Movie message in 'The Day After Tomorrow' is mostly hot air

Rating: 1/10 (7 June 2004)

June 7, 2004
Unable to develop a coherent political ideology to oppose President George W. Bush, the anti-Bush cabal has turned to humor and Hollywood. The CBS Evening News borrows jokes from late-night comedy shows to jab at Bush every Friday evening, and we have just been treated to big fanfare about a new anti-Bush movie.
The thesis of "The Day After Tomorrow" is that the Bush administration has failed to protect us from global warming. According to this theory, global warming caused by carbon dioxide emissions will melt the ice at the North Pole, which will then warm the Atlantic current, making Northern Hemisphere temperatures drop precipitously and bring about a new ice age within hours.
New York City is hit by a huge tidal wave and a catastrophic ice storm. It's all pretty grim; only the wolves that escape from the Bronx Zoo are having a good time.
This climate disaster might come tomorrow, 100 years from now or in 1,000 years.
Regardless, it's all the fault of our insensitive, out-of-touch president who refuses to ratify former Vice President Al Gore's favorite treaty, the Kyoto Protocol. In the movie, the president meets the fate he deserves along with everyone else in Washington, D.C.
The real bad guy is the vice president, a look-alike for Dick Cheney, who puts budgetary constraints ahead of incurring the gigantic costs of environmental regulations demanded by global-warming fear mongers. He is made to eat crow at the end of the movie, publicly confessing the error of his ways and thanking the Third World for accepting the mass migration of U.S. citizens fleeing south to escape the ice.
We must credit the movie producers for making the audience laugh out loud at the scene of Americans wading across the Rio Grande to cross our southern border illegally, begging for entry into Mexico to escape the cold. At first, Mexico tries to seal the border against the influx of Americans, but our president's cozy relationship with the Mexican president enables them to work out a deal: the United States forgives all Mexico's debts and Mexico graciously allows Americans to enter Mexico.
The hero of the movie, the scientist who predicted it all, is a man of unbelievable endurance. He warns his son to stay inside the New York Public Library because, if he ventures outside, he will freeze to death within minutes. But the father somehow walks through ice and blizzard all the way from Philadelphia to New York to join him.
The son and friends holed up in the library keep warm by burning books. The movie audience responded with lusty cheers when the volumes containing the tax code were tossed into the fireplace.
We see Manhattan covered with ice up to the roof of the public library and the arms of the Statue of Liberty, as well as tornadoes in Los Angeles, ice sheets breaking up in Antarctica, hail the size of baseballs in Japan, and snow in India. The special effects of "The Day After Tomorrow" are fun to watch, but their utter improbability defeats the propaganda message.
Nevertheless, Gore, Al Franken, and Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., are hoping this summer disaster flick will make Americans take global warming seriously and turn it into a presidential campaign issue. MoveOn.org and the National Resources Defense Council are distributing leaflets at theaters to explain the message to moviegoers.
Environmental groups are urging Americans to do their part to save the environment by riding bicycles to the movie theater. I didn't notice any movie stars giving up their SUVs or Gore riding his bike; it is President Bush who has made news by bicycle riding.
Global warming isn't science; it's leftist propaganda to promote global regulation of our economy. If the predictions of the movie were true, it is obvious that absolutely nothing we could do - even abandoning every automobile in America - would make any difference.
In April, a team from Harvard University concluded the most comprehensive study ever made of global temperature over the last 1,000 years. The team reported that the world was much warmer during the Middle Ages, between A.D. 800 and 1,300, than it is today.
Bush is in good company in rejecting Kyoto. The U.S. Senate voted 95-0 in 1997 against Kyoto because it would cost jobs and drastically reduce the standard of living in the United States, while exempting most other countries from its regulations. The various international conferences on global warming have produced mostly hot air, and Russia gave Kyoto the kiss of death last year when Russian President Vladimir Putin pulled out, saying that Kyoto would stunt his country's economic growth.
Phyllis Schlafly