I’ve been mystified by young(er) adults’ absolute panic about “climate change” in the face of actual experience and the extended timelines of real problems, if they were real.  Then I recently watched The Day After Tomorrow for the first time, and I wondered how huge an impact that movie (and the myriad lesser copies that have no doubt permeated our society for decades) had.

The fundamental premise is that climate scientists are wrong not in their warnings of danger, but in their comforts that we have years, decades, or centuries to adapt and prepare.  The movie invents a mechanism that brings calamity to half the planet within a month, and in the nature of propaganda, it doesn’t matter how thin the explanation is.  It only matters that people suspend their disbelief sufficiently to let the images into their minds.  A new ice age not only changes from feeling in conflict with “global warming” to feeling — somehow — connected to it, and slowly creeping glaciers are replaced with the prospect of burning books in the local library for warmth next week.

As George MF Washington writes in The Pipeline:

“The Day After Tomorrow” came along at a critical time for the environmental movement. The propaganda value of the term “Global Warming” had begun to fail. The planet simply wasn’t getting hot enough fast enough, and folks who were still capable of critical thinking had begun to look askance at things like the “hockey stick” graph. The climate movement was desperate to incorporate extreme weather events into its campaign in order to ratchet up the fear factor, but regular Americans just couldn’t wrap their brains around the idea that extreme cold, hurricanes and tornadoes could be created by the same phenomenon that was supposed to be making the Earth hotter and raising sea levels.

The movie feels like an alien invasion film, but its political utility has us sacrificing our economic well-being on a crusade similar, in its response, to building giant space lasers because an invasion could actually come any day.