Climate Change: Our Current Apocalypse

Climate change has been an ever-escalating issue, becoming more and more prevalent over the last decade than ever before. As described by S. Brent Plate in, Apocalypse Now and Then: Four Rules for Watching the World End, global warming is something we collectively fear. Since this fear has been ignored and left to fester, every time it makes an appearance to the public consciousness, it is more harrowing than ever. From a certain point of view, this could be seen as positive since we must make a change at some point, and fear will force us to do exactly that.
Powered by this type of fear was the Climate Change march that happened in New York City, the largest of its kind. Backed by the exclamations of the scientific community, a collective prophet for the dangers of climate change,the goal of the march was to relay scientific findings that a possible end for humanity as we know it is within sight. In all too classical of an apocalyptic fashion, there is salvation being offered, and it's in the form of changing our over-consuming ways.
Unfortunately, however, as Dan Archer says in his comic, "the politics of the apocalypse have proved insidiously divisive and incendiary" (5th panel), and this fact is becoming apparent as humanity's hand is being forced into making a decision. 
Because apocalypse is always so divisive, and because the signs around us are more clearly than ever pointing towards destruction, those in favor of changing our ways have become the harbingers of doom. The marches, protests, and general outcry is something that has been seen in apocalypses' past.

Apocalypse Vs. Reality

            As Elaine Pagel writes people read their own “social, political, and religious conflicts” into apocalyptic myths. Filmmakers love to create disaster movies showing wide scale societal devastation based on cultural and societal fears.

The Day After Tomorrow is an archetypical apocalyptic myth. It shows a total societal rearrangement caused by a large-scale catastrophe. Like all apocalyptic myths, the date it occurs is not specified, but still immediate enough to create a sense of concern. That allows it to take a slightly prophetic tone. The science behind the film is absolutely nonsensical, but the filmmakers clearly see climate change as an issue of concern. They just don’t want to let facts get in the way of a good story.

Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth film serves as a much more direct, prophetic, apocalyptic statement. Rather than allowing getting carried away with the spectacle, Al Gore relies on facts to show the realities of climate change. His predictions are nowhere near as drastic as the ones in The Day After Tomorrow. But they allow the audience no illusions. His message is climate change is happening, and there is nothing you can do about it.

These films base themselves around a similar cultural fear: global warming. But The Day After Tomorrow made $652 million dollars, while An Inconvenient Truth made about $50 million. That shows that in our society, we are more comfortable with myth than fact. The Day After Tomorrow takes society’s fears about global warming and exaggerates them to a point where they look like something out of The Book of Revelations. An Inconvenient Truth is much more jarring and uncomfortable, because it shows global warming as a fact, rather than a myth. Both films warn of an apocalypse by similar means, but audiences are more comfortable with that warning when it’s wrapped in a layer of myth, rather than fact.