This weather report brought to you by Rupert Murdoch's Fox News

Rating: 3/10 (5 August 2011)

It's easy to enjoy Roland Emmerich's "The Day After Tomorrow," if you have your brain surgically removed and put into cold storage.
There are some entertaining and totally unrealistic special effects, kind of like a comic book brought to the big screen, and it wisely zooms in on some human interest stories, distracting from the incredible absurdity of the movie's premise.
Which is, quoting from Roger Ebert:
"The movie stars Dennis Quaid as the paleoclimatologist Jack Hall, whose computer models predict that global warming will lead to a new ice age."
Not only that, it will strike with little warning, in a matter of hours.
Now what's wrong with the reasoning here?
Nothing, if you are a fan of Fox News because this movie is made by Fox, a part of the Rupert Murdoch media empire.
In the Murdoch media world, black is white, and if you don't believe it, you're fired. So here, global warming equals global cooling.
The funny thing is that there really are something resembling paleoclimatologists, and they happen to hold the key to why our current anthropogenic global warming is likely to wipe out most of the life on our planet. And it is not because of a new ice age.
The period most closely resembling our own, in terms of temperature rise and CO2 increase, occurred during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), about 56 million years ago. Then, global warming of about 6 C degrees caused the greatest mass extinction ever recorded on Earth. Now, CO2 in the atmosphere is increasing 10 times faster than during the PETM.
But in Murdoch World global warming causes the global temperatures to get colder. Those egg-headed scientists are such fools! Everyone knows when it gets warmer it really gets colder. Murdoch Logic: warm = cold. (And tax cuts for the rich mean more jobs for the poor.)
Oh, and what caused the PETM? The release of methane hydrates from the coastal sea floor. As ocean temperatures rise, they will be released again. It is called the "clathrate gun hypothesis." Look it up.
In Murdoch World the Antarctic ice melts. In the real world, it is the melting of Arctic ice that is the real danger. Melting of ocean ice covering the Arctic Ocean will contribute significantly to warming the ocean and releasing the methane into the atmosphere, a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than CO2. Did I say "will"? How about "is."
In Murdoch World, the facts are upside down. But, then, Rupert Murdoch is from Down Under.
However, it is possible to enjoy "The Day After Tomorrow" if you watch it for what it really is: a comedy -- provided your brain has been surgically removed and placed for the duration in cryogenic stasis.
Have a nice day.