Jump to content

Hollywood Global Warming: Difference between revisions

Hollywood Global Warming (view source)

Revision as of 07:00, 8 April 2014

182 bytes removed ,  10 years ago
m
Mass update links
VisualWikitext
m (→‎[[Video Games]]: clean up)
m (Mass update links)
Line 1:
{{trope}}
One might say "Global Warming is the New Nuke", since it has largely supplanted the role the A-bomb once had in fiction as a catalyst for [[The End of the World Asas We Know It]].
 
In fiction, the effects of global warming are often drastically exaggerated 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.
Line 40:
** Note that the theory doesn't predict that it'll happen in only 2 days, nor that it will form super-cooled columns capable of freezing the fuel(!) in a running(!!) helicopter engine.
* The movie of ''[[Film/Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea|Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea]]'' features a non-human-caused version of global warming, predating the contemporary issue. The ice caps melt, leaving chunks of ice to rain down on the ''Seaview'', which ignores the fact that ice, you know, ''floats''. It's shown how hot it's getting around the world by taking [[Stock Footage]] and [[Technicolor Science|tinting it fire engine red]]. Oh, and we haven't even gotten into [[Hollywood Science|the absurdities of how this was caused in the first place]]. It's resolved through [[Deus Ex Nukina]], of course. (Don't ask why this is the plot of a movie titled ''Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea''.)
* The backstory of ''[[AIA.I.: Artificial Intelligence]]'' has global warming destroying Earth's ecosystems and causing sea levels to rise by a hundred meters. Most of the Third World is effectively uninhabitable, while the rich nations managed to use their advanced technology to survive. At the end of the film, {{spoiler|the reverse has happened -- a new ice age has wiped out humanity, leaving behind only the intelligent robots that they built, who have evolved into [[Sufficiently Advanced Aliens]]}}.
* In ''[[Soylent Green]]'', the greenhouse effect has led to year-round temperatures in the 90s and 100s, so crops cannot grow and people can only be fed by the Soylent Corporation's processed products, including their [[I'm a Humanitarian|latest]] [[Future Food Is Artificial|innovative]] [[It Was His Sled|product]].
* [[Ice Age|''Ice Age: The Meltdown'']]. Justified, as it takes place at the end of the last ice age, when the Earth's climate was starting to warm.
* The end of the ''Rite of Spring'' segment of ''[[Fantasia (Disney)|Fantasia]]'' had all of the dinosaurs going extinct because of a massive drought caused by a sudden warming of the Earth's climate. Shortly after the last dino goes extinct, the entire Earth is flooded, submerging whatever continent is still on that planet.
 
 
Line 56:
* ''Carbon Diaries 2015'' and its sequel ''Carbon Diaries 2017'' by Saci Lloyd takes place in Great Britain after global warming has caused climate change, and as a result, people are rationed the amount of carbon they can use.
* [[Stephen Baxter]] puts an interesting twist on this in his [[Northland Trilogy]] where global warming and sea level rise causes masses of problems for the stone age tribes that lived in what was to become the North Sea 10000 years ago. This is of course the warming to the current global temperature and sea levels.
* This is the backstory of the world of [[Dark Life (Literature)|Dark Life]]: risen seas mean that the only land availible is on the bottom of the ocean.
 
 
Line 72:
 
== [[Web Comics]] ==
* ''[[Freefall (Webcomic)|Freefall]]'', planet Jean, 2001: [http://freefall.purrsia.com/ff600/fv00526.htm mentions] it in relation to Helix's [http://freefall.purrsia.com/ff600/fv00523.htm Vampire Florence theory].
* ''[[Chainsawsuit]]'', 13 Feb 2009: [http://chainsawsuit.com/2009/02/13/strip-161/ tries to] ''[[Up to Eleven|outdo]]'' this.
* ''Calamities of Nature'', 11 Jan 2010: [http://www.calamitiesofnature.com/archive/?c=322 discussing] the ways of thinking about this.
* ''Luke Surl'', 24 Mar 2010: comics add <s>Heat</s> Fund Raising [http://www.lukesurl.com/archives/1275 Thermometer].
* A ''[[The Whiteboard (Webcomic)|The Whiteboard]]'' filler has Doc start to launch into a rant about GW, only to be interrupted by a mallet to the head, in [http://www.the-whiteboard.com/autotwb1153.html this strip].
 
 
Line 96:
* This trope is one of the prime features of the Earth sim game ''[[Fate of the World]]''.
* In keeping with its [[Cyberpunk]] setting, ''Jump Raven'' takes place in a USA that's been sold off to the highest bidders, wracked by global warming and [[Wretched Hive|militias of street thugs]]. You spend the game in a future New York where it's [[The Night That Never Ends|always night]] and enormous walls have been placed to keep back the ocean.
* In ''[[Civilization (Video Game)|Civilization]] IV'', Global Warming is one of the disasters that can strike your larger cities in the late game. The effects of "global warming" in game are bizarre, strike locally and aren't restricted to coastal towns or other locales most likely to be affected by actual global temperature increase. Just imagine a news story about buildings being DESTROYED in downtown ''Denver'' by GLOBAL WARMING and you'll see how strange this gets. The older games treated it more severely, however, with a global meter that tracked pollution output and would do nasty things like raise sea levels, destroying any cities or units on coastal plots, although some of the weird effects might be explained by exceptionally strong storms and such.
* In ''[[Sid MeiersMeier's Alpha Centauri]]'', runaway pollution can make terrain change, earth sink, and if you don't have a Pressure Dome, the rising water can destroy cities (and units [[Video Game Time|who apparently couldn't escape from the slowly raising water]]). But fear not, because with a Pressure Dome the city becomes a floating city, plus your formers can raise the land, and if you get the Planetary Council to agree, you can launch a solar shade to cool the planet.
** The Planetary Council can also decide to melt the polar ice caps, causing global warming ''on purpose'' (which isn't as nonsensical as you might think, they are [[Terraforming]] Planet after all). You can arrange this in order to flood your rival's coastal cities.
* In ''[[Brink]],'' global warming has caused the seas to rise, covering most of the Earth.
Line 103:
* This is one of the possible consequences of letting your ecosystem become unbalanced in ''[[Spore]]''. You can cause it yourself by running around enemy planets with a heat ray, causing settlements there to undergo [[Critical Existence Failure]].
** Curiously, if you reverse the process fast enough after they capitulate, you can preserve the T3 rating of the planet with all the plants and animal.
* Global warming is a part of the dystopic backstory of ''[[Frontlines: Fuel of War]]'', with a "super-hurricane" hitting Alaska in 2021.
* The [[Play Station 2]] flightsim ''Lethal Skies'' is set in an [[Ocean Punk]] type setting after melting glaciers have flooded most of the planet.
* Happens in ''[[Pokémon Ruby and Sapphire (Video Game)|Pokémon Ruby and Sapphire]],'' when the villains' attempt to control weather-based legendaries lead to massive climate changes threatening to wipe out humanity. Since this set of games (and the ''Pokémon'' franchise as a whole) does appear to have subtle environmental messages in place, it may well have been intentional.
* ''[[Battle Engine Aquila (Video Game)|Battle Engine Aquila]]'' is based during a war over the 13 remaining islands after the sea level rises.
 
{{reflist}}
Retrieved from "https://allthetropes.org/wiki/Special:MobileDiff/885992"
Cookies help us deliver our services. By using our services, you agree to our use of cookies.
More information