When I was a kid, it was automatically assumed that climate changes, if they occurred at all, occurred over periods of millenia. Well, times change, and today we know that significant climate changes that can affect an entire hemisphere (the northern) can take place in a period of years (less than a decade) — and have done so, in the not so distant past.

The Day After Tomorrow is based on the book The Coming Global Superstorm by sensationalists Whitley Streiber (who was once abducted by a UFO) and Art Bell (who should have been); some of its science is valid (the interruption of the thermohaline circulation in the North Atlantic), some is simply folklore (the quick-frozen mammoths with the undigested buttercups still in their stomachs) of the sort that creationists like to hold up as proof of … something-or-other. The consequences are then compressed from the five to ten years indicated by cores taken from the Greenland ice sheet down to a few hours from business-as-usual to the United States frozen solid by the next ice age, and exaggerated from a drop of ten or so degrees fahrenheit in the average annual temperatures of the northern hemisphere to instant quick-freeze.

Early in the movie, there are lots of nifty special effects. Tokyo being bombarded by baseball-sized hail is pretty blah, but the destruction of Los Angeles by giant tornados is lots of fun, as is the drowning of New York City by a super-sized storm swell. Then everything freezes up, and so does the movie, and we are largely left with a plodding second hour in which climatologist Jack Hall (Dennis Quaid) … well, plods … along a frozen DC-New York corridor to save his semi-estranged son Sam (Jake Gyllenhaal) who is trapped in the frozen New York Public Library. Jack, in what I can only describe as an anticlimax, arrives just ahead of a flight of rescue helicopters sent out by the U.S. government (which has relocated to Mexico).

The science leaves something to be desired. The explanation of quick-freezing is nonsense (in the centers of low-pressure storms, air rises, it does not subside; and if it did, it would compress and heat automatically). As someone else pointed out, the storm surge that inundates New York — high enough to almost swamp the Statue of Liberty — is unaccompanied by the winds that would be required to raise it and maintain it. Nobody tries to explain where the precipitable water in the atmosphere that instantly buries much of the northern hemisphere under dozens, if not hundreds, of feet of snow comes from. And, of course, the time scale is far too short.

There were also some social results that left me in doubt. I can see Mexico closing its borders to a swarm of U.S. refugees (a scene at which, I am told, people cheered during a pre-screening in San Francisco), but why then open them again and allow this swarm of locusts, as well as the entire U.S. government and military, to relocate to their soil? I really do have my doubts about this.

The resemblance of the main villain of the piece, the doubting vice-president, to Dick Cheney is reported to be “strictly coincidental”.

On the other hand, the catastrophe described here is potentially quite possible — just not as bad, nor as fast (but the results could be equally painful; imagine the northern hemisphere trying to continue to feed its four to five billion people if its growing seasons were suddenly, in the space of five years, to shorten or disappear).

See it for the special effects. And think about it a bit.