Globophobia | 5 June 2004

According to the Hollywood film The Day After Tomorrow, the failure of the world to confront global warming is going to result in the royal family being freeze-dried at the breakfast table at Balmoral and our cities drowned in raging tornadoes. Never mind that this scenario — based on the global-warming lobby’s latest hobby-horse, the theoretical displacement of the Gulf Stream — is in direct contradiction to the drought and heatwave which scientists have been predicting for years. And never mind that much of the film’s scenes are physically impossible: to reverse the Gulf Stream, according to some calculations, would involve first having to stop the world rotating. It is just that it is a bit rich, the rest of the world being lectured on the evils of fossil fuels by a bunch of Hollywood actors delivered fresh from their power-showers to the film studio in fleets of sports utility vehicles.