue that the rhetorical strategies used by both sides of the global warming debate demonstrate the opportunities and limitations of popular culture in situated public scientific discourses.
The derivation of the quasi-geostrophic potential vorticity equation of mathematical meteorology is usually done using fairly sophisticated techniques of perturbation theory, but stops short of ...deriving self-consistently the stratification parameter of the mean atmospheric state. In this note we suggest how this should be done within the confines of the theory, and as a consequence we raise the possibility that the atmosphere could become globally unstable, with dramatic consequences.
The aim of this paper is to investigate the transmediation of scientific articles to very different media types, meaning that the form and content of scientific communication is transformed into ...other forms of communication – more precisely works of art or entertainment, as exemplified by the media type feature film. The focus is on transmediation of narratives and truthfulness. Specifically, the discussions centre around narratives of human actions changing the environment on a global scale. Such narratives are vital to scrutinize because they concern the conditions of future human existence. To make the discussions truly relevant, the complex issue of truthfulness in communication is also included. Different media types can be, and are often expected to be, truthful in different ways, and because of media differences it may well be the case that narratives and their truthfulness are corrupted in transmediation. Whereas communication in general has many widely different purposes, its function is sometimes essentially to get things right – to represent certain things truthfully. Therefore, it is imperative to explore the capacities of different media types to narrate truthfully. The paper starts with explications of some of the core concepts of the investigation – transmediation, narration and truthfulness – and continues with a discussion of general media differences between scientific articles and feature films. This is followed by a brief analysis of a scientific article (“The ‘Anthropocene’”, published by Paul J. Crutzen and EugeneF. Stoermer in 2000), a somewhat longer examination of the transmediation of this article to a feature film (The Day after Tomorrow, directed by Roland Emmerich and released in 2004) and a conclusion.
What slides into deep-freeze most quickly and permanently are any emotions you might have expected to feel during such a traumatic tale. The producers have assembled a talented but hapless cast, led ...by Dennis Quaid as a climatologist who slogs through what might be the end of the world in order to reach his son (Jake Gyllenhaal) for no sensible reason except that life-threatening treks are expected in stories like this.
Welcome to the world according to "The Day After Tomorrow," Hollywood's latest natural-disaster offering. At heart, it's a polemic on climate change with blockbuster special effects and a few plot ...twists from past disaster movies - teen love forged in struggle and workaholic scientist saves neglected son. In the movie, global warming melts the Arctic ice cap, fresh water shuts down critical currents in the North Atlantic that transport heat north, and the big chill begins. The impetus for that scenario comes from Dr. Wallace Broecker's early work on a 1,000-year chill- down known as the Younger Dryas, which occurred at the end of the last glacial period. Yet recent studies have shown that at the time, sea ice covered virtually the entire northern Atlantic Ocean. The two celluloid scientists stare at computer images of the superstorms, each with a sinister hurricane-like eye. Terry Rapson describes how the storms draw "supercooled" air from the upper atmosphere through the eye to the ground, flash freezing anything underneath.
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