TF1 is rebroadcasting “The Day After Afterwards” this Sunday at 9:10 p.m., the disaster film by Roland Emmerich released in 2004.
As a result of sudden global warming, the Earth finds itself plunged into a new ice age.
Long criticized by the scientific community, this scenario is nevertheless based on a very real hypothesis.
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Our planet
New York transformed into a giant ice rink? TF1 is rebroadcasting this Sunday evening The Day AfterRoland Emmerich’s disaster film released in 2004. At the time, climate change was still a vague concept for the majority of spectators who came to scare themselves with spectacular tricks. Without realizing that the fight of climatologist Jack Hall, snubbed by the American vice-president during a conference at the United Nations, will perhaps concern them one day.
The Day After is inspired by The Coming Global Superstorm, a 1999 book in which the authors, Art Bell and Whitley Streiber, intended to alert the general public to the dangers of global warming. And a hypothesis which is still debated today: the progressive weakening of the “Atlantic meridional overturning circulation” (AMOC), a complex system of ocean currents, including the Gulf Stream, that help regulate heat between the tropics and the Northern Hemisphere.
The total collapse of AMOC, if it were to materialize, could lead to a series of chain disasters. In a few hours like in the film where the Statue of Liberty and the towers of Manhattan find themselves trapped in the ice? Probably not. Questioned at the exit, a famous climatologist will say that “The Day After is to science what Frankenstein is in heart surgery“.
Two decades later, the effects of global warming are being felt more and more every day. And the film’s storyline (a little) less laughable. In their assessment report published in 2023, the IPCC experts express “a medium level of confidence that the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation will not collapse before 2100“So we would be saved? Not so quickly…
An underestimated risk?
In an open letter dating from last October, around forty international researchers affirm that recent work “suggest that the IPCC underestimated the risk of collapse of the AMOC and that crossing this tipping point is a serious possibility in the coming decades“.
“The impacts, particularly on the Nordic countries, would likely be catastrophic, including major cooling of the region while surrounding regions warm“, they note. This could “potentially” threaten the viability of agriculture in north-west Europe, they argue.
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The effects would also be “probably“feel global with”a shift in tropical precipitation belts, less oceanic absorption of carbon dioxide and a significant rise in sea level“, write the researchers. What could inspire the scenario of a sequel to Roland Emmerich’s film?
>> The Day After by Roland Emmerich. With Dennis Quaid, Dennis Quaid, Emmy Rossum. 2h00. At 9:10 pm on TF1
