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| 5/25 |
| 2004/5/25-26 [Science/GlobalWarming] UID:30406 Activity:high |
5/24 http://usatoday.printthis.clickability.com/pt/cpt?action=cpt&title=USATODAY.com+-+%27Day+After+Tomorrow%27%3A+A+lot+of+hot+air&expire=&urlID=10526977&fb=Y&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.usatoday.com%2Fnews%2Fopinion%2Feditorials%2F2004-05-24-michaels_x.htm&partnerID=1660 My favorite lines from movie preview: "How do I know so much about a movie that isn't out yet? I've seen the promos, and I've read and reviewed the book upon which it is based, The Coming Global Superstorm by Art Bell and Whitley Strieber. In Strieber's previous work, Communion, he explained that he was told of the Earth's upcoming apocalypse by aliens. And how this knowledge was communicated is much more the purview of an adult Web site than a family newspaper." \_ Long enough link for ya? Geez. http://csua.org/u/7fw \_ It's funny-- I found myself agreeing with the first part of this article: The Day After Tomorrow suffers from scientific implausability on the same scale as, say, Battlefield Earth. Then Michaels started bashing Global Warming in general, and I started thinking, what the hell? And then I read the bio at the bottom, and it all made sense: "Patrick J. Michaels is senior fellow in environmental studies at the Cato Institute...." \_ The Free Market will save the environment! If people put a dollar amount on it, we will stop destroying the environment! \_ Pay a man to stop polluting, and he'll stop polluting as long as you pay him. Shoot a man for polluting, and no one else will ever pollute. \_ 2 polluters will take his place. So you're in favor of the death penalty? \_ Sure, as long as you're 100% certain the perp did the crime. Me, I think we should make war profiteering punishable by the death penalty as well, so there you go. --erikred \_ War is a business, too. You think the government should take over all the military related businesses and run them itself at cost? Why not just have the government take over all businesses? Capitalism is evil! Death to BushCo! American credibility around the world has been destroyed for generations! \_ War should not be a business. Making weapons and defense systems is a business, but it is wrong and immoral to attempt to stir up more demand for this product a la Coke and Pepsi. Understand that there is more to living on this planet than making a buck. \_ no one needs to stir up the war business. people have been doing that just fine on their own since one guy figured out how to whack another guy with a stick or a rock or his bare fist. modern weapons just make it more efficient. \_ If you make him pay to pollute at all, all you have to do is make sure the pollution rights are expensive enough. There was a study which suggested that the "environmental services" of the Earth would cost $100-trillion per year if replaced by industry. \_ Good plan. Let's replace the earth. I didn't like this one anyway. \_ It's great that Art Bell has come so far into the mainstream. not. \_ dunno about you, but I'm watching this movie becuase I would like the next Ice Age to happen, and I don't particularly care about how it happens. Comet, Nuke Winter, whatever. \_ The previews lost me when they showed a wave hitting New York and none of the buildings collapsed. Good thing water has no mass.... \_ But its still not as bad as the Worst. Movie. Physics. Ever. found in The Core. For more ratings go here to Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics: http://www.intuitor.com/moviephysics \_ Also good is the Bad Astronomy page (movies too) http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/movies \_ This guy's preamble on Armageddon made my day. |
| 5/25 |
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| usatoday.printthis.clickability.com/pt/cpt?action=cpt&title=USATODAY.com+-+%27Day+After+Tomorrow%27%3A+A+lot+of+hot+air&expire=&urlID=10526977&fb=Y&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.usatoday.com%2Fnews%2Fopinion%2Feditorials%2F2004-05-24-michaels_x.htm&partnerID=1660 The latest example is the global-warming disaster flick, The Day After Tomorrow. This film is propaganda designed to shift the policy of this nation on climate change. At least that's what I take from producer Mark Gordon's comment that "part of the reason we made this movie" was to "raise consciousness about the environment." Fox spokesman Jeffrey Godsick says, "The real power of the movie is to raise consciousness on the issue of (global warming)." This current normally brings tropical warmth northward and makes Europe much more comfortable than it should be at its northerly latitude. The heat stays stuck in the tropics, the polar regions get colder, and the atmosphere suddenly flips over in a "superstorm." The frigid stratosphere trades places with our habitable troposphere, and in a matter of days, an ice age ensues. Folks in Japan are clobbered by bowling-ball-size hailstones. If we had only listened to concerned scientists and stopped global warming when we could. Carl Wunsch, a professor of physical oceanography at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, knows more about ocean currents than most anyone. He thinks the nonsense in The Day After Tomorrow detracts from the seriousness of the global-warming issue. So he recently wrote in the prestigious science journal Nature that the scenario depicted in the movie requires one to "turn off the wind system, or to stop the Earth's rotation, or both." The stratosphere will become the troposphere when all three laws of thermodynamics are repealed. Hailstones can't reach bowling-ball size because their growth is limited by gravity. Hurricanes can't hit Belfast because the intervening island of Ireland would destroy them. I've seen the promos, and I've read and reviewed the book upon which it is based, The Coming Global Superstorm by Art Bell and Whitley Strieber. In Strieber's previous work, Communion, he explained that he was told of the Earth's upcoming apocalypse by aliens. And how this knowledge was communicated is much more the purview of an adult Web site than a family newspaper. What's on the movie's Web site is worse -- nothing but out-and-out distortion. It also insists that what is depicted on the screen has already started. "Did you know," says the site, that there were more tornadoes recorded in May 2003 than in any other month? I looked up federal tornado statistics, and indeed they're going up, and there was a peak in May 2003. Then I determined the number of radar stations and their type. When our first radar-tracking network was established in the 1960s and '70s, the number of tornadoes rose proportionally, then leveled off until the new Doppler radars came online in 1988. It took a decade to put this system in place, and the number of reported tornadoes went up accordingly. So the flashy Doppler radars are merely detecting more weak storms that cause little, if any, damage. The Web site also implies that global warming is making hurricanes worse. Christopher Landsea, the world's most aptly named hurricane scientist, has studied the maximum winds in these storms as measured by aircraft and finds a significant decline. Some scientists think climate change strengthens El Nio, the large atmospheric oscillation responsible for a variety of weather -- both good and bad. So it's more likely that climate change is weakening these storms than enhancing them. org, the liberal advocacy group and billionaire George Soros' policy toy. They've got Al Gore front and center, plumping the film. They've got their Web site using the movie to drum up support for legislation by Sens. There's a huge drought out West, which a New York Times editorial blamed on global warming. Remember that humans have slightly warmed the planet some in recent decades, but the correlation between Western drought and warming is zero. Far be it from me to criticize anyone's freedom of expression. McCain's and Lieberman's measure mimics the United Nations' infamous Kyoto Protocol on global warming, which many scientists know will do nothing measurable about planetary temperature within the policy-relevant future. This isn't Hollywood's first attempt to scare people into its way of thinking. How about Jane Fonda in the 1979 anti-nuclear-power flick, The China Syndrome? Twelve days after its release, the accident at Three Mile Island occurred. Despite the fact that it released only tiny amounts of radiation, the politics of that hysteria effectively killed any new nuclear plant. Analogize the Western drought to Three Mile Island, and you get the idea. Or how about the 1983 movie The Day After, whose purpose was to strengthen the nuclear-freeze movement. The Day After Tomorrow is only one more day than The Day After, and it deserves the same fate. Lies cloaked as science should never determine how we live our lives. Patrick J Michaels is senior fellow in environmental studies at the Cato Institute and author of the upcoming book, Meltdown: The Predictable Distortion of Global Warming by Scientists, Politicians and the Media. |
| csua.org/u/7fw -> usatoday.printthis.clickability.com/pt/cpt?action=cpt&title=USATODAY.com+-+%27Day+After+Tomorrow%27%3A+A+lot+of+hot+air&expire=&urlID=10526977&fb=Y&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.usatoday.com%2Fnews%2Fopinion%2Feditorials%2F2004-05-24-michaels_x.htm&partnerID=1660 The latest example is the global-warming disaster flick, The Day After Tomorrow. This film is propaganda designed to shift the policy of this nation on climate change. At least that's what I take from producer Mark Gordon's comment that "part of the reason we made this movie" was to "raise consciousness about the environment." Fox spokesman Jeffrey Godsick says, "The real power of the movie is to raise consciousness on the issue of (global warming)." This current normally brings tropical warmth northward and makes Europe much more comfortable than it should be at its northerly latitude. The heat stays stuck in the tropics, the polar regions get colder, and the atmosphere suddenly flips over in a "superstorm." The frigid stratosphere trades places with our habitable troposphere, and in a matter of days, an ice age ensues. Folks in Japan are clobbered by bowling-ball-size hailstones. If we had only listened to concerned scientists and stopped global warming when we could. Carl Wunsch, a professor of physical oceanography at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, knows more about ocean currents than most anyone. He thinks the nonsense in The Day After Tomorrow detracts from the seriousness of the global-warming issue. So he recently wrote in the prestigious science journal Nature that the scenario depicted in the movie requires one to "turn off the wind system, or to stop the Earth's rotation, or both." The stratosphere will become the troposphere when all three laws of thermodynamics are repealed. Hailstones can't reach bowling-ball size because their growth is limited by gravity. Hurricanes can't hit Belfast because the intervening island of Ireland would destroy them. I've seen the promos, and I've read and reviewed the book upon which it is based, The Coming Global Superstorm by Art Bell and Whitley Strieber. In Strieber's previous work, Communion, he explained that he was told of the Earth's upcoming apocalypse by aliens. And how this knowledge was communicated is much more the purview of an adult Web site than a family newspaper. What's on the movie's Web site is worse -- nothing but out-and-out distortion. It also insists that what is depicted on the screen has already started. "Did you know," says the site, that there were more tornadoes recorded in May 2003 than in any other month? I looked up federal tornado statistics, and indeed they're going up, and there was a peak in May 2003. Then I determined the number of radar stations and their type. When our first radar-tracking network was established in the 1960s and '70s, the number of tornadoes rose proportionally, then leveled off until the new Doppler radars came online in 1988. It took a decade to put this system in place, and the number of reported tornadoes went up accordingly. So the flashy Doppler radars are merely detecting more weak storms that cause little, if any, damage. The Web site also implies that global warming is making hurricanes worse. Christopher Landsea, the world's most aptly named hurricane scientist, has studied the maximum winds in these storms as measured by aircraft and finds a significant decline. Some scientists think climate change strengthens El Nio, the large atmospheric oscillation responsible for a variety of weather -- both good and bad. So it's more likely that climate change is weakening these storms than enhancing them. org, the liberal advocacy group and billionaire George Soros' policy toy. They've got Al Gore front and center, plumping the film. They've got their Web site using the movie to drum up support for legislation by Sens. There's a huge drought out West, which a New York Times editorial blamed on global warming. Remember that humans have slightly warmed the planet some in recent decades, but the correlation between Western drought and warming is zero. Far be it from me to criticize anyone's freedom of expression. McCain's and Lieberman's measure mimics the United Nations' infamous Kyoto Protocol on global warming, which many scientists know will do nothing measurable about planetary temperature within the policy-relevant future. This isn't Hollywood's first attempt to scare people into its way of thinking. How about Jane Fonda in the 1979 anti-nuclear-power flick, The China Syndrome? Twelve days after its release, the accident at Three Mile Island occurred. Despite the fact that it released only tiny amounts of radiation, the politics of that hysteria effectively killed any new nuclear plant. Analogize the Western drought to Three Mile Island, and you get the idea. Or how about the 1983 movie The Day After, whose purpose was to strengthen the nuclear-freeze movement. The Day After Tomorrow is only one more day than The Day After, and it deserves the same fate. Lies cloaked as science should never determine how we live our lives. Patrick J Michaels is senior fellow in environmental studies at the Cato Institute and author of the upcoming book, Meltdown: The Predictable Distortion of Global Warming by Scientists, Politicians and the Media. |
| www.intuitor.com/moviephysics -> www.intuitor.com/moviephysics/ html Viewing this page requires a browser capable of displaying frames. |
| www.badastronomy.com/bad/movies -> www.badastronomy.com/bad/movies/ Of all the places where Bad Astronomy originates, it's safe to say that Hollywood has the biggest budget. Most of the top-grossing movies of all time are science fiction... When I was a kid I lived on a straight diet of Lost in Space'', Star Trek and Space: 1999''. Even though the science in these shows is usually pretty bad, they do serve the great purpose of getting people excited about science, space and astronomy. Even though we recently had two naked eye comets pass by the Earth (Hale-Bopp and Hyakutake), and millions of people saw them, they will probably remember the comet from Deep Impact'' and the asteroid from Armageddon'' better. Movies have a way of imprinting their images on our brain, and those images are not necessarily accurate. The movies may not be bad, but sometimes the science is. I know they are fiction, so I try not to take them too seriously. My philosophy is: these movies have made an impression, and if it's wrong, at least I can use that impression to teach Good Astronomy. Sure, they're fiction, but why not use that fiction to show some fact? I cannot keep up with all current movies, let alone ones from years gone by. But I'll add more, I promise: as long as movies are made, this list has the capacity to grow! Note: most of these reviews have two parts: one with no plot spoilers and one (the actual review) with lots. If you haven't seen the movie, be warned: the spoilers will have key elements of the plot revealed. Science Fiction Science Blunders is an all-too-short website with brief descriptions of more generic science mistakes in TV and movies. It's a fun read and complements a lot of what I say here as well. |