Hollywood Disaster Film Set to Turn Heat on Bush

[G_j]

www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0313-02.htm

Hollywood Disaster Film Set to Turn Heat on Bush

Movie depicting horrors of global warming could boost votes for Democrat challenger

by Dan Glaister in Los Angeles

 Here's the pitch: a dullish candidate, outflanked by his opponent's serious money, attacked for his liberal leanings, is swept to an unlikely victory thanks to a blockbuster movie that focuses on the effects of big business and the agro-industrial complex.

Audiences throw their popcorn aside, pick up their ballot papers and realise that they too can make a difference. The studio behind the movie: 20th Century Fox, owned by Rupert Murdoch. The director: Roland Emmerich; no Martin Sheen-style bleeding heart Democrat but the brawn behind Independence Day.

It sounds unlikely, but this summer might just see an alliance of commerce, populist entertainment and feel-good concern combine to weaken President George Bush and hand votes to his expected Democrat rival John Kerry.

On the other hand, the film could tank, like one of its director's other monster-budget summer openings, Godzilla.
...more..

[burythehatchet]

1. Very interesting

I wonder if Murdoch sees it that way

[WaywardSon]

2. I would love to grow my organic vegetables all year round

I'll wait for the DVD. Got to go... Art Bell is on the phone.

[Dogmudgeon]

3. Ice, Ice, Baby!

I seem to have gotten a reputation for being a Cassandra with my twin "predictions" of an energy crisis and a climatic flip-flop for the next two decades, but the news -- and our Courageous Annointed Leader -- has been bearing me out pretty well lately.

I've been talking this film up for most of the last year. (Of course, it's only a movie.)

It's a film adaptation of Art Bell and Whitley Strieber's The Coming Global Superstorm. Although Art and Whit have told some tall tales in their lives, the book is well-researched, the wild-assed speculation is clearly defined, and Strieber's fiction writing has never been better as he interweaves a "real life" fictional account of the return of the Ice Age.

The movie, like the book, will probably dramatize every item it can, but the threat is real, especially since the climate is changing very much according to the pattern that climate-change scientists have been fearing for a while. Oceanic currents are beginning to break down, the atmosphere is developing a much more radical temperature gradient, the weather has become much more unpredictable, and CO2 levels have risen to their highest levels in at least 30 million and possibly 250 million years -- and are rising even faster.

Sir David King, a consulting scientist to British Parliament, recently predicted that if the level reached 550 parts per million, the polar ice caps would melt and the Gulf Stream current would be reversed, plunging Europe into a new ice age while the rest of the globe overheated. The level is currently around 375 PPM. He also thinks we can stop this from happening if we can stabilize the level at below 450 PPM, which does not seem possible, as it seems that the 550 PPM level will be achieved in 10-25 years even without human counterefforts. I personally think that Sir David is an optimist, as the oceanic thermohaline currents have already started to dissipate.

What is my claim to prophecy? Did God tell me all about it back in 1977 or so? No, it was Dr. Wallace Broecker, indirectly, in the form of several papers he wrote, brought to my attention to a long-lost friend of mine who was in grad school for geology.

Now we await the coming of Stossel and the Holy Skeppers, who will chant "Junk Science!" until oceanography research budgets are slashed in accordance with the Gospel of Less Government.

--bkl
The End Is Near! Bring blankets.

[G_j]

4. wow,

thanks for the further info. Now I really would like to see this movie.

[Forkboy]

5. With Emmerich at the helm

it's bound to suck.

Of course my avatar might indicate a certain bias :)