FALMOUTH – “The Day After Tomorrow” is here, and surprisingly, this film isn’t science fiction.

It’s scientific theory … on steroids.

During a Friday morning preview and discussion of the movie, coordinated by the Maine Council of Churches and the local Sierra Club chapter to raise awareness about climate change, much of the 100-person crowd murmured their surprise at not feeling disgust as the closing credits rolled.

“There was enough reality in terms of the science to give me some pause,” Barrett Rock of the Institute for the Study of Earth, Oceans and Space at the University of New Hampshire said Friday.

The film begins with the dramatically staged breakup of an Antarctic ice shelf – an event that already is occurring to some degree.

Swashbuckling, hybrid-car-driving climatologist Jack Hall explains, in a simplified but surprisingly accurate manner, the theory of how global warming could alter ocean currents and cause the Earth to grow colder.

From there, however, things go Hollywood.

Softball-sized hail kills businessmen in Tokyo, while tornadoes ravage Los Angeles. A flood sweeps through Manhattan, then a deep freeze encases the city in ice.

All of these phenomena do appear in at least one of the many climate models run by scientists. The trouble is, geologic history tells of abrupt climate shifts occurring over two, 10 or 100 years.

This movie wreaks all its havoc in 10 days – a virtual impossibility according to researchers at the University of Maine’s Climate Change Institute.

“I think it falls somewhere between impossible and highly improbable,” professor George Denton said earlier this week.

The political bent of the movie is clear – it features a dim but genial president deferring to a powerful second-in-command who suspiciously resembles a cross between Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld.

Once the president is flash-frozen, the vice president gravely tells the American people, “We were wrong. I was wrong.”

American leaders profusely apologize to Latin America as illegal refugees wade across the Rio Grande into Mexico during the evacuation of most of the United States.

And well-coifed reporters from Fox News keep idiotically running into the storm to be killed by flying debris.

Not surprisingly, “The Day After Tomorrow” has raised the ire of conservative and libertarian groups such as the Cato Institute, which challenge both the scientific exaggeration and the validity of some of the climate theories explored in the film, calling it “myth.”

Environmentalists view the film, however imperfect, as an opportunity.

Environment Maine and the Natural Resources Council of Maine plan to distribute information about climate change to moviegoers at theaters in the Portland, and perhaps mid-coast, areas this weekend.

“It would be a cliche to say this movie should be a wake-up call, but it is,” state Sen. Chris Hall, D-Bristol, chairman of the Legislature’s Utilities and Energy Committee, said Friday.

Hall and Maine Department of Environmental Protection Commissioner Dawn Gallagher told Friday’s audience about this summer’s effort to develop a greenhouse gas reduction plan for Maine.

Last year, legislators supported a bill requiring the state to reduce emissions to 1990 levels by 2010, then reduce emissions by an additional 10 percent by 2020.

On the federal level, they spoke of a bill – the McCain-Lieberman Climate Stewardship Act – that would place new restrictions on the emission of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, if it is approved by the U.S. Senate in the next few weeks and by the House later this summer.

Both U.S. Sens. Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins have broken with Republican Party leadership to support the concept in the past and are expected to do so again.

Others spoke of more local initiatives to encourage public transportation and renewable energy.

“The time to act is now,” Suzanne Watson of the Northeast States for Coordinated Air Use Management said Friday. “You need to understand what’s happening around you, to have a voice in this whole process.”