On the ethics of made-up science

I've written about the various ways of making stuff up in science fiction before; it's a subject dear to my heart. So I was interested to see Kieran Healy picking on critics of the science in the environmental disaster movie The Day After Tomorrow in a Crooked Timber post, on the grounds that it's just a movie.

It's a common enough sentiment; but to an aficionado of good science fiction, this particular defense rankles. Sure, movies and other fictional entertainments have fantastical things in them all the time, and I wouldn't have it any other way. But there are worse and better treatments of fake science. To my mind, there are two types of behavior that cross the line into badness:

1. Fake science that actually damages the storytelling (for instance, the totally arbitrary miracle technobabble solution cooked up in the last five minutes). This is an aesthetic violation, but not an ethical one, except inasmuch as you may have cheated disappointed moviegoers out of the ticket price; but this is a widely acknowledged risk of going to the movies.
2. Fake science presented as realistic in marketing campaigns, particularly quasi-"educational" or polemic ones. This is what really gets my goat, because it actually makes people more ignorant. That seems to be happening in the case of The Day After Tomorrow, which is based on some idiotic book co-written by Whitley Streiber, who doubtless knows what the UFO aliens who abducted him have to say about global warming.

Scientists interested in outreach (whether to raise concern about a threat such as global warming, or to promote general science education) will often use the craze for some high-profile piece of media science fiction as a teachable moment, being careful to put in disclaimers about the inaccuracies in the entertainment. I'm of two minds about this. On the one hand, some people really will be interested enough to follow everything they're saying. On the other hand, the marketing campaign is guaranteed to twist this into an endorsement by prominent scientists of the story's accuracy. (See The Physics of Star Trek by Laurence M. Krauss: it's actually a fine book, but it was sold in store displays as a scientific vindication of Star Trek's physics, which it is not.)

In the case of The Day After Tomorrow it's even worse because the issue is so politically charged: it's a readymade strawman for Cato Institute hacks who want you to believe that this hysteria is what those silly liberal atmospheric scientists are pushing. Please don't feed the strawman.