Get your EOTW apocalyptic fix

The Day After Tomorrow

It looks like a movie version of Whitley Streiber and Art Bell's The Coming Global Superstorm. The premise is that ice ages are caused when climatic imbalances cause a huge discharge of thermal energy in the form of a Superstorm, one that eventually dissipates enough excess atmospheric heat to return balance in the form of an ice age.

I personally don't subscribe to the Superstorm theory, but I have been interested in this subtopic within climatology since it opened up in the late 1970s. After several cold winters, the idea that another ice age was immanent attracted a lot of attention. The idea lost favor after a decade and a half of unabated global warming, but the quick dilution of the feeder "tributaries" of the north Atlantic Gulf Stream and recent change in the thermohaline circulation have revived interest in the ideas. Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute has done the most research on this area of climatology; William Calvin has authored a number of well-received papers on how abrupt climate change could have accelerated human evolution.

Although Streiber and Bell are well-known for their involvement in UFO lore, The Coming Global Superstorm has a only light sprinkling of occult wackiness. Half of the book is a fairly exciting fictional account of such a Superstorm written by Streiber, and much of the rest is a pretty-good recitation of the recent scientific work on abrupt climate change -- as well as the controversial idea (within meteorology) of "superstorms".

Although the next ice age could fall on us like a tidal wave of sleet tomorrow afternoon at two, it might also hold off for a thousand years. Most climatologists hedge their bets by warning us about a "little ice age" triggered by the oceanographic changes WHOI describes. But ice ages have been very reliable since the Central American Sea closed up, stopping a warm equatorial thermohaline current from keeping the Atlantic warmer -- and that was about five million years ago. The Earth has been locked in an ice age that is interrupted only once every 100,000 years, for about 10,000 years. We are either 10,000 or 14,000 years past the last Great Melt, depending on which criterion you use.

My own expectation for an incipient ice age is far less dramatic than Streiber and Bell's, or the coming movie. I think it would take about a decade to get going, and the ice would not bury NYC for several hundred years. (In a Superstorm scenario, this would take a matter of months.) But the frailty of civilization is worth thinking about.

If the movie theater owners have any sense at all, they'll crank the A.C. up for this one!

--bkl

i thought it was that we are all going to melt/burn up/etc due to global warming?

you're going to melt because not backing the current Administration means you're a SINNER and bound for HELL!

(or so Bush and Ashcroft think!)
:)

They'll tell you everything you need to understand the dynamics of climate change, abrupt or otherwise.

Streiber and Bell's The Coming Global Superstorm is a fun read, but I don't put much stock in the suddenness they expect from the change. "Superstorms" as currently defined are more like small, high-speed hurricanes.

Streiber`s website occasionally has some interesting stuff on it pertaining to climate change, like this ominously written blurb on the recent speed-up of the polar vortex (observed since about 2000, IIRC).

--bkl

In the 80's he teamed up with James Kunetka (sp?) and wrote "War Day" and "Nature's End", both excellent books about the end of the world.

Streiber, actually, is more of an optimist. In War Day, he travels through post-WWIII with Jim Kunetka, and believes that America will survive and prosper again because of the resilience of its people. In Nature's End, his character-persona brings down a murderous spiritual leader - cum - psychopath who wants to pass a law requiring the suicide of 2/3rd of the world's population.

The fictional part of Superstorm is a similar story. His central character just barely escapes the superstorm, but everyone around him gets caught up in it. His brother-in-law, a meteorologist with the UKMET (UK Meteorological Office) describes his own impending death in e-mails as the superstorm buries the British Isles under two kilometers of ice. The description of Paris thumbing its collective nose at the storm is one of the high points of the book. All in all, it's a great book to read during a snowstorm :)

--bkl

$24 including shipping, all the way from frosty Lapland!

beat Wal-Mart the eBay way!