Anne Billson writes about disaster movies for Perspective. “You can’t say we weren’t warned. Our elected representatives might have been more aware of the speed at which a deadly virus can spread around the world if only they had paid more attention to films like Contagion, in which Gwyneth Paltrow shakes hands with a chef in Macau who has been cooking a pig infected by a bat disturbed by rainforest clearance. As I write this, the people of Texas are struggling in freezing temperatures for which their science-denying governors have dismally failed to prepare; perhaps they would have taken climate change more seriously if they’d seen The Day After Tomorrow, in which the northern hemisphere is gripped by a new Ice Age, forcing Americans to migrate south across the Rio Grande towards more clement weather..”