This turns out to be a bit of a tough sell, though, as Jack reckons that it could be a hundred years or so before the really bad stuff starts to happen. But because of the water pouring into the ocean from the disintegrating Larson B ice shelf, Jack’s predictions begin to play out faster than anticipated—much faster.
As the planet’s climate becomes increasingly unstable, it turns out that Jack’s computer model is the only one around that’s capable of predicting what’s going on. As he plugs the numbers in and cranks the handle, it becomes increasingly clear that the world is on the brink of a catastrophic change in climate that’s only days away. Even worse, his model predicts that the only way to protect as many US citizens as possible is to move people in the lower-latitude states as far south as possible, and leave everyone above a “no-hope” latitude to the mercy of the elements.
The only problem is, Jack’s son Sam (Jake Gyllenhaal) is currently stuck in New York, which is a long way above this “no-hope” line.
Predictably, because this is a Hollywood disaster movie, Jack decides to travel to New York City and rescue his son, despite knowing that he’ll be facing some incredibly tough conditions. And in true joined-at-the-hip buddy-movie style, his two research partners join him. On the way, Jack and his team, together with his son Sam (who’s holed up in the New York Public Library with his girlfriend and a handful of others, burning books to stay alive) face deadly flesh-freezing downdrafts from one of the megastorms. Thankfully, though, they evade the killer air, and are eventually reunited.
Meanwhile, there’s a flood of US refugees (including the remnants of the US Government) crossing the border to Mexico. Yet, before he can be evacuated from DC, the US President is killed in the ever-worsening storms. As the climate-change-denying vice president takes his place (now ensconced in Mexico), he faces an unprecedented human and environmental disaster. And as he comes to terms with the consequences of human disregard for our fragile environment, he emerges a humbler but wiser leader.
As the storms clear, we see a remade Earth, with snow and ice covering much of the northern and southern hemispheres, and a thin band of warmer land sandwiched in between. What were previously thought of as developing economies are now the ones calling the shots. And what is left of humanity faces the challenge of building a new future, and hopefully, a more thoughtful and responsible one.
As the movie draws to a close, we begin to see groups of survivors emerging from the ice-encased buildings of New York City, including Jake and Sam. Humanity has suffered a blow, but it’s far from beaten.
The Day After Tomorrow leaves viewers with a clear warning that, if we continue to be disdainful of how we treat the environment, there could be potentially catastrophic consequences. But the overarching message of the film is one of the indomitable spirit of humanity overcoming even the most extreme of catastrophes. Watching the remnants of society start to work together, we just know that, whatever happens, we will survive as a species.
This narrative admittedly makes the climate change messaging of the movie somewhat ambivalent. The film certainly tries to warn viewers about the consequences of actions that lead to global warming. But it also conveys a message of hope that, even if we make a mess of things, we can use our grit and ingenuity to find a way out. In other words, climate change is a problem, but it’s not the end of the world. To confuse things further, this is a movie about global warming that ends up with a frozen planet. At first blush, it’s probably not the message you’d go for if you were out to convince someone that greenhouse gas emissions are leading to catastrophic planetary heating. Yet it does give the movie a twist that I must confess I rather like. It suggests that the consequences of human-driven climate change are not necessarily predictable or intuitive. Yes, the Earth’s climate as a whole is warming. But because it’s also complex and fickle, this warming won’t necessarily lead to the types of issues that some might imagine.
In this way, the movie leaves us with a picture of a climate that is sensitive and unpredictable, with the greatest point of certainty being that, if we take it for granted and continue to use it as a dumping ground for our industrial and personal effluent, something will give. This is part of the concern that drives scientists, activists, and others in the push for rapid and drastic action to curb the impacts of human-caused climate change. But even though this is vitally important, it’s hard to make sense of the complex nexus between people, technology, and climate without first recognizing how fragile our relationship with the dynamic planet we live on has always been.
Fragile States
On December 26, 2004, a magnitude 9.0 earthquake struck off the coast of Sumatra. It was one of the largest earthquakes ever recorded, and the shock waves reverberated around the world, triggering other, smaller quakes as they went. But the most devastating result was a series of tsunami unleashed in the Indian ocean. These swamped coastal areas in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Thailand, India, and many other countries. As the sea swept through towns, villages, and cities, over 250,000 people lost their lives. It was one of the worst natural disasters in recent memory.
The 2005 Indian Ocean tsunami is a sobering reminder of just how precarious a place Planet Earth is, even before we begin thinking about the impacts of technology and human-driven climate change. We live on a dynamic and unpredictable planet, and throughout human history, natural events have devastated communities. This is not to diminish the almost-unthinkable consequences of global warming if we don’t put the brakes on our unfettered use and abuse of natural resources. But it is an important reminder that long-term environmental stability and security are often illusions that are born from our ability to convince ourselves that, because yesterday was a good day, tomorrow and the next will be just the same.
This is a blind spot that we all have to the dangers of sudden, catastrophic risks, whether we’re looking at climate change or the impacts of emerging technologies. Just how deeply rooted this is in our collective behavior was brought home to me several years ago on a family vacation to the Pacific Northwest. Traveling with my wife, my parents, and our (then) young kids, we started at Mount Hood in Oregon, and worked our way north to Seattle and Mount Rainier via Mount St. Helens. These and other volcanoes in the Cascade Range are all relatively inactive at the moment. But in 1980, the world was reminded of just how much power lurks under the range, as Mount St. Helens erupted, throwing more than half a cubic mile of material into the atmosphere, and leaving a crater over a mile wide.
The May 18, 1980, eruption was the most violent in the Cascade Range since the region was populated by settlers migrating from the east. Apart from low-level volcanic activity around some of the peaks, there hasn’t been anything quite like it for over 1,000 years. Yet despite this relative calm, the Cascade volcanoes are far from safe.
Fifty miles outside the city of Seattle stands Mount Rainier, perhaps one of the most iconic of the Cascades. Mount Rainier is a magnet for hikers, skiers, and day-trippers. Something like twenty million people a year visit the mountain, and its striking profile is as much a part of Seattle as the Space Needle and Pike Place Market. Rainier stands guard over a metropolitan area accounting for some 3.7 million people. And yet it’s classified by the US Geological Survey as one of the most dangerous volcanoes in the country—and one where a major eruption could be devastating.
Seattle was founded in 1851, well after Mount Rainier’s last period of major volcanic activity, which occurred around five hundred years ago. Because of this lag between the cycle of volcanic activity and large-scale urban expansion, there is little if any cultural or historic memory among most of Seattle’s current inhabitants of how unpredictable the environment they live in is. I suspect that most people living around the city think of it as a safe place to be, simply because it’s been safe for as long as anyone can remember.
My daughter now lives in Seattle, and just in case I was missing something, I asked her what it’s like living next to a volcano that could wipe out the city if it got
particularly belligerent. She’s been living and working there for over four years now, and her response is best summarized as “meh”—supporting my suspicions that, to many people living in the area, a risk not experienced is a risk not worth worrying about. However, she did add, “So, how do you feel about your only daughter living in the shadow of one of the country’s most dangerous volcanoes?” which made me realize that she’s not the only one with a rather complacent perspective here. How easily we convince ourselves that this dynamic, dangerous planet we live on is going to stay the same from day to day.
Despite our relatively optimistic short-term view of the Earth’s enduring stability, Mount Rainier has had a habit of awakening from its slumber every five hundred years or so. And given the timing of the last eruption, we’re overdue for some action here. Maybe nothing as dramatic as the 1980 Mount St. Helens eruption, but probably nothing that people used to enjoying this seemingly passive slumbering giant will take kindly to.
Mount Rainier and the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami are just two reminders of how complacent we become when the environment we live in appears to be stable, and how quickly we sink into denial about how precarious life is on this outer skin of our dynamic planet. Yet the reality is that we live in an environment that can turn dangerous on a dime.
In 2008, CBC News published a list of some of the most devastating natural disasters that have occurred since 1900.168 It’s an admittedly subjective list, as the line between natural and human-created disaster gets increasingly blurred when it comes to floods and famines. This aside, though, the list makes for sobering reading. Tallying the numbers, something like eight million deaths have been associated with earthquakes, tsunamis, eruptions, hurricanes, cyclones, and floods over the past hundred years or so. Adding in pandemics and famines, the number rises to well over two hundred million people who have lost their lives as a direct result of the environment they live in. What makes these numbers even more devastating is that, apart from malaria (which is estimated to kill a million people a year), most of these deaths are caused by intense events that punctuate periods of relative calm.
What these figures bring home—and they are only the tip of the iceberg of environment-related deaths—is that we live in a dangerous world. Many people live perilously close to potential circumstances that could rob them of their livelihoods, their communities, and their lives. Collectively, we live in a fragile state of being, despite everything we do to convince ourselves that we’re okay. Yet this very fragility is integral to life on Earth. It’s the very changeability of the world we live in that has led, through evolution and natural selection, to an incredible diversity of species, including humans. A changing environment forces adaptation. It weeds out the poorly adapted and creates new opportunities for evolving organisms to take hold and thrive in new niches. Change is a force of nature that has led to where we are now. Yet it’s one that we mess with at our peril.
A Planetary “Microbiome”
Over time, the complex relationship between the Earth’s changing climate and the forces of evolution has led to a deep symbiosis between how living organisms impact the Earth, and how this in turn impacts them. Amazingly, over geological timescales, life has crafted the Earth we live on as much as Earth has molded the life it harbors. This symbiosis formed the basis of the Gaia hypothesis developed by scientists James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis in the 1970s. And while a lot of pseudoscientific mythology has since grown up around the idea of Planet Earth being a living organism, there are deep evidence-based reasons to approach the Earth as a complex system of organic and inorganic matter that, together, are responsible for a shifting and evolving environment.
If we were an alien race observing the Earth from some distant solar system, we’d see a planet where the atmosphere, the oceans, the land, and the organisms that are part of them are constantly changing and shifting. We’d see a rolling history of different species rising to dominance, then fading as others arose that were better fitted for a changing world. We’d see humans as the latest manifestation of this deep relationship between the planet and the life in and on it. And we’d probably assume that this species would also be superseded at some point, not necessarily by a more intelligent one, but by one that was simply better adapted for thriving in a post-human world. With the clarity that comes from time and distance, we’d recognize that humans are just one small cog in a much larger planetary-scale machine, albeit a cog that has an outsized opinion of itself.
In recent years, a quite compelling analogy for this deep interconnection between the environment and the organisms that are part of it has come out of the field of microbiology. For decades now, scientists have realized that our bodies contain trillions of microbes. In fact, a popular myth has arisen that our microbes outnumber our human cells ten to one, meaning that despite any beliefs to the contrary, each of us is more non-human than we are human.
This number doesn’t hold up to scientific scrutiny, as how much of each of us is made up of microbes varies quite considerably. But that’s not the interesting bit of this story. What is, and the piece that’s shaking up our understanding of our biology, is that we are each deeply interdependent on the microbes that live on and in us, so much so that there’s emerging evidence that our gut microbes can actually influence how we think and feel.169
This is where a useful analogy can begin to be drawn between the human microbiome and planet Earth. Not so long ago, we thought of ourselves as complete and independent entities, with minds and wills of our own. But we’re now learning that what we think of as “me” is a complex collection of non-human microbes and human cells that, together, make up a living, thinking organism. We are, in fact, a product of our microbes, and they of us. In the same way, we’re beginning to understand just how symbiotic the earth’s organisms are to the planet. Just as our microbiome is an integral part of who we are, we are discovering that we cannot separate the physical Earth, its rocks, soils, oceans, rivers, even its atmosphere, from the flora and fauna that inhabit it, including humans.
This perspective radically changes how we think of ourselves and our actions in relation to the planet. Through it, we can no longer assume that the environment is something to be utilized, or even something to be looked after, as both assume we are somehow separate from it. Rather, it’s increasingly clear that we are both a product of our environment, and deeply enmeshed in its future. In other words, what we do has a profound impact on how the world changes, and how this in turn will change us.
This interdependence between us and the environment we live in has accelerated substantially over the past two centuries. A few thousand years and more ago, humans were something of a bit player as far as planetary dynamics went. We were insignificant enough that we could live our lives without bringing about too much change (although with hindsight, it’s possible to see how early environmental abuse set us on the pathway toward local flooding, famines, and the formation of deserts). Yet, over the past two hundred years, there’s been a dramatic change. Global population has risen to the point where the environment can no longer absorb our presence and our effluent without being substantially altered by it.
Human profligacy is now a major factor in determining how we impact the environment, as we saw in chapter eleven and Inferno. But there’s another, equally important trend that is radically changing our relationship with planet Earth, and that is the increasing impacts of technological innovation.
The Rise of the Anthropocene
Around two hundred years ago, we saw the beginnings of massive and widespread automation, an acceleration in fossil fuel use, and transformations in how we use agricultural land. The resulting Industrial Revolution changed everything about our relationship with the planet. Almost overnight, we went from a relatively minor species (in geological terms) to having a profound impact on the world we live on. This trend continues to this day, and we’re now entering a phase of technological innovation where how we live and what we do is more deeply coupled
than ever to the evolution of Planet Earth. But there’s a problem here. Going back to the microbiome analogy, we, along with all other forms of life, are part of a deep and complex cycle of planetary change. Yet, because of our growing technological abilities and our evolutionary drive to succeed, we are now forcing the world to change faster, and in different ways, than ever before, and we have no idea what the consequences of this are going to be.
What we do know is that there will be consequences. We know that the Earth changes and adapts in response to the organisms that live on and in it. We understand that Planet Earth is a deeply complex system, where the results of seemingly small changes can be unpredictable and profound (going back to chapter two and chaos theory). We recognize that, in such systems, the harder you hit them, the more unpredictably they respond. And we realize that complex systems like the Earth are prone to undergoing radical and disruptive transitions when pushed too hard.
This is all part of living in the “Anthropocene,” a term that’s increasingly being used to describe this period in the Earth’s history where, largely though our technological innovations, humans have the power to dramatically influence the course of planetary evolution. The trouble is, while we have this growing ability to impact a whole planet, it’s by no means certain that we know what we’re doing, or that we understand how to chart a path forward through the ways in which our planetary influence will in turn impact us.
Here, The Day After Tomorrow stands as something of a warning against human hubris and the fragility of our relationship with the natural world. Over-the-top as it is, the film reminds us that we are messing with things we don’t understand, and that if we’re not careful, there will be a reckoning for our environmental irresponsibility. Perhaps not surprisingly, in true Hollywood style, it’s all a little clumsy. But it’s hard to avoid the message that we live on a dangerous planet that has the power to seriously disrupt our twenty-first-century lifestyles, and that we prod and poke it at our peril.
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