The Biggest Error in The Day After Tomorrow

[@pakijetli]

To me the most unbelievable bit was at the end where they imply the US government would be capable of mounting a semi-capable survival strategy in the face of climate disaster.

[@Elbrasch]

Well they didn't, they just conquered/took Mexico's stuff if I remember correctly.

[@erin1569]

@@Elbrasch that's the most american thing ever

[@JohnPopcorn06]

@@erin1569 every superpower works that way. in international politics if u are stronger u will force your will onto others. states dont behave morally.

[@AnimeSunglasses]

I dunno, that part isn't TOO unlikely as long as half of Congress is deceased and the other half is allowed to deny that they ever made a bad decision, ever, in their lives, ever...

[@3DRiley_]

@@JohnPopcorn06 Only if the population don't hold them properly accountable. Also for all the things the EU has done wrong and/or bad it has something to show about achieving some degree of international equality, it has given smaller and weaker states some power to be similarly strong as the bigger states, although sadly limited to some degree. I guess one thing that works in the EUs favor in this is that it can only act as a superpower together, which means that the strongest states, that can't achieve the status of superpower alone, are dependent on the other states working in union with them. Which would suggest fighting for less national lists and more supranational lists in the EU could help keeping the power more equally spread.

[@Thytos]

I love the scene where ice is chasing them, because that's definitely how ice behaves - it's chasing people

[@lotoreo]

"The ice is chasing people - it has become sentient!!" "But how could ice ever be sentient? There's no way that that could happen!" "Under normal circumstances, yes. But this is ice from the upper atmosphere." "Ah, that explains it!"

[@Hunpecked]

Ice can chase you in real time, but you can outrun it: kzbin.info/www/bejne/nZPYYmaLot9oo7c&ab_channel=ThisIsHappening

[@TheFRiNgEguitars]

It's always something chasing someone in the movies!

[@russell2952]

@@TheFRiNgEguitars And they run away holding hands until one of them trips and falls.

[@kabivose]

ICE was formed in 2003 and presumably started chasing people almost immediately. The film was released in 2004. Coincidence or was the film trying to warn about customs enforcement problems before kids ended up separated from parents and held in camps? :-)

[@NickCBax]

I remember reading an article by a climate scientist around when this came out. He agreed to watch and write a review of the movie after a sizable donation was collected. Instead of spending most of the time on the science, he tore apart the plot and the characters. It was epic.

[@chadd990]

He probably figured that no one would be dumb enough to believe any of this crap so there was no point in wasting time debunking the junk science. Ah, such an innocent time period when one could assume such things.

[@zei9256]

Do u still remember the article?

[@NickCBax]

@@zei9256 No. I don’t really have any more information to share to help find the article/blog post. Sorry.

[@1queijocas]

I watched this movie as a kid and I knew back then the science was wrong (no big deal). Made-up science often makes movies more fun (just like how we like to watch shooting movies where one actor kills 20-50 by himself).

[@dreamcanvas5321]

That's hilarious and delightful. Would read. You should share the link if you can find a copy online somewhere.

[@bartz0rt928]

What bothered me the most at the time was that when Gyllenhaal's character complains that he got marked down on his math test for not showing his calculations, his father the scientist takes his side.

[@willy4170]

Same, that also pissed me off a lot 😂

[@David13ushey]

@@willy4170 The ubermench doesn't need to show their work. They're superior. That's why they survive. The stupid people die.

[@RCTMADNESS]

As a parent you would be on your child's side. I think that scene shows that despite all, he is a father who loves his son

[@Anankin12]

@@RCTMADNESS yeah, but you also want your son to learn. I would have sit down with the kid and explained why that happened and why you should show the calculations.

[@jamesdewitt84]

@@RCTMADNESS If he really loved him he would teach him to show his workings!

[@datguy6101]

Using science to explain/debunk movies is a solid way of increasing its accessibility, I'm looking forward to more.

[@jeffbenton6183]

I agree. That's the whole premise of the "Science vs. Cinema" channel: kzbin.infovideos I think you'd like it (they haven't posted a video in awhile, and they only have about a couple dozen, so you can easily binge-watch all of them. It's also similar to a lot of Legal Eagle's content (though he's doing Real Law vs. Movie Law, rather than Real Science vs. Movie Science, but you get the idea)

[@anonnymousperson]

2:32 - This video has the best explanation and examples for conduction, convection and radiation ever.

[@davieb8216]

We should ask Steve mild to create a 2d model of the whole world atmosphere

[@josephmurphy7522]

This!

[@ThomasRintoul]

Loved this. Physicist takes on Hollywood "physics" is always fun. Could you do something on the thrust vectoring disaster that is the end of the Martian?

[@SimonClark]

Sounds like that could be a collab...

[@ThomasRintoul]

@@SimonClark I'm keen

[@n3mo_17]

Don't do maths and it'll be fineeeeeeeee!

[@GeorgeCollier]

@@SimonClark do i hear scott manley?

[@KitagumaIgen]

It cannot be worse than the Ben Hur spear-showing in the hall/armoury - couple of heroic leading men pushing Roman spears along clotheslines...

[@kabivose]

I saw it a long time ago, but as far as I remember, some of the best bits were the characters saying "but that's impossible!" whenever the laws of physics were broken.

[@MrARock001]

I had always understood the movie's explanation to involve the eye of the hurricanes to be extreme low pressure systems, where supercold air was convected downward. Of course, that would just mean the problem becomes "no one in the eye of the storm could breathe at all, because of the extreme low pressure, and things would be exploding instead of freezing."

[@secularstormchaser0074]

Funnily enough, my meteorology teachers said that one part in the movie is feasible...even assuming adiabatic warming, that that aprticular scene was theoretically feasible, but then again, I thibk they were assuming the hurricane like storms acted like a true hurricane where pressure at the surface would fall and then would allow for No work to be done one the parcel, but of course from there there'd be less atmosphere to take the heat away, and helicopters would fall iut of the sky well before it got cold enough, simply due to decreased push from the presshre drop

[@SeaCowsBeatLobsters]

I thought of this as well. The whole reason the air descends is the drop in pressure in the eye of the storm. The air might actually get colder as it descends. Didn’t think about the other implications, though. Not only would the helicopters fall due to the low pressure, I think the characters might suffocate.

[@fromnorway643]

@@SeaCowsBeatLobsters The pressure near the top of the mesosphere (80-90 km) is only 1/100,000 or 0.001 % of that at sea level, so the air descending to the surface without being compressed isn't even remotely possible.

[@dordagiovex9989]

In practice, a super-downburst

[@MatthijsvanDuin]

@@SeaCowsBeatLobsters An air pressure that's 160 hPa or lower (16% of normal sea level pressure) will give you roughly 5 seconds of "useful consciousness" before hypoxia renders you incapable of performing tasks to save yourself. This is assuming you were sitting still, any sort of aerobic exercise (e.g. running around) will further shorten this.

[@StephenMckeatingVegan]

The most unbelievable part of this video for me was that Dr Simon Clark made it through the British education system without watching this video at least once per term when a geography teacher got bored, or a supply teacher wasn't prepared. Or literally any last-day-of-term

[@LemonArsonist]

I got confused between Day After Tomorrow and 2012 for a sec there and was waiting for my favourite terrible physics in all of film: "The neutrino are mutating!". Before realising they are in fact different films

[@Xenro66]

Damn I hate when my neutrino mutates lol

[@lotoreo]

The Latinos are rotating!!

[@Stefnos87]

The elektrons are angry!!

[@xponen]

it is called "transmutation" not mutation. Neutrinos indeed transmute into different particle when it interact with matter and detector detect those particle as proxy for Neutrinos. The detector for Neutrinos were large tank of water just like it was depicted in the movie (the water boils in the movie).

[@dorderre]

Let's face it: we didn't watch these movies because of their accurate depition of physics, but because of the CGI and scenes of global destruction ;)

[@margaret381]

Thanks for your analysis, Simon! Honestly, I enjoyed the movie back when I watched it. It is clearly not a scientific documentary nor does it claim to be, so in my mind it is absolutely okay for it to contain inaccuracies that you've mentioned. If we start criticizing disaster films from the scientific lens, why not do the same for any Marvel movie too, let's see how accurate those are :D

[@aliensinnoh1]

I’ll admit, this has always been my favorite disaster movie, as someone who was born in 1997. Even with all its bad science, I still like to see a disaster movie where climate change is the disaster. Also it was my first exposure to the fact that the Eastern Seaboard of North America and Europe owe our warmer climate to ocean currents.

[@bean-pod]

Yep and while the movie is exaggerated we are definitely headed into a world where the AMOC is getting weaker. What will likely happen is that the sea level will rise and additional 3 feet, drought conditions will worsen, Europe will get colder/drier, and the climate system (although not at movie levels) will react quite swiftly.

[@4TIMESAYEAR]

@@bean-pod They've been saying that since 1980. Was supposed to have happened by now. Isn't going to happen.

[@xxoloveitt]

@@4TIMESAYEARits literally happening right now. Have you seen the graph of antarctic ice?

[@dundee6402]

@@4TIMESAYEAROh it is happening as we speak mind you. It takes ages to be overthrown but eventually happen.

[@leandrotami]

I remember the whole theater laughing when they said Mexico would receive immigrants after their foreign debt was forgiven or something like that. I'm from Argentina but it still sounded way so ridiculous. Dead creditors can't collect debts.

[@seraphina985]

Eh the US government would have survived along with the wealthiest fraction of their population. So there would still an organisation with legitimate claim to the debt, one who's members would likely become very rich since there would be few citizens in need of services to provide for leaving the repayments to cover insane salaries instead.

[@DevonExplorer]

I actually have this film in my DVD collection. It's one I sometimes enjoy because I can harangue and shout at it as well as enjoy the story. The bit that always makes me laugh is when one of the characters says 'It's been raining solid for three days!' I always tell them to come to Britain, especially Devon, and they'll be lucky if they don't get a good three weeks of solid rainfall before the sun comes out again. Great explanation, Simon. That's given me something else to harangue the film about now. :D

[@jsbarretto]

I guess another way of saying this is that the per-molecule energy of air in the upper atmosphere is higher than that lower in the atmosphere, but that this only turns into a measurably high temperature when pressurised?

[@esquilax5563]

No. The per-molecule kinetic energy of the air *is* the temperature. It increases when pressurised

[@Maniac3020]

I was actually thinking about the helicopter freezing scene recently. If the air from high in the atmosphere is cold enough to freeze helicopters (and helicopter pilots) in seconds... how the hell did experimental rocket planes fly to the edge of space?

[@avroarchitect1793]

The velocities those planes flew at generated so much friction on the airframe that heating beyond safe operating temperatures of normal steel or aluminum alloys became an issue, therefore they used the fuel as a coolant before burning it (in the case of hydrogen rocket powered systems and other liquid fueled rocket systems), had ablative coatings or had cooling systems in place. At least until the super-alloys they needed were developed. Or they used solid fuel rockets which once started are EXTREMELY difficult to put out as the reaction is self sustaining and generates immense heat.

[@cgmason7568]

Because those are 2 very different things

[@AnymMusic]

7:05 this would be SO much better of a "world end" movie. looking all around and everything just melts

[@op4000exe]

Fun fact, this movie got me really interrested in climate change back when it came out, and caused me to make sure to care more and more about the climate. Even if the version depicted in the movie has barely even the faintest thread of relation to reality.

[@MrMctastics]

For every one person that became aware of climate change because of this movie, there's two more who became climate skeptical

[@op4000exe]

@@MrMctastics That sadly is plausibly true. Though I do know of quite a few people who became interrested in climate change due to it.

[@jatpack3]

Shouldnt all the polar bears be extinct right now and all coastal cities under water? Plentiful reasons for rational thinking people to be skeptical when fantastical claims of catastrophes are made by experts. End of the world indeed.

[@neurofiedyamato8763]

@@MrMctastics Doubt that at all. If someone already believes climate change is real, they will have a bit better scientific knowledge to dismiss the movie specifically rather than climate change as a whole. On the other hand, someone who don't know about it at all would be intrigued to learn more about climate change. A movie won't convince someone who doesn't believe in it in the first place, and if it reinforces myths, well its not like they believed in climate change to begin with.

[@exudeku]

Ah yes, Freedom Units, for those who measure in Honda Civic per Rugby Stadium

[@tougs]

Thank you, this sentence has now been communized to be used elsewhere

[@parzival8061]

Football stadium*

[@dorderre]

Wasn't it Toyota Corolla per nano lightyear?

[@fromnorway643]

The well-known climatologist James Hansen has described this movie as “highly unscientific”.

[@pcsanch1023]

What a magnificent video. I love how you've done this, drawing a pertinent and scientifically enlightening conversation out of a film that some viewers may have questioned, but certainly not with the rigour and knowledge that you have. Thank you!

[@JohnPopcorn06]

without watching it, let me guess: stratospheric cold coming down when there it is actually warmer there than in the upper levels of the troposphere?

[@andreafarina385]

Yes, and also adiabatic heating causing the air to increase in temperature as it descends

[@katiemarshall4340]

Hi Simon, you are brilliant btw. I'm more of a biologist than a physicist, I love the way you detail how the air gets worked on moving down to the surface and affect us. I absolutely love this film not for its science but for it's socioeconomic and geopolitical stance. Good use of Independence Day as well 👍

[@idraote]

Examining the science of films is always interesting. There are physicists who do that on KZbin and I love them for it. The worst thing about the topic is that very often one realises that the "real" science could have been introduced seamlessly into the plot. It wasn't a narrative problem, it was just lack of research.

[@mattcroft]

interestingly, a bunch of air from higher layers of the atmosphere falling into a low pressure void and heating up is a thing that happens occasionally; it's called a heat burst!

[@Darth_Baggins]

I love the concept of dismantling movies with real science. I'd be curious to see your take on some of the 90's classics like Twister or Dante's Peak.

[@Anomize23]

We can analyze whatever error was made in this movie but one thing they were right was mammoths instantly froze with food in its stomach and that is a true fact. That alone tells you anything can freeze instantly if a thick coated mammoth can freeze instantly

[@stephenbrickwood1602]

The destabilisation of the winds around the north pole has caused major temperature drops much further south than usual. And it could get worse.

[@0li_vi_er]

1:56 "-150°Freedom Units". Exactly. Units used in the last three Free countries on Earth: the Glorious United States, Liberia and -Burma- Myanmar (name requested by the Freedom Fighters in charge of the place).

[@MJbramham90]

Haha! I always find that scene hilarious! They're literally chased down a corridor by frost! Emmerich's movies in general take physics and just yeet it out the window, but I think the worst (or best) for this is 2012. The opening of 2012 is just Emmerich taking a physics textbook and burning it! XD

[@xKuukkelix]

This was one of my favorite childhood (not meant for kids) movies :(

[@rashkavar]

Nice to hear about this phenomenon from a scientific perspective. I studied mining and mineral processing engineering, and we call the adiabatic heating phenomenon "autocompression." In underground mines, particularly the ones that go way down, (the one I worked at had plans to go down to about 3km under the surface and only stopped there because exploration hadn't been done further down), we have to figure out a system of ventilating the workspace. In every mine, we need enough airflow to keep exhaust fumes, blasting gasses, natural underground gasses (like, y'know, natural gas) down at concentrations where they don't explode or make horrible things happen to people's lungs. Unlike up on the surface, there's very little natural airflow in underground spaces, so we have to use forced air systems, and when you have a big industrial complex that's shape is largely dictated by the ore body, that makes for a complex system. But...that's still fairly easy. In deep mines, though, you get the added difficulty of heat management. The further down you go, the hotter it gets, and that gradiant is fairly steep. By the time you're over 2km down, you're talking upwards of 70 degrees Celsius or so, at least at the mine I was working at. Naturally, that makes the air down there *really effing hot.* Not quite 70, because we've got the fans going for the toxic/explosive gas issues, and that kind of heat will drive a degree of natural ventilation even if that system went down, but...more than hot enough to kill a human being working a shift down there. So...we need to cool the place off. That's fine, right? We've got A/C systems, we just make the air really cold and push it down and...oh...autocompression. Or adiabatic heating. How do we solve this? Two options: really really cold air, or water/ice and heat exchangers. The mine I worked at has been in operation for over a century, and has some interesting features from its early days. One of the most notable is the collapsed section that has a nice network of cracks running all the way to the surface above it. That's where they draw the air from, and because it's in the interior of Canada, the cold of winter and the heat of summer balance out to that rock being a pretty steady 2-3 degrees C. That's enough to get the air at the bottom of the mine down to a safe working temperature. But...that's the easy option that works if you're lucky enough to be running your deep mine in Canada and have a collapsed section from the early days of the mine when things like that were just...accepted normal events and not crises that might get the whole mine shut down. The deepest mines in the world are the gold and platinum mines in South Africa. The deepest of these, Mponeng Gold Mine, is working on going down as far as 4.27km below the surface, and was at 3.84km down by the end of 2018. But...they probably don't have that network of cracks to the surface. They certainly don't have Canadian winters to turn that into a very cold heat exchanger. So they have to use the expensive option: pumping cold water (in extreme cases like Mponeng, a water/ice slurry, since all the energy that goes into melting the ice doesn't bring the temperature up), down, and having heat exchangers deep in the mine absorbing the heat down there and bringing it up to the surface. There's still some work being done on the water getting pumped through the system, but this greatly reduces the amount of cooling potential that is lost due to adiabatic heating. But doing that means you need to build an extremely complex and enormous system that is effectively doing what refrigerators do. (oh, and if you're wondering why they use water/ice instead of a normal refrigerant, it's because somewhere in this massive system, you're going to get a leak now and then, and water spraying out of pipes is much less of a problem in a confined space than massive amounts of difluoromethane spraying into that space. At the very least, a worker walking into that area is going to notice the water filling the space and thus not die, whereas you might walk into a space where the difluoromethane has replaced all the air and just die in a few minutes having not realized you had made a mistake until it was way too late. (And yes, such is the joy of working in confined spaces. If you do this kind of thing for a living and have not had a course in how to work safely in such spaces...please find a course you can take, this is life-or-death knowledge.)) So...this is only really viable for mines that produce massive amounts of gold and platinum group metals, because mines are only viable if they turn a profit, and nothing else is worth enough to justify building a system like this. (While I know nothing about South Africa's regulatory system, I will note that there are countries where mines "benefit" from having safety rules about hot environments that are less strict than those used in Canada. I put that in quotes because I would argue that the safety of its workers should be a major priority for any mine, and forcing workers to work in too-hot conditions is contrary to that. To me that outweighs the financial gains from not having to implement a proper cooling solution. Unfortunately, there are far too many mine operators who do not take such a moral high ground. And I do want to emphasize, this is not a comment about South Africa specifically; I do not know what their rules are.)

[@OddNumber1524]

our geology department really liked to do trash movie nights, usually with stuff like The Core, Dantes Peak and Crack in the World.

[@codieloades5741]

Brilliant video Simon

[@maybevoldemort8995]

The clips for explaining the physics of temperature in this were perfect 😂

[@fawfulfan]

One of the main problems with this movie is that, while the collapse of thermohaline circulation COULD indeed cause localized cooling in the northern hemisphere, it would be a seasonal cooling - cooler winters. Not cooler summers. For an ice age to start, you have to have SUMMER temperatures drop. This is why Greenland is covered in ice, but Siberia, which can get just as cold, isn't. Because Siberia is a huge mass of land, whereas Greenland is surrounded by water. And land heats up faster than water, so in Siberia it gets warm enough to melt the ice in summer, whereas it rarely gets that warm in summer in Greenland.

[@myleftyscissors]

The illustration of radiation at 2:50 is flawless. It should be taught in every science classroom from pre-school to PhDs.

[@fabianholm2011]

Thanks for putting me onto Brilliant, brilliant! Been having such fun with this app.

[@virkony]

Magic actor that did the work to move air around was left out of picture. I saw that scene. And I thought it is perfectly normal that cold air would replace warm air and thus downward movement. It probably requires less volume to maintain same pressure when it is colder. I understood that scene as somehow super-cold air appeared at some altitude. And warming from pressure increase while it moves down wouldn't be enough to avoid freezing. I didn't understood well how to use that map at 6:24 in this video. My guess from it is that it indicates that going from 100 hPa (~15km) down to 1000 hPa (near ground) at ~40N latitude would result in warming up by 715K. But if that air was just from ~8km (~350 hPa) - difference is just 45K (330K-285K).

[@cabthegreat87]

I've seen a lot of videos about that movie and this was by far the best one yet.

[@zecuse]

Under certain conditions, water can flow uphill. It requires the surface have a jagged "step" texture and be so hot that it induces the Leidenfrost effect. The water "grips" the steps and "falls" up the slope of the surface if it's angled correctly.

[@stonefreak5763]

Also (my thought) if the Air is moving down very very rapidly, it would occur a lot of friction and with that would heat up even more, right?

[@kiwifruit5603]

Dude, this was a problem set by Maarten Ambaum in Reading's Atomspheric Physics course way back. Also went on to explain why aircraft recycle air rather than bring in "cold" fresh air from outside.

[@agentprismarine2778]

2:17 delta sign is not used for q and w! It's only used for state functions.

[@jimjacobs2817]

Have you considered the gravitational potential lost by the atoms in the atmosphere being radiated as heat? (Also the air wouldn't create ice, it would be extremely dry)

[@AnymMusic]

0:38 accurate or not, that looks VERY cool

[@TobZeN666]

What would be the pressure have to be near earth to suck air down from the upper atmosphere? Enough to counter this problem a bit/some? But it would be compressed at some point in time...

[@charlessmith263]

I know a little bit of physics and meteorology, Simon. Potential temperature is also known as "Theta-E" or "Theta-E advection", which is usually measured in Kelvin units.

[@dangle3392]

Despite all the physic errors in the movie, I still find it a fantasic movie and i love to watch it.

[@ynntari2775]

"radiation is when stuff yeets energy…" is now my absolutely favourite way of teaching physics

[@theharshtruth1893]

Nice explanation......Just one question; They have found woolly mammoths & other creatures frozen while still having undigested food in their stomaches indicating they were flash frozen in hours or even minutes. How could that have actually happened

[@rokaspleckaitis566]

They're mammoths, so they ate hard ro digest highly fibrous food, I assume. When they died they were probably in very cold weather (below -25 °C). So their bodies lost all heat in a dozen hours, but in that dozen or so hours the food didn't break down, especially after all the enzymes were dead.

[@meinnase]

loved that movie as a kid, something about sitting in a warm house while watching a shit ton of snow just was so cozy lmao

[@theosphilusthistler712]

Yeeees. Non-scientist but I do recall having to suspend disbelief at that scene, as with the scene in _Waterworld_ where he dives using the air bubble in an inverted glass bowl to dive down to submerged buildings - from a sea level that is above all but the Himalayas. Also, for low pressure air to be sucked down that work would have to be equalised in some way and whatever is providing that energy is sure to be doing more damage than frosting the Empire State. (And where is the water coming from for that effect anyway?).

[@RealityCheck6969]

This thermophysics issue was in my mind the whole time when I was watching this movie at the age of 10 in the cinemas. It's good to see someone has finally addressed this big scientific lie. :P

[@kuri3494]

I know this movie is dumb and bad etc etc, but weirdly enough I loved this movie as a child and even weirder I was allowed to watch it despite being raised by a young-earth creationist "climate change isn't real" family. So this movie was sort of my introduction to climate change and it really fascinated me. And now I'm in grad school helping to work on an actual earth system model. So I'll always be grateful for it.

[@neurofiedyamato8763]

I always found the movie immensely entertaining. I completely ignored the science they tried to throw at us since as a kid I didn't understand it, and secondly knew it just didn't make much sense in reality... As for the plot or characterization... I don't know, don't have good enough memory to recall any issues. Just fun seeing the chaos as a kid.

[@andrewdodd1918]

I did see a documentary about ice storms that happened in 2013, 2015, and1998, sections of the St. Lawrence Valley from Kingston to Québec’s Eastern Townships received up to 100 mm of ice pellets and freezing rain - more than double the icy precipitation normally received in those areas in a whole year. Like other major ice storms that have affected the Lake Ontario and St. Lawrence region, the storm resulted from a combination of low-pressure warm air currents from the Gulf of Mexico and high-pressure cold currents from the Arctic. When these two currents collided, the warm air rose above the cold; the precipitation consequently fell as rain but froze as it reached lower altitudes or hit the ground. When watching the film "The Day After Tomorrow" I incorrectly assumed that this was possible on a global scale. I have since researched further and know that this would not happen.

[@Zhixalom]

❤️ That was just double-brilliant (video and sponsor). Please do the movie "The Core" as well. Although you may want for flip your approach to what actually fits with physics and science, or at least break it up into several parts to avoid making your video longer than the movie is 😁

[@doaimanariroll5121]

I find a good way to make this concept more intuitive is to think if you have a 1 meter cube of air and compress it to 0.5m cube the “temperature” hasn’t changed, as in, you haven’t added heat. You’ve just doubled the amount of temperature in a given space.

[@youtubeaccount1320]

Aside from the terrible depiction in the movie I am interested about what you think about the actual decline of the AMOC. I got interested in the topic because we have a research institute called Potsdam Institute for CIimate Impact Resarch in my hometown (maybe you know it since you work in the field) which does a lot of research about that paticular topic and to me it seems like a reasonable concern. But since I am an absolute amateur in the field I was wonderung what you think about it.

[@DJ_Force]

Never saw the movie, but if air is coming from the upper atmosphere, where is all the air already at the surface going? What energy source is powering this massive movement of, well, mass?

[@emmabird9745]

Air moves from high pressure to low pressure (nature abhores a vacuum). So, since there is no high pressure way up there, you can only suck it down, which would cool it. I agree with your argument about adiabatic heating (thats what happens in a bicycle pump) I am somewhat sceptical about your bringing it down to ground level heats it. The only way that could happen is if you push it down, but it only has a weight of air on top of it so that seems unlikely. In the film they show a vortex (cyclone) which due to CF does produce a lower pressure in the centre which could suck air down cooling it because you are doing negative work on it. That much though? As far as freezing the fuel or oil in the helicopters, very very very (etc) unlikely. Firstly fuel in aircraft flying at high altitudes doesn't freeze and the oil lubrication systems are transfering heat from friction so they won't freeze either. If the film has one serious message it is that chaotic systems like weather can change to another state quite suddenly (say over a few decades but the film isn't long enough for that). It certainly has several times in the distant past. why not now? A disaster movie needs drama so they stretch things a bit. To enjoy the show somtimes you have to suspend your disbelief. Don't let science get in the way of a good yarn eh.

[@seraphina985]

The fuel in the tank may begin to but I certainly don't see it happening that fast. For one thing the heat would be being lost through the solid walls of the tank which the newly formed solid would presumably adhere to as a nucleation site. Presumably this would likely help to build up a layer of insulation which would buy time before all the fuel froze. During this time the fuel temperature sensors would have the aircraft screaming at you. Besides which unless it also somehow had a bunch of supercooled water present to get into and freeze up the rotor bearings and such the blades would not just stop, they would have autorotated and a heli pilot can land in that scenario. The air rushing up relative to the falling helicopter pushes the blades around (It's basically a big fan after all) which in turn causes the blades to keep sweeping the air horizontally and pushing air down in the process generating some lift. Not enough to stop the fall but it is enough to slow it to the point it's like having a parachute and the flight controls still work to use some of the potential energy being released to direct the craft to a relatively safe landing site. At this point anything relatively flat ish will do even if there is tree cover or something you just don't want to land where you will roll down a mountain or whatever so anywhere the craft will happily come to rest will do for a hard but survivable landing. It should anyway assuming the pilot actually has heli training because heli pilots are trained to safely put the helicopter down in the absence of engine power.

[@aliensoup2420]

As if the movie wasn't stupid enough, at the end the audience I was attending with started clapping in approval.

[@konan4heather]

QQ from a very-non-physics person. Wouldn't the air rushing from the stratosphere to the surface be due to the even lower air pressure at the bottom (obviously anomalous)? Then this argument that the air is doing work thus heating up doesn't hold.

[@blindtraveler844]

what would happen if the rotational speed of the air at the core of the storm centrifugally was fast enough to where it would force the air outwards and drop the pressure at the core so much that it would suck air in over the top of the storm ??

[@zapazap]

Thermal conductivity of wooden doors, or of flesh in a cold downdraft?

[@EtecMax]

So this was wrong. You explained what would happend if this would be showed correct. But another interesting perspective: What conditions would be necessary to make this happen? Assume the Storm "throws" the air out of the centre that you get the pressure in the middle which would be the same 80 km or whatever over ground. Sounds like you need a pretty nice storm to accomplish this. How fast would this storm be? And since it needs to do work, how hot would the storm be?

[@Oberon4278]

Glad I watched this, it's always good to find a new channel to subscribe to. Also thrilled that my intuition about why this is wrong turned out to be accurate. Thanks, once again, to my college chemistry professor!

[@pilotintraining18ify]

Yayyyyyyy!!! ive literally waited months to see this since I suggested it! 😄😄 watching it all on Nebula now. Thanks, Simon

[@trevinbeattie4888]

“Freedom units” :D LOL. I wish I had known this yesterday when there was a discussion in a Twitch stream about what temperature scale was more sensible.

[@CompanionCube]

but wouldn‘t the air be pulled down by a vacuum hence negative pressure hence cooling it down?

[@SiriusJMoonlight]

I only saw a bit at the end. My favorite thing is that frost effect they keep using. Frozen stuff doesn't freeze AGAIN when the temp drops another 50 degrees. There's almost no moisture left to freeze at that temperature.

[@jdlessl]

CO2 frost? -100ºC is definitely cold enough for that.

[@youkofoxy]

so... If we reverted the air flow... would it freeze?

[@casaxtreme2952]

Even if the air was coming down as cold as described, it wouldn't be able to "suck out" so much heat energy from the buildings and helicopters through conduction as fast as shown. As Simon states, air is a pretty good insulator and additionally, steel and concrete have a pretty high heat capacity compared to air. So it would take a lot of time to actually cool the material down. It's like when you were in a sauna and then go outside in the winter, it is not like your core temperature immediately drops down to 0°C, you can spend a good amount of time there without even feeling cold.

[@SuperVstech]

The cyclonic action supposedly drops the cold air mass from the troposphere to the surface, by dropping the pressure… so, not compressing the air down, but by evacuating the surrounding air in an eye of the storm. This of course would basically put everything into a near vacuum… also ludicrous.

[@andrewpienaar4522]

Yes, Exactly.! The freezing Helicopters was where I started paying much more attention to my Popcorn.

[@HolliGenett]

When I saw the characters running away...yes RUNNING AWAY...from the incoming cold, coming after them inside and seen visibly as fast forming frost like it was a cognizant being trying to kill them like a cartoon villain, I literally laughed. So incredibly ridiculous!

[@joshuahudson2170]

I knew on first watch that storm was bunk. It's pretty obvious that there isn't enough thermal mass of the cold air in the upper atmosphere to freeze water on the surface like that even ignoring the energy gain descending it down.

[@LordVoltrex]

Loved this and would love to see more like it. Excellent work, Simon.

[@e1123581321345589144]

I simply love your illustration of convection, conduction and radiation by movie scene. right on point. Brilliant! :))) p.s. I was in high school when the movie came out and seeing the "freezing storms" scene kind of broke it form me. I kept screaming in my mind, "that's not how weather works" for the rest of the movie. There's only so much suspension of disbelief can do before the whole narrative starts breaking down.

[@darrenparis8314]

I hope your channel blows up mainstream soon.

[@medexamtoolscom]

Adiabatic cooling is actually how air is typically liquefied. You compress it to high pressure, it then gets hot, and then you let the tank of compressed air cool to room temperature, and then you let out the pressure, and then you have very cold air, some of which liquefies if you do it hard enough. Ironic that you get a more compressed form of it by releasing the pressure since of course the liquefied air then has a much higher density than the compressed air. But of course that's not a problem for consistency with the laws of thermodynamics because only a small fraction of it actually liquefies. This actually doesn't work with helium starting from room temperature, to liquefy helium, you must cool the whole thing with liquefied air first, AND THEN perform this process starting at the lower temperature, so it's a very inefficient two-step process, and that's also why liquid helium is so expensive to produce. Note that adiabatic cooling doesn't actually happen at all in an ideal gas, it is only because of the van der waals forces and unideal behavior of a gas that it happens at all. If you compress an "ideal" gas, it doesn't heat up at all because the work you perform on it just is stored as potential energy by virtue of the fact that it is compressed gas which can perform work when it expands again, so the energy you put into compressing it isn't lost to generating heat. And helium is much closer to an ideal gas until it gets very cold already, so adiabatic heating and cooling doesn't work on helium until you get it to a mighty cold starting temperature.

[@phillipotey9736]

Water does sometimes flow uphill...?

[@spacecadet35]

I would have thought that the main problem was the water flowing uphill. When you have warming the sea level rises, when you have cooling, the sea level lowers. Yet , for some reason we see the water level rising.

[@skywalkerchick]

The part where they burn books for warmth when there’s PERFECTLY GOOD WOODEN FURNITURE EVERYWHERE THAT WILL BURN LONGER

[@johnnyswatts]

Isn't the cold air descending actually an example of convection? One can, after all, also have temperature inversions.

[@PalkkiTT]

0:13 Morbius

[@deepashtray5605]

There is also the issue of displacing the air beneath that column. Fluids of different temperatures simply don't mix together all that quickly.

[@em945]

Would that mean there would be thunderstoms or intense weathercells?

[@deepashtray5605]

​@@em945 It's a big part of it.

[@fromnorway643]

Another problem is that air from the upper mesosphere couldn't have much of a cooling impact on the sea level atmosphere since it is about 100,000 times thinner. You can't cool a bathtub filled with near boiling water with a thimble of ice water.

[@em945]

@@fromnorway643 so interesting and complex.

[@jenssylvesterwesemann7980]

1) I've learned something valuable, thank you for that. 2) Now, how long is that Bowie/Mercury earworm going to stick?

[@npip99]

The math, physics, and entire explanation, was vastly more convoluted than it had to be. Temperature is average kinetic energy of the particles. When you halve the volume, you double the temperature. You have same amount of energy, but it's in half the space. [Cue diagram, showing low-density particles on the left, and high-density particles on the right. Subtitled "Cold" and "Hot" respectively]. So, if you take extremely low pressure cold air, and compress it so it can be in the lower atmosphere, it gets extremely hot. [Cue big arrow pointing from the left diagram, to the right diagram] That's it, nice and simple. It wasn't even until 4:46 that pressure was mentioned, and then shortly after the explanation drifted back to adiabatic and formulae anyway. The whole temperature = heat + work thing, along with all of the types of convection/conduction/radiation, all of that was just far more convoluted of an explanation than it had to be.

[@glenbirbeck4098]

ya, the scene where the groovy gal and guy are being chased by an abrupt frost line in a granite floor....that must be my favorite. Thought I knew cold weather, guess not.

[@Frank_E_Scialdone]

Hold on for a second… Are you telling me that this film is not based on scientific truth? I am stunned. I appreciate this video… But is it really necessary?

[@paulstubbs7678]

The bit that got me was freezing aircraft out of the air in mid flight, I didn't think that was possible. yeah if they are left on the ground not running that can be a problem, but not in mid flight.

[@gamerdragon4721]

I’ve watched the video and, ok fair enough what you said does make sense! :D However, hypothetically what if the storm depicted in the movie has an incredibly low air pressure in the eye of it? Wouldn’t it be theoretically possible for what happens in the movie to happen in a IRL situation ether by having roughly the same pressure as the cooler low pressure air or by the low pressure in the storm decompressing higher pressure air lower down in the atmosphere rapidly cooling it? :P Sorry if this is a stupid question BTW, I’m just genuinely curious as to wether or not you think there is *any* way (depicted in the movie or not) that a storm like this would be possible, AKA: a storm that can freeze anything in a matter of seconds! :]

[@kam......]

I love how Dr Simon Clark talks about a 2004 movie like it was yesterday lol.

[@neoluna1172]

so simon, ive heard a lot about tipping points, and how we are likley past sevreal. Is there still hope for some form of advanced human civilzation?

[@theursulus]

Nicely done.. I wondered about that bit.. but studied physics a very long time ago!

[@stephenellis5729]

So can you explain how mammoths in Siberia froze completely with out the flowers in its stomach going sour? I think they’res several examples collected so far.

[@dasreicht]

I'm quite stupid, and I still don't really understand what "work" is in this context. I've been wondering ever since I heard First and Second Law by Flanders and Swann...