Understanding Movie Physics: The Day After Tomorrow

Global warming is a topic of controversial debate in today's modern world. Some claim that it is a hoax, while others argue that it is a very real threat. While global warming is not as a immediate threat as it is portrayed in The Day After Tomorrow, it is still a very real threat that humanity has to deal with now before we leave Earth in a poor state for our the generations after us that they can heal.

The graph above, as researched and provided by climate researches working at NASA, show the level of carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere over thousands of years. It wasn't until around the 1950's , as seen above, that the level of carbon dioxide became dangerous.

In this video, NASA researchers have created a simulations that maps out the temperatures of the Earth since the late 1800s. It is important to note that temperatures around the globe are increasing both exponentially in both time and size as it gets closer to the present and that the last five years have projected the warmest global temperature in history, with 2018 being about 2 degrees higher than what the global average temperature had been in the 1950's. It is also important to note that the global temperature increase of the world only seemed to drastically increase around the 1940s/1950s which parallels the dramatic increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Carbon dioxide is naturally in of itself a heat-conserving gas, and it is widely known that human development and innovation releases what we call greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide being a main one, into the atmosphere. With this information and the shared time frame in which both global temperatures and the presence of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere increase, it is reasonable for us to infer, just as many legitimate scientist have, that the increasing amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere produced from humanities factories, cars, cities, etc is what is causing rising global temperature as more and more heat is captured by the gas which signifies the presence of over all climate change and global warming.

Link below is the article from NASA's climate website from which the evidence used in this article:

https://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/

(In order to find the video on the website, scroll down till you see "Global Temperature Rise" and then click "More". The video will pull up right below.)