Snow falling in New Delhi; helicopters freezing in the Scottish skies; giant tornados ripping apart Los Angeles. Its grasp of science may be tenuous, and it may not exactly have made waves at the box office, but The Day After Tomorrow has been credited with being one of the most influential films of our age - the film which introduced the notion of climate change to the masses. "Like many other people, I have this feeling that we're slowly but surely destroying our planet." said director Emmerich. "I came [to the film] because of science fiction, and then I realized it wasn't at all science fiction but something that is very real." The Day After Tomorrow triggered a massive boost in support for ecological organisations and made climate change an issue at the 2004 US presidential election. Scientists working in the field were positive about it. "I'm hoping more people will become more aware of this problem and start thinking about what we can do to address it." says Worldwatch Institute director Janet Sawin. "Climate change is already happening now, not the day after tomorrow."
But for how long have we been aware of climate change, and was this really the first film to deal with it? It was certainly the best financed, yet, in their time, others have won more audience attention. The difference is that most earlier films examining the issue tackled it less directly by talking not about changes on Earth but, rather, about changes on other planets. The tale of the aliens who wish to plunder our world because they have destroyed their own has become a popular part of twentieth century mythology, typified by the miniseries V, in which fascist reptiles concealed in human skin-suits seek to steal our water. The devastation of other planets has also given us lone refugees like The Man Who Fell To Earth, a would-be saviour of his homeworld all too quickly seduced by the vices of ours, and Superman, last son of dying Krypton. Through these stories film-makers have introduced a note of caution about the way we treat our world - but where did they develop their concerns?
This story takes us right back to the eighteen eighties, when the revolutionary thinkers Charles Darwin, Thomas Huxley and Karl Marx all befriended a youth called Edwin Ray Lankester. Lankester went on to become a keen scientist and translated the works of the German Ernst Haeckel, who coined the term 'ecology'. He taught all he knew to his student Arthur Tansley, who went on to found the British Ecological Society and who, in his turn, taught one JRR Tolkein. Tolkein had always been fascinated by nature, especially botany. He was living in an exciting age, when biology was just beginning to be taken seriously as a scientific discipline; doubtless he was also influenced by young men returning from the First World War, many of whom were at the forefront of conservation movements and of internationalism, beginning to see things in global terms for the first time. The effect of this on Tolkein's writing, as he began work on The Lord Of The Rings, was considerable. Though it was not his style to preach, he devoted a great deal of subtle attention to the botanical landscapes of Middle Earth, and once commented that the whole story could be seen as an ecological conflict. "There are of course certain things and themes that move me specially." he noted. "I am (obviously) much in love with plants and above all trees, and always have been; and I find human maltreatment of them as hard to bear as some find ill-treatment of animals." His focus may have been on plants rather than on climate, but this marked the dawn of an ecological awareness which other writers soon seized upon and began to expand.
One of the first important novels about catastrophic climate change was Sydney Fowler Wright's Deluge, which sees the west coast of the United States destroyed by an earthquake and the east coast imperilled by a rise in sea levels. Written in 1927, it was obviously influenced by the great San Fransisco earthquake of 1906, and as such it caught the public mood. In 1933 it was made into a film, one of the first disaster movies of any sort. Together with the popularisation of mysticism and myth which followed the war, it contributed to a growing interest in older ideas about catastrophes heralded by unusual weather. The Biblical Armageddon was often referred to in subsequent works in this genre, but perhaps more prominent was the ancient Norse story of Ragnarok, perhaps itself a piece of folklore with roots in the last Ice Age. This tale of an age of darkness in which the frost giants (usually interpreted as glaciers) move southward into human lands became a recurring theme in twentieth century fantasy and science fiction, popping up in films like Terry Jones' Erik The Viking. Early notions that Earth's climate might undergo changes during our lifetimes tended to focus on the possibility of an Ice Age, seemingly more dramatic and easier to imagine than a slow process of global warming. Scientists were always sceptical about this, though more recently there has been speculation that a change in ocean currents caused by warming could trigger a mini Ice Age in the northern hemisphere. "The Earth's climate is never going to flip in a matter of days the way it does in the movie," says Sawin, referring to The Day After Tomorrow - yet others have noted that, though it lasted for thousands of years, the last Ice Age probably covered the north in snow in little more than five.
In 1969, James Blish's novella We All Die Naked changed everything. Though few realised its importance at the time, it was the first work of any kind to introduce the notion of the greenhouse effect, an idea gradually adopted by other writers, scientists and politicians. There had already been books exploring the idea of an overheated Earth (most notably Brian Aldiss' Hothouse), but these had tended to be set in the far future, so it was easy to assume that the changes they described had occurred as a result of natural processes. Blish's bold ideas forced people to start thinking about their own possible culpability in a way which went beyond fantasies of foolish aliens polluting their planets. It was followed, just three years later, by John Brunner's The Sheep Look Up, which took a hard (and very well-researched) look at the possible impact of pollution in America. The implications of this were inescapable, and though global warming is yet to be proven beyond the doubts of many, the possibility of it happening came to be widely accepted. Environmental concerns which had existed since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution were finally recognised on a global scale.
Throughout all this, authors and film-makers never lost sight of the possibilities offered by setting the catastrophe on another world. By exploring other possible climates at a planetary level, they could run through whole cycles of changes and consider their possible effects on life. Most important amongst these works was, of course, Dune. Its author, Frank Herbert, was a seasoned environmental campaigner who spent much of his life trying to stop deforestation in South America. As with The Day After Tomorrow, Dune was somewhat lacking in scientific accuracy, though it followed its own internal logic convincingly enough for the majority of critics. In 1984 it was made into a film, but its director, David Lynch, found himself arguing with the studios from that start, and had little control when it came to editing. Its ecological themes were largely submerged beneath a more audience-friendly tale of political rivalry, war, and giant monsters.
In the last years of the second millenium and the early part of the twenty first century, a change occurred - stories began to appear which weren't about global warming per se, but which assumed it as part of their background. Japanime such as Sky Blue, Mobile Police Patlabor and Daphne In The Brilliant Blue also incorporated this idea, and we can see it hinted at in films like Robocop II (with its sun cream spf 5000). The present was catching up with science fiction's futures. The function of the genre changed, and so we got adventure stories like The Day After Tomorrow, slight on plot, big on special effects, backed by assorted scientists, politicians and pressure groups despite the essential silliness and innacuracy of the events they depict. This is the age of the climate change technothriller, sold en masse in airports; yet Roland Emmerich is determined that people shouldn't trivialise The Day After Tomorrow too much, concluding "It is a movie that should not just entertain but also make people think."
All this laid the groundwork for latter-day documentaries like An Inconvenient Truth, and for the involvement of artists and filmmakers in events like the Copenhagen summit. If public attitudes and government policies are really going to change to reflect our changing world, film has an important role to play.
