Caffeinated Climate Change - Bill McKibben On "The Day After Tomorrow"

"It's always hard to get people to take global warming seriously because it happens too slowly. Not slowly in geological terms – by century's end, according to the consensus scientific prediction, we'll have made the planet warmer than it has been in tens of millions of years. But slowly in NBC Nightly News terms. From day to day, it's hard to discern the catastrophe, so we don't get around to really worrying. Something else – the battle for Fallujah, the presidential election, the spread of SARS, the Jacksonian mammary – is always more immediate, and evolution seems to have engineered us for a fascination with the sudden.

Slowness, by all accounts, shouldn't be a problem with The Day After Tomorrow, a new global-warming epic due in theaters May 28. Apparently, the script posits that rapid melting of Arctic ice is enough to trigger massive changes in ocean currents, shutting down the Gulf Stream and setting off a humongous super storm. (It's a premise that seems borrowed from late-night radio host Art Bell's book The Coming Global Superstorm.) In the 20th Century Fox version, tornadoes rip through Los Angeles (targeting – what else? – the Hollywood sign), while a massive snowstorm pounds a puzzled New Delhi, and grapefruit-size hail batters Tokyo. The worst is saved for New York (which has already been wrecked by the film's director, Roland Emmerich, in both Independence Day and Godzilla). A giant wave or two batters Wall Street, and then a day that began in sweltering heat turns unimaginably frigid; soon, the whole city is locked in a glacier.

EDIT

The underlying science is not nonsense. Arctic ice is melting, and quickly, thereby sending a pulse of fresh water into the North Atlantic. Some computer models indicate that this could weaken the Gulf Stream, bringing on regional cooling in Western Europe and the northeastern U.S. even as the rest of the planet warms. Meanwhile, extreme weather events are escalating: African floods, European windstorms, Asian droughts, and so on. All of these bad things won't happen in one day, but the scenario is not pure Hollywood contrivance, either.


There's a chance, however, that the film's depiction will set the bar too high. That is, if the reason we're supposed to worry about global warming is that it will first send a tidal wave over the Statue of Liberty and then lock it forever in an ice cube, anything less will seem ... not so bad. When, in fact, the more likely horror stories happen a little more slowly – and a little farther away from the Hollywood hills and the Manhattan canyons. For instance: The World Health Organization estimates that the spread of mosquitoes in a warmer, wetter world will cause malaria and dengue fever to explode. The deaths won't come all at the same time, and they won't involve people who look like Dennis Quaid, but they'll be plenty real. And consider the latest statistics from the Earth Policy Institute, which note steep rises in grain prices as a direct result of harvests lowered by massive heat waves in the last few years – again, results that are less sensational but likely to be equally tragic."

EDIT

http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=18601

Although the causal factors and buildup procede slowly, the historical evidence from ice cores indicates that the actual dramatic/catastrophic climate change happens quickly, in years, not decades and certainly not centuries.
An analogy that is used it that of filling a bucket with water. As it is slowly filled, everything is okay; however, when it reaches the rim, it overflows immediately.

If my experience is any guide, and malaria becomes endemic to the United States with its gun culture, watch out -- millions of people whacked-out on Lariam (a malaria preventative) waving their guns around. I know lots of people take it safely with no side effects but I for one would not care to be operating a motor vehicle or a handgun under its influence which for me was quite substantial. By the last week, I was becoming quite paranoid!

I have a buddy who claims to have read about geologists finding the occasional mammoth frozen in a glacier, with fresh vegetation in the stomache. The implication is supposedly that these mammoths had to have been frozen solid in a matter of hours, and then stayed that way for thousands of years.

These stories are what inspired that book "the coming global superstorm, which I assume is what inspired "the day after tomorrow"

I've never seen these accounts myself, anybody know whether they are true or not?

...whether or not it proves that anything occurred other than landslides or avalanches is still open to debate. A lot of these mummified remains have been found, and it is not clear to me that the animals necessarily froze solid within hours of death as opposed to becoming naturally mummified over several months time.

SOme of the mammoths and other animals were frozen around 10,000 to 15,000 years ago but others were frozen at other times -- I have heard 30,000 or even 45,000 years ago. We can't assume that all of the mammoths were frozen at the same time, as we know that they most probably weren't.

Here are a couple of papers about the mammoths -- they waste some time arguing with Velikovsky, who is not taken seriously by credentialed scientists -- but they do include some good information about mummification, the age of various mammoths that have been discovered, etc.

All I really can say is, the famous mammoth with the frozen buttercups in his mouth -- this could have just as well happened due to an avalanche as due to a sudden onset of glaciation.

So I don't take mammoths as proof of catastrophic onset of glaciation or a superstorm, but I'm not entirely willing to say it can't happen, just that it seems anti-intuitive to me.

The term isn't exactly ... exact.

The snowstorm that hit the East Coast of North America in mid-March, 1993, was called a Superstorm.

The superstorm described by Bell and Strieber in their book (The Coming Global Superstorm) is possible, but not probable. But smaller superstorms, even an order-of-magnitude larger than the 3/93 superstorm, are quite possible. The changeover to an ice age would be likely to spawn hundreds of such storms every decade while a global temperature inversion was in the process of equalizing.

Indigenous Siberians and Inuits have similar stories of a kind of local superstorm, basically a tornado of snow, that freezes everything it touches. These storms are said to happen only every several generations, but they fit in well with stories of long-past disasters. At least one tribe calls them "Dancers" (I think it's the Chukchi of Eastern Siberia). They also appear to be similar to a rare kind of downdraft phenomenon that can deliver very cold air from the stratosphere to the ground.

Again, Bell and Strieber cite this phenomenon to support their idea in The Coming Global Superstorm.

The scenario of a massive, disastrous, instant-onset ice age is possible, but very doubtful. The movie (The Day After Tomorrow) ought to be a good disaster flick, but the most likely ice-age onset scenario will happen in a series of "flickers" over a 50-100 year period (according to Wallace Broecker, one of the original proponents of the rapid-onset idea).

Keep in mind, though, that a "flicker" could be something like four or five horrendous winters in a row, with very little snow melt during the summer -- followed by as many horrendously hot summers, before the next cold flicker.

No need for panic. But we ought to think about how to deal with it when it gets here, whether the first "flicker" is happening now, or will hold off for 500 years. I personally think it's starting to happen now, but that's of no real importance. Preparedness -- without panic -- is.

--bkl