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alt title(s): Global Warning "Global Warming is real, eh? Well, guess what, libs? It is currently cold outside!"
One might say "Global Warming is the New Nuke", for it has largely supplanted the role the A-bomb once had in fiction as a catalyst for The End Of The World As We Know It.
In fiction, the effects of global warming are drastically exaggerated for the purposes of creating immediate drama. Statements of absurd sea level rise are the most common, with fictional works frequently portraying walls of water flooding all the coastal cities on the planet all at once rather than extremely gradually. A sea level rise of that magnitude would actually necessitate the melting of several major ice sheets, something that would take decades. Here is a good app to demonstrate. Others include utterly bizarre weather phenomena instead of a more realistic magnification of existing patterns.
In reality, global warming is a far more subtle phenomenon, with its primary effects being such things as more intense and more frequent storms, droughts, famines, and so on, generally more heavily affecting the less developed parts of the world, where food is scarcer and farming more difficult than the developed world. In fact, for the developed world, the most relevant consequences of global warming would not be its direct effect on the weather, but the effects that the changing weather would have on the geopolitical climate. The increasing frequency and intensity of famine and natural disasters would magnify the inability of developing states to exercise any sort of control over their populations, creating "failed states" that would serve as prime recruiting grounds and safe havens for non-state actors such as terrorist organizations. This growth in the number of failed states and the power of non-state actors could lead to a shift away from the current state-dominated system. In short, the situation would be more Mad Max than Waterworld.
Also, note that the term scientists use is "Global Climate Change", not "Global Warming", to reflect that the changes are more complex than a simple increase in temperature overall and some regional decreases are actually involved- many areas will get colder and wetter under global warming as the oceanic and atmospheric conveyor belts that move heat around the planet shift location, just as many areas will get warmer and dryer. It also is a broader term, able to be applied to all changes in the globe's climate, past, present, and future, instead of simply the current observed warming trend.
Note: This page is only for the portrayal of global warming in fiction. No Real Life examples.
Examples
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- In Transformers Super God Masterforce, the main effect of the Decepticons' Kill Sat is to erode the ozone layer. A single shot quickly results in the polar ice caps melting and flooding at the base of the Himalayas. Which is an issue of Did Not Do The Research, because ozone is a greenhouse gas, and destroying it would cool the earth.
- Neon Genesis Evangelion manages to both play with and avert the problem. Second Impact (also a man-driven catastrophe) causes the destruction of Antartica first, resulting in a lot of underwater real estate.
- It's somewhat important to note that Second Impact's name comes from it being an asteroid impact (or at least that's the cover story), which is a much better reason for rapid sea level rise than an intensification of the greenhouse effect.
- In Jubei-chan, the reason that Freesia was freed from being a Human Popsicle.
- In the original manga of X1999, Kamui's mother burns to death because she was the 'shadow sacrifice' for the earth and took all of the earth's misfortune (aka, global warming) onto herself. Okay, maybe death by fire was a little more dramatic than the real thing, but...
- Waterworld has the entire planet, save a few high mountaintops, covered by water. This would require more water than is currently on the planet: were all the ice caps to melt (a process which would take centuries at the present rate), the sea level would rise over 220 feet - catastrophic, sure, but there would still be plenty of solid land left.
- The Day After Tomorrow revolves around a sudden catastrophic global Ice Age precipitated by global warming. This concept is very loosely based on a theory that global warming will disrupt certain mid-Atlantic ocean currents, resulting in a 20-30 degree Fahrenheit temperature drop across much of Europe and North America.
- The movie of Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea features a non-human-caused version of global warming, predating the contemporary issue. The ice caps melt, leaving chunks of ice to rain down on the Seaview, which ignores the fact that ice, you know, floats. It's shown how hot it's getting around the world by taking Stock Footage and tinting it fire engine red. Oh, and we haven't even gotten into the absurdities of how this was caused in the first place. It's resolved through Deus Ex Nukina, of course. (Don't ask why this is the plot of a movie titled Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea.)
- The backstory of A.I.: Artificial Intelligence has global warming destroying Earth's ecosystems and causing sea levels to rise by a hundred meters. Most of the Third World is effectively uninhabitable, while the rich nations managed to use their advanced technology to survive. At the end of the film, the reverse has happened — a new ice age has wiped out humanity, leaving behind only the intelligent robots that they built, who have evolved into Sufficiently Advanced Aliens.
- A novel by Arthur Herzog portrayed global warming (well before most average people understood it at all) as rapidly transforming the entire planet into a desert, nearly boiling off the oceans before some Applied Phlebotinum just barely saved the world.
- In Ben Bova's Empire Builders and sequels, the ice caps don't melt en masse, but global warming eventually hits a "cliff" where several ecosystem-critical weather systems fail at once, leading to massive devastation across the Earth and setting the stage for the rise of several power-mad theocracies across the globe.
- Michael Crichton's State Of Fear is all about the controversy over global warming. It bears about as much accuracy as The Day After Tomorrow, in the opposite direction.
- Quite well handled in the Sands of Sarasvati. It involves the icecaps of Greenland partially melting into unknown caves beneath the island, causing the entire ice mass to slide on a bed of molten water into the sea, causing a megatsunami that threatens the nuclear powerplants built on the coastlines. It's also written by an actual environmental scientist, and aside from the aforementioned caves, is based on sound science. It helps that it's set Twenty Minutes Into The Future to escalate the force of global warming, as well.
- Philip Pullman's The Amber Spyglass, in which the portal between the worlds created an increase of temperatures that made things harder for the native sentient polar bears. They are later driven to the Himalayas, and things aren't any better there
- In Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou, sea levels have risen dramatically, submerging entire cities, although global warming is never explicitly mentioned as the cause. The extreme version of this trope is averted however, since the rise is shown to be happening gradually, over generations. This greatly adds to the atmosphere of the work: Humanity is slowly fading away, and the fact that this is a slow and gradual Cozy Catastrophe, rather than an explosive overnight change, just makes it more poignant.
Web Original
Western Animation
- Captain Planet And The Planeteers, in a Wonderful Life episode, showed Manhattan half-submerged by the Atlantic Ocean in a scene meant to represent the year 2010.
- Parodied on The Simpsons; Lisa examines a museum diorama of Manhattan which promises to show what the effects of global warming will be "over the next three years"; the city is entirely submerged, with tiny plastic bodies floating around. In an attempt to reassure her, Marge says "Three years is a long time."
- The Futurama episode "Crimes of the Hot" revolves around global warming. A educational film shown at the beginning shows that the solution was to put ice cubes from Halley's Comet (the only source of ice that doesn't have bugs in them) into the ocean. But when Halley's runs out of ice, a conference is called, where Prof. Farnsworth reveals that the cause of global warming is pollution from robots. So all the robots are lured to the Galapagos islands, where they are to be destroyed. Farnsworth saves the robots and prevents global warming at the same time by having all the robots vent upward at once, thus moving the Earth further away from the sun and solving the problem once and for all.
But...
ONCE AND FOR ALL!
- The "educational film" is actually used in An Inconvenient Truth. It helps that Gore's daughter is one of Futurama's writers.
- South Park has quite a few anvilicious episodes attacking Global Warming in general, and The Day After Tomorrow in particular. In the episode, "The Goobacks", the unemployed rednecks were talking about how to make sure the future never happens so that the people from the future won't take their jobs. One guy suggested using Global Warming to cause an Ice Age. That idea was shot down since it was idiotic. In the episode "Two Days Before the Day After Tomorrow", Stan and Cartman destroyed a beaver dam and the resulting flood was blamed on global warming.
- Global Warming was 'solved' by the villain Killface in Frisky Dingo. While he attempted to destroy the earth with a rocket that would drive it into the sun, the rocket instead moved the earth 1 foot away from the sun, effectively undoing global warming permanently. He parlayed this into a failed Presidential run, his slogan being 'I solved Global Warming! Now you can have your factories, and your SU Vs and your tanks.'
- In keeping with its Cyber Punk setting, Jump Raven takes place in a USA that's been sold off to the highest bidders, wracked by global warming and militias of street thugs. You spend the game in a future New York where it's always night and enormous walls have been placed to keep back the ocean.
- In Civilization IV, Global Warming is one of the disasters that can strike your larger cities in the late game. The effects of "global warming" in game are bizarre, strike locally and aren't restricted to coastal towns or other locales most likely to be affected by actual global temperature increase. Just imagine a news story about buildings being DESTROYED in downtown Denver by GLOBAL WARMING and you'll see how strange this gets. The older games treated it more severely, however, with a global meter that tracked pollution output and would do nasty things like raise sea levels, destroying any cities or units on coastal plots, although some of the weird effects might be explained by exceptionally strong storms and such.
- In Sid Meiers Alpha Centauri, runaway pollution can make terrain change, earth sink, and if you don't have a Pressure Dome, the rising water can destroy cities (and units who apparently couldn't escape from the slowly raising water). But fear not, because with a Pressure Dome the city becomes a floating city, plus your formers can raise the land, and if you get the Planetary Council to agree, you can launch a solar shade to cool the planet.
- In the PS 1 game Submarine Commander, the Earth experienced global warming so fast that the crew of the titular submarine doesn't realize it, and when they surface, it's all sea. The ending is even more absurd: the inverse, global cooling, happens just as fast, via satellite. It's so fast that after the final battle, your submarine that took catastrophic damage and was sinking, is rescued by water levels receding so fast that the submarine is stranded on top of high-rise buildings.
- This is one of the possible consequences of letting your ecosystem become unbalanced in Spore. You can cause it yourself by running around enemy planets with a heat ray, causing settlements there to undergo Critical Existence Failure.
- Ironically, if you reverse the process fast enough after they capitulate, you can preserve the T3 rating of the planet with all the plants and animal.
- Global warming is a part of the dystopic backstory of Frontlines: Fuel of War, with a "super-hurricane" hitting Alaska in 2021.
Live Action TV
- The faux-documentary The Future Is Wild had a waterworld stage as one of Earth's natural climatological shifts of the millions of years that the show covers. The Global Ocean, like all the other periods, had its own set of weird critters living in it.
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