This film is a dreadful piece of work, hardly worth a second thought except for one reason - it illustrates the use of entertainment media for propaganda purposes.
Arguably, the film's most credible character is climatologist Ilana Green (Lindsay Crouse), who describes evidence of plants growing within 90 miles of the North Pole (despite the fact that there is no land above sea level that close to the Pole), and who describes data from about a dozen CO2 monitoring stations which each report about a 1% increase in atmospheric CO2 - then she concludes from this data that Earth has experienced an alarming 12% increase in CO2. Fortunately, this error was not included in the IPCC's report on climate change, but for every one person who reads a peer-reviewed journal article on climatology, there are thousands of people who saw this film. My concern is that these casual viewers could have been misled by the pretend science.
Because the rise of atmospheric CO2 is central to the film's plot, I believe the writers had a duty to check the numbers - either make the total equal to the average of the several stations' data, or have the (fictional) stations all report data that averages to 12%. I don't think this was an accident - I believe the writers wanted to make our present situation (real life CO2 increases near 1%) seem scarier, so they deliberately misrepresented the global average by 12 times. If a real climatologist had published a paper built around an error of this type, they would be discredited and virtually unemployable in their field. This makes the film a propaganda piece, a deliberate attempt - way back in 1996 - to "sell" the global warming agenda with fraudulent, alarmist, inflated data.