A month ago I noted that while I'm sympathetic to the idea, using the upcoming blockbuster The Day After Tomorrow to promote global warming awareness could be problematic because the verifiable science in the movie could be suspect. (by contrast, since there is nothing verifiable in The Passion, Chrisitian conservatives had no qualms about bludgeoning the public with its message, so to speak)

Sure enough, we have a first round of scientists belittling the movie:

Climate scientists have been stirred to ridicule claims in an upcoming Hollywood blockbuster that global warming could trigger a new ice age, a scenario also put forward in a controversial report to the US military.

The $125-million epic, The Day After Tomorrow, opens worldwide in May. It will show Manhattan frozen solid after the warm ocean current known as the Gulf Stream shuts down.

The movie's release will come soon after a report to the US Department of Defense (DoD) in February predicting that such a shutdown could put the northern hemisphere into a deep freeze and trigger global famine within 15 years.

But in the journal Science on Thursday, Andrew Weaver of the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada, surveys the current research and concludes "it is safe to say that global warming will not lead to the onset of a new ice age".

(...)

The DoD's doomsday scenario, which is very similar to that in the film, was drawn up by Peter Schwartz and Doug Randall of the San Francisco-based Global Business Network. Neither is a climate scientist.

The scenario suggests that as global warming melts Arctic ice packs, the North Atlantic will become less salty. This would shut down a global ocean circulation system that is driven by dense, salty water falling to the bottom of the north Atlantic and that ultimately produces the Gulf Stream.

This much is respectable scientific theory, and some researchers believe it could happen for real in 100 years or so. But the film-makers and DoD authors go further.

They say it could happen very soon. And that if it did, the northern hemisphere would cool so much that that ice sheets would start to grow, creating a catastrophic new ice age.

This is too much even for sympathetic climatologists. Stefan Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, whose own models say the Gulf Stream could shut down within a century, told New Scientist: "The DoD scenario is extreme and highly unlikely."

Certainly, I'm not climate expert. However, it seems that if the scientific community gets too cozy with the movie, it'll be too easy a target for those who would poo-poo the global warming issue.