Digg thisYou may have heard that, as ABC News reported, the footage of the “collapsing Antarctic ice shelves” in Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth was actually made up of special-effects shots taken from the 2004 sci-fi doozy The Day After Tomorrow:
Well, it’s fake but accurate, you might say. “Just because Big Al manipulated my emotions with spectacular Hollywood fakery doesn’t mean we’re not ALL GONNA DIE FROM GLOBAL WARMING!!!” If you really believe that, there’s no point in arguing with you. But you’ll have to forgive me for laughing at the look on your face when you find out what the effects guys used to make all those “glaciers”:
Sculpted from Styrofoam and later scanned into a computer, the ice shelf “flyover” looks real.
That’s right, Styrofoam! You know, the evil, evil stuff that’s being banned all over the place because it’s destroying the environment. Wonder what the studio did with it when they were done with their dumb movie? Five hundred years from now, will the last few survivors of the human race stumble upon those beautifully sculpted glaciers, completely intact, in some forgotten landfill?
Guess it’s kind of like Al’s blazingly incandescent house: You can’t save the world without destroying more than your fair share of it.
(Thanks to faithful Deceiver reader Jenn for the tip!)
