Introduction
New York city is shown covered with
a sea of frozen ice, after a tidal wave inundated the city in the movie
The Day After Tomorrow. n this movie, sudden climatic changes take place over a matter of days,
weeks, and months. Suddenly hurricanes are happening everywhere, large hail
is falling everywhere, sea coasts end up underwater, blizzards cover cities.
While this movie contains a lot of Hollywood hype—especially the speed
that these changes happen—it brings up the point that global warming
is no longer “fiction” but a real problem.(20th Century Fox).Global warming has been pushed to the forefront of American pop culture with the destruction of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina, the summer blockbuster movie in 2004, The Day After Tomorrow, and Al Gore's release of his Oscar-winning Inconvenient Truth.
The 2006 movie Inconvenient Truth was based on Al Gore's 1992 book Earth in the Balance. While many people may think climate change is "new" scientists have again and again for the last thirty years shown the same basic principles of climate change occurring now hold true. The only change is NOW in the U.S. the general population and politicians suddenly care about climate change.
Until 2000, geologists and other scientists who studied climate change assumed it would happen slowly, over the course of 100s and 1000s of years. However, new evidence suggest that climatic changes can happen suddenly (sudden in terms of the geologic time scale), where sudden climate changes could happen within a decade.
Global Warming or Climate Change? Geologists and other scientists prefer the term climate change over "global warming" because it tells us there will be other changes in the atmosphere and on earth that accompany rising atmospheric temperatures. By the end of this module, you should be able to describe a few of these expected changes. . People's sudden interest in climate change is likely driven by Hollywood versions of disasters shown in The Day After Tomorrow and fear over recent events like hurricanes, droughts and wildfires. While scientists can study and determine if the increase in climate fluctuations in the U.S. is due to climate change (it is too soon to tell)--suddenly the general public and media is over-reacting to global warming, blaming all maladies and societal problems on global warming.
In this module, we'll look at what is known and what is hype behind climate change. You’ll learn about climate changes throughout earth’s history, what scientists believe is happening to climate now, and what the possible consequences of global warming are.