The Day After The Polar Vortex And The Ignorance Of Dangerous Weather
By Adam Cecil
Quick: name two things partially caused by a polar vortex. If you named your hair instantly freezing on the walk to class and a fictional Statue of Liberty being washed away by a violent wave, you win! Your prize is getting to think about the 2004 disaster movie The Day After Tomorrow, starring the lovable Dennis Quaid and the wrinkly Jack Gyllenhaal. The phrase “polar vortex” quickly entered into all of our vocabularies right after Christmas, when one of the so-called “persistent, large-scale cyclone[s] located near either of a planet’s geographical poles” (thanks, Wikipedia!) froze our collective asses off. But did you know that a polar vortex is partially to blame for the severe weather that takes place in The Day After Tomorrow? Roland Emmerich must feel so vindicated right now.
Here’s the thing about polar vortexes: they very rarely travel far from the poles they’re named after. So when a polar vortex (also called a circumpolar whirl, which I also hear is the name of a new Dairy Queen treat) graces the rest of the world with its presence, it’s kind of a big deal. Like, record-breaking low temperatures kind of deal. Like, subway trains freezing to the tracks kind of deal. Like, I slept in a two-blanket burrito kind of deal. A polar vortex was also partially responsible for Hurricane Sandy coming all the way up to New York and destroying New Jersey. This is so creepily close to the plot of The Day After Tomorrow that I’m actually looking over my shoulder looking for three giant wolves that can somehow survive freezing temperatures that humans in parkas cannot.
For some reason, all of this extreme weather isn’t causing us to get any more serious about cutting back on energy use. I mean, sure, in the ten years since The Day After Tomorrow was released, we’ve seen some amazing strides in the way people view global climate change. However, the fact that the extreme weather detailed in The Day After Tomorrow was dismissed as propaganda and unrealistic only ten years ago is still telling (though to be fair, everything except the basic premise was wildly unrealistic). It takes a lot longer than ten years to make a major change like the one our world requires, but we’re running out of time. I guess we have two options. We can either start taking global climate change a lot more seriously and take action to curtail our energy use or we start stockpiling books now to burn during the end times. I highly suggest Darwin’s On The Origin of the Species. The irony will keep you warm much longer than the book will.
