What were the many errors of "Day After Tomorrow"?

There is no scientific fact or physics law that would support the film’s contention, of course, so there is not much to talk about.

I would like to know the cause for the formation of the huge wave that flooded New York. Surely it was not any floating ice melting, nor the melting of Antarctica ice pack – especially since the ice pack has been increasing at a rate of 75 billion tons a year for the last 25 years. Only if the sun exploded and became a red dwarf there would be heat enough to melt instantly (in geological terms “instantly” could mean about 1000 years) and cause an sea wave that traveled faster than the speed of sound from Antarctica – without losing its momentum after burying South and Central America, Africa, Australia, South Asia, etc. But, given the amount of ice in Antarctica, would there be enough water produced for covering the whole world with three stories of water (about 10 meters).

But there are some amusing things that you have not noticed:
<dir>1) The fantastic ability of the “climatologist” to develop a computerized model of the storm in only 24 hours. A computer simulation of that kind includes some couple of hundred thousands constants and variables, and a few thousand algorithms. There was not time for entering all those numerical values in the program – not to mention the time involved in writing the code, debugging it, making trial runs, tweaking with values, checking results against observed facts and phenomena, etc, etc.

2) Take a look at a New York City map: there is not room for a cargo ship to navigate from the Battery Park and Wall Street area up by 5th Avenue. If the ship entered from the Hudson river or the East River, there is no room for a ship that long for make any turn at any corner in New York City. Also, the people in the Library were in the second floor, so the water level in the streets was not high enough to allow the cargo ship to float.</dir> But special effects were cool! I liked the part where wolfs are chasing the heroes. It reminded me of Jurassic Park and the velociraptors chasing the boys.

I went to the cinema to watch the film, one week after its opening date: I found myself being the only spectator in there! If I smoked, I could have lighted a cigarette, put my feet on the seat in front of me, talk aloud, and break any rule in the book without being taken out of the theater. I wonder if it was a commercial success as they claim.

Now – seeing the push to revive the Kyoto protocol that’s going on, I wonder how many “politically correct” Academy nominations will this junk movie get?

 

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Surprisingly ... the movie was a commercial success as it racked up over 180 million $ in North America. It even made more money than the original Matrix movie.

If it gets any nominations ... it would be only for special effects most likely. The movie does bring out the concern about global warming ... it even made politicians and scientists think a little harder about the state of the climate and their role in the Kyoto accord ... but all in all, this movie was seen as one big special effect ... which there is nothing wrong about that.

 

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Would the tidal wave have anything to do with volcanically generated landslides in the Canary islands?
http://www.disasterrelief.org/Disasters/010831tsunami/
If so that is an entirely unrelated phenomenon. I am surprised this film's version of global warming didn't start earthquakes and volcanoes in California as well.

 

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Massive tidal waves ... or Tsunami ... can be generated by the volcanically generated landslides in the Canary Islands but I don't think they could generate waves as large as those seen in the movie. The waves seen in the movie were generated by a rapid rise in ocean levels and rapidly shifting ocean currents but I don't see how ocean levels could rise so quickly without the ice caps melting at an unprecedented rate.

Earthquakes and volcano eruptions are in no way related to global warming ... the climate doesn't affect contenental drift patterns nor seismic activity. Though I have a feeling you were being sarcastic by stating that so if that was the case ... it would have been funny to see that.

 

:sarcasm:

Yes, I was trying to be sarcastic. I suppose global warming would also make asteroids fall out of the sky and supernovae erupt in the heavens.

You see, if global warming causes global cooling in this way, this is called negative feedback; pretty soon the two effects would cancel out.
Global warming does not cause ice ages, just some localised cooling effects.

 

Actually, it was neither; the weatherforecasters in the movie refer to "a wind-driven storm surge which could threaten the entire Eastern Seaboard."

OK, the sheer scale of the surge depicted is a bit hard to believe - and we never saw whether it was concentrated on New York alone, or flooded many other parts of the coast also. But we know that, on the open ocean, swells can build up pretty huge in a strong wind. This was supposed to be the biggest storm in human history, after all, so one might expect some fairly spectacular oceanographic repercussions.

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T

There's no need to invoke earthquakes, volcanoes, supersonic wave propagation - and certainly not the Sun exploding..!

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(If that happened, all Earth's oceans would be vapourized within a few seconds of the 8-minute light travel time. Oh, and the Solar remnant would be a neutron star, not a red dwarf).

 

This is true.

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I know that wind-driven storm surges do result in such an event but I didn't mention it because a storm surge results when a hurricane (or massive storm) originates from the ocean and comes inland where it raises water levels due to the enormous low pressure of the eye and the shallowness of the waters near land.

The storm in the movie does look similar to a hurricane ... but those storms didn't originate from the ocean ... it originated over land and had a North-South course. I don't know how the winds of those storms can create storm surges as powerful as those depicted in the movie if it was formed over land.

And another thing ... the way the storm decended on NY from the north ... those storm surges couldn't have formed as large as it showed ... if at all possible. Clearly the storm has the same "structure" as that of a hurricane ... so that means the wind pattern of the storm had a counterclockwise motion around the eye. In the movie, the "storm surge" arrived long before the eye reached the city ... and if the counterclockwise direction of the winds are to be held as true (as it is with hurricanes), then the winds would be blowing towards the ocean ... not inland ... prior to the arrival of the eye. If the wind blows out towards the ocean, then a wind-driven storm surge couldn't be the principle cause of the flooding of NY (and possibly the entire coastline). Granted there is still a surge but nowhere as powerful or half as powerful as that in the movie. It's easy to visualize this. So, in my opinion, there is something more to those storm surges than the force of wind.

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This is also true.

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I guess this is what's generally known as a continuity error!

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If the direction of the storm wouldn't allow the effect it seemed to produce, the scriptwriters and special effects department have f****d up. Perhaps you should post this on moviemistakes.com?

 

If there were a storm surge that high, winds need to reach at least twice the speed of sound.

 

And as we all know ... there is no force on this planet which could generate wind speeds that fast ... even if there was a cataclysmic collapse of the stability of the atmosphere.

hmmm ... maybe I will

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. But then again, according to the website there is already 43 mistakes in the movie ... I wouldn't want to make the movie even more scientifically ridiculous by posting that storm surge "mistake".

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Another thing that amused me very much is, if the kids are so smart they would know to burn all the furniture around them except for many irreplacable books.

 

I think the books were a better source of feul for the fire than the surrounding furniture ... and it was in greater supply too.

 

And also on thought is how did they keep up with sanitary matters.

 

The theme of the movie is about global "warming" and the effect of this "warming" is "freezing". In other words, global "warming" causes "freezing". What a contradiction!

 

Well technically it is possible that warming may lead to a domino effect that may lead to an ice age. The movie just pumped steroids into a kernel of truth.

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Was it not an ice age that caused the extinction of dinosaurs a long, long time ago? Maybe there was a global warming effect which caused that ice age? Since human was not even present at that time, I wonder what caused that global warming in the first place!?

 

Greenhouse gasses. By addition of heat radiation of the sun over time after time, increasing temperatures more dramatically than today because dinosaurs werent conscious about the climate back then.

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You've been watching Batman and Robin. No, the current series of ice ages - which have only occured in the last 2 million years - did not wipe out the dinosaurs, who snuffed it 65 million years ago

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.

Geological records give no evidence of any permanent glaciers existing anywhere on Earth at that time, or for the next 35 or so million years. The previous series of ice ages were in the Carboniferous Period, and ended around 75 million years before the reign of the dinosaurs began.

Even if there had been glaciations within the Jurassic or Cretaceous Periods, some parts of the Earth would almost certainly have stayed warm enough for dinosaurs to survive. Throughout the recent ice ages, there were always patches of tropical forest persisting around the equator. (Besides, not all dinosaurs would have needed tropical heat to live

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).

True, there were considerable warming trends in the past long before the advent of humanity. Any number of causes are possible: a long-term variability in the Sun, the coincidence of extremes in the 3 Milankovich cycles, heightened volcanic activity adding more CO2 to the atmosphere... I'm sure anyone can come up with a way of warming the Earth if they tried.