Hollywood Global Warming: Difference between revisions

In fiction, the effects of global warming are oftenassumed to be correct and drastically exaggerated from even the most pessimistic predictions for the purposes of creating immediate drama. Everything within a thousand miles of the tropics becomes an inhospitable desert, with places like Canada, Siberia and Scandinavia becoming the last refuges of humanity. Massive tornadoes, hurricanes and wildfires start striking all over the planet. Absurdly swift rises in the sea level rise are also fairly common, with fictional works frequently portraying [[Giant Wall of Watery Doom|walls of water]] flooding all the coastal cities on the planet all at once rather than extremely gradually. A sea level rise of that magnitude necessitates the melting of most of the world's major ice sheets, something that would take decades in any realistic scenario. [http://merkel.zoneo.net/Topo/Applet/ Here] is a good app for demonstrating this point. Even the worst-case predictions for global warming don't involve any kind of sudden globally catastrophic event of the sort so popular in disaster movies, but rather a planet that gradually becomes less hospitable to human life. While global warming is often referred to as being rapid, that's "rapid" in geological terms. Compared to past cooling and warming trends (the ones that have brought Earth into and out of its past ice ages), a century-long gradual rise in temperature that substantially affects human life would be very rapid indeed.

InProponents reality,of man-made global warming claim that while there ''are'' some possible (but less likely) scenarios where there could be movie-style doomsdays (and even in these unlikely scenarios, "doomsday" wouldn't happen everywhere at once), in general global warming is supposedly a far more subtle phenomenon, with its proponents claiming potential effects being long-term phenomena such as droughts, famines, floods, and possibly magnification of certain common weather patterns, generally more heavily affecting the less developed parts of the world where farming is more difficult and food somewhat scarcer than in the developed world. Because the environment in the real world is complicated, no single drought or melted glacier can ever be shown to have resulted only from global warming; the effect only appears in statistical data gathered over many years, and can only be tentatively identified as a contributory factor in some of these effects.

For the developed world, proponents claim the most relevant consequences of global warming maywould not be itsa direct effect on the local weather, but rather the effects that changing weather patterns elsewhere might have on the geopolitical climate. The increasing frequency and intensity of famine and other various ecological problems that might result could conceivably cause political unrest and upheaval in the populations of developing countries. In short, the (very) long-term situation mightwould ultimatelysupposedly resemble ''[[Mad Max]]'' more than ''[[Waterworld]]''.