Hollywood's thundering butt-ignorance about basic science was simply amusing until Hollywood started getting political.

Perhaps you mean 1954? The original Godzilla was released that year... as far as I know, it was the first of a long run of "monsters created by nuclear weapons testing", including Them (also 1954) and Rodan (1956), two of my favorites.

I suppose it depends on what's "merely amusing" and what's "political". Where would you place 1936'sThings to Come? I think I can guess, considering it's based on a novel by that infamous Soclialist, H.G. Wells. Granted, it's not a disaster movie, but it is science fiction...

I think R.L. nailed it.

In a book I read a couple of months ago (synchronous with Katrina's landfall) -- Big Weather, by Mark Svenvold -- the author coins a word to describe an emerging social fascination with natural disaster: catastrophilia. He uses it mostly to chart the early success of The Weather Channel: how they were able to attract a larger audience than a few thousand weather geeks by compiling documentaries of extreme weather events and offering them in prime time.

IMO, that phenomenon already existed. I'm tempted to call it "vicarious survival", and would also extend it to include unnatural disasters. As evidence I offer the popularity of 1950s monster flicks, Irwin Allen's output during the '70s, 1983's The Day After, etc. ... and the entire genre of alien invasion, beginning with Wells' The War of the Worlds, which pushes the time frame all the way back to 1898.

I think the trend that Svenvold noted, vis a vis The Weather Channel, is the result of an increased jadedness of the viewing public -- or perhaps a creeping inability to suspend disbelief in the appreciation of fiction. In any case, more vicarious thrill is derived from documented real events. To be blunt: "Real people died in that, but I didn't," like crashes during auto races. Hence (as portrayed in his book), the sudden market for storm footage, and the huge increase in chasers willing to risk their own lives to provide it.

That hasn't discouraged the purveyors of fictional vicarious survival -- but it has ramped up the intensity of manufactured "natural" disasters necessary to attract an audience... or maybe just to outdo the previous one. Thus we have "10.5" earthquakes and "Category 7" storms. I wonder how much longer it'll be before someone remakes When Worlds Collide...

Bad Science (non-science, nonsense) is something Hollywood, et. alii, has always been guilty of ... and the latest buzz-words (like global warming), or depicting real agencies (like FEMA), are nothing more than a reach for verisimilitude. I doubt that it has any more purposeful political content than did the atomic bomb tests awakening Gojira.