11 Wildly Inaccurate Movie Science Tropes

Thanks to the flood of apocalypse films to hit our screens of late (no pun intended), you'd be forgiven for thinking that one day the arctic ice is all going to fall into the sea, asteroids will rain down from our polluted skies and we'll all go the way of Atlantis.

The stern advice behind these films is that we've all been very bad to Mother Nature and now she's going to make us pay in one fell swoop. Glaciers and tidal waves will roll irresistibly over our arrogant little cities (preferably destroying some well-known landmarks) and it's all going to be very dramatic.

Unfortunately, that's not quite how it works. It can take a thousand years to enter an ice age and, considering the fact that a thousand years ago we thought that the sun went round the earth, that's more than enough time for us to either adapt, escape or prevent it.

That's the glass-half-full viewpoint, but there's also a much more pessimistic side. The actual effects of man-made climate change are not going to be nearly so exciting as tsunamis and sudden ice ages. What is more likely to happen is that we will simply pollute and waste our way back to the Middle Ages, over an imperceptibly long and drawn out period of time.

Basically, the world really does end, not with a bang, but a whimper.