THE COMING GLOBAL SUPERSTORM
My first Apocalypse article! Now the site is rockin!
This is a book I read several years ago, and the book that the film The Day After Tomorrow is based on.
Except the content is not make-believe. This is a very real situation, and the most likely scenario for a global Apocalypse.
I’ve included an excerpt from the book, an article from National Geographic, and a direct link to an online scan of the book, in case you want to read it yourself. You can also pick it up on Amazon.
EXCERPT FROM THE BOOK:
THE COMING GLOBAL SUPERSTORM
by Art Bell and Whitley Strieber
Chapter 1: Present Danger
1999 was the most violent year in the modern history of weather. So was 1998. So was 1997. And 1996. Anybody who glances at a weather report from time to time can see that something extraordinary is happening. But exactly what that is remains a matter of controversy.
For twenty years, we have been bombarded with warnings that global warming is a real and present danger. Equally, there have been claims that it’s all nonsense.
On March 15, 1999, scientists at the University of Arizona and the University of Massachusetts reported on their construction of a thousand-year record of earth’s average temperature. The results were shocking. What has happened is that a nine-hundred-year-long cooling trend has been suddenly and decisively reversed in the past fifty years. Due to the rise in heat-trapping greenhouse gases, ferocious warming is under way. The scientists predicted that the earth will shortly be warmer than it has been in millions of years.
A climatological nightmare is upon us. It is almost certainly the most dangerous thing that has ever happened in our history.
However, there is a surprising amount that we can do about it. Some of it involves personal action. Some of it involves the whole society. None of it is particularly difficult or expensive, and none of it will place a cost burden on government, business, or the individual.
How effective will it be? That remains to be seen. So far, the fact that we cannot answer the question of just how dangerous global warming actually is, has meant that nobody is doing anything very decisive. But the situation is getting more and more serious. It has become clear that the deterioration of the atmosphere — indeed, of the whole biosphere — is happening a lot faster than even the most concerned climatologists imagined just a short time ago.
What does this mean? What might happen? We must find a way to understand. We must, because we have to empower ourselves to prevent it. Could it be that the worst climate disaster of all — an event barely whispered about — is actually happening right now? Could we be at the edge of runaway climate change — an event so devastating that it could abruptly leave the world unable to feed itself, perhaps even visit it with unimaginable destruction?
To find out, we must take a journey not only through the shocking record of current climate change, but also into the amazing history of the world’s weather.
At this point, almost any violent change in climate will batter our civilization because it is so enormous and makes such a massive demand on the environment. Even the unthinkable could happen: our civilization could fall.
Earth’s climate works like a rubber band being stretched and suddenly released. For years, eons even, the stresses slowly build as the chemistry of the air changes. And then, in a matter of a few years or even a few months, there is a shift so vast that we can scarcely begin to imagine it.
Earth, it seems, has a powerful regulatory mechanism built into its climate. Heat increases to a certain point, and then the whole system breaks down. Cold air comes roaring down from the north, flooding the previously overheated Northern Hemisphere.
Suddenly, a new era of cold weather begins. We know, generally, how this happens. But not even science has as yet faced the fact that this change must be accompanied by an absolutely massive release of energy, as earth’s climate strives to reorganize itself. In other words, this great shift of climate is almost certainly accompanied by a great storm or series of storms, a weather upheaval outside of contemporary human experience. We believe that it has happened before, and that traces of what we are calling the superstorm exist in the fossil record. We believe that it comes on suddenly and that it is so destructive that it has the potential to end our civilization.
These are sensational claims, but we can prove that nature pulls the trigger suddenly and, therefore, that the rebalancing of the climate that follows must also be very sudden and involve titanic energies. This suggests that our present situation may be extremely perilous.
Over the past three million years the earth has been locked in an unusually harsh climate system. During this period, our climate has flipped from warm to cold conditions and back again many times. Again and again, earth has warmed up, getting hotter and hotter until — very suddenly — the glaciers have come back and entombed a quarter of the planet in ice for upwards of a hundred thousand years. Sometimes, the cooling event has not resulted in a long-term buildup of ice. Sometimes, as happened around 8,000 B.C., sudden cooling has not led to the return of the ice, but has only interrupted the warming process for a short time.
All of the factors that have caused sudden climate change in the past are lining up right now. This change, which we will show is part of a vast natural cycle, has been sped up this time by human activity. When the change comes, it is likely to be much more violent than ever before, and we will offer evidence from recent and unexpected climatological data that indicates why this would be so.
We will look at the last great upheaval through the eyes of the people who were living then. Examining the fossil record, we will identify the season in which it took place. And we will see why that particular event did not result in a new ice age and learn exactly how to tell if the changes the next one brings will cause one or not.
What will this climate change be like for you and your family? This depends on where you live. The farther north your home, the more likely you will have to move quickly south.
When the warm ocean currents that now flow north cease to do so, our whole climate will change. It is our contention that the energy necessary for the superstorm will be created at that time.
Say you live in Dallas or Madrid or Rome. Your first indication that the superstorm is building might be weather reports to the effect that a series of cold fronts are moving down from the Arctic, one after another. This could happen at any time of the year. You would hear that more northern places — Toronto, Stockholm, Beijing — were receiving extremely heavy weather — extraordinary rain in the summer, unprecedented blizzards in the winter. This would continue for a week or more, always building in intensity. Across the northern plains of the world — the American High Plains, the central Asian steppe — wind gusts of upwards of one hundred miles an hour would start to be recorded. We believe that it would get worse, and we will make our case over the course of this book.
Places like Edmonton and Semipalatinsk, then Minneapolis and Moscow, would cease to communicate with the outside world. Alaska and northern Siberia would have gone silent before.
From Europe to Asia to America, whole populations would be desperately attempting to move south. Because the same changes that affected currents in the North Atlantic would alter the movement of currents in the Southern Hemisphere, Australia and New Zealand would also be affected. There, summer would have turned to winter, or normal winter would have become extremely cold. Heavy seas would devastate the southern coasts of the continent. Typhoons, blowing up suddenly, would smash into the Philippines, Japan, and the Pacific islands.
The farther north you were, the more extreme conditions would be. Day after day, the storms would continue, becoming more complex and organized, larger, taking on forms never observed before.
All over the Northern Hemisphere, massive population movements would be taking place. There would be mass disorganization, and many, many people would be overrun by the superstorm.
After the superstorm was over, it would gradually become clear that a catastrophe of breathtaking proportions had occurred. The only reports from Europe would be coming from Portugal, southern Italy, and southern Spain. The entire American Midwest would be under a sheet of ice, one that would extend across Siberia and northern Europe as well. This ice would reflect vast amounts of sunlight and heat back into space.
If the storm — as the last one appears to have done — hit in summer, the ice would probably melt. It is possible that this happened the last time and, as we shall see, was recorded in myth all over the world.
If the storm took place in the fall or winter, then the ice could conceivably compress so much in the next few months and reflect back so much heat and light that the next summer simply would not be warm enough to melt it. The winter that followed would be the coldest in history.
The ultimate and ironic effect of global warming would have become clear to the survivors: a new ice age would have begun.
Copyright © 2000 by Art Bell and Whitley Strieber
NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC ARTICLE:
DAY AFTER TOMORROW MOVIE: COULD ICE AGE HAPPEN OVERNIGHT?
Stefan Lovgren in Los Angeles for National Geographic News
May 18, 2004
Snow falls in New Delhi. Tornadoes rip through Hollywood landmarks. Grapefruit- size hail pounds Tokyo. Manhattan is buried under hundreds of feet of snow. The ice age is here.
It may just be a movie. But to environmentalists, there is more than a kernel of truth in the catastrophic scenarios depicted in the upcoming summer flick The Day After Tomorrow. Some activists hope the special effects blockbuster, in which global warming leads to a new ice age, will spark debate about environmental damage.
“Climate change is already happening now, not the day after tomorrow,” said Janet Sawin, director of the energy and climate program at the Worldwatch Institution in Washington, D.C. “I’m hoping more people will become more aware of this problem [as a result of the movie] and start thinking about what we can do to address it.”
The film’s director, German-born Roland Emmerich—the man behind such popcorn fare as Independence Day and Godzilla—welcomes the debate.
“It is a movie that should not just entertain but also make people think,” Emmerich said in a telephone interview. “It is not just science fiction but something that is very real.”
Global Superstorm
In the movie, which opens May 28, climatologist Jack Hall (played by Dennis Quaid) warns that global warming could trigger an abrupt shift in the planet’s climate. His fears are confirmed when the melting of the polar ice caps overnight pours huge amounts of fresh water into the oceans. The influx of fresh water shuts down the Gulf Stream, the ocean current that stabilizes the Northern Hemisphere’s climate system. That unleashes a superstorm that brings with it a new ice age.
Emmerich, whose first movie in Germany was about a weather experiment gone awry, got the idea for The Day After Tomorrow from the book The Coming Global Superstorm, written by paranormal experts Art Bell and Whitley Strieber. As the title suggests, the book warns of a doomsday scenario similar to the one in Emmerich’s movie.
“It read like science fiction … and I quickly realized it would make for a great movie,” Emmerich said. “I began researching … and found the underlying science pretty real.”
There is little doubt that global warming is real. In the last century the average temperature has climbed about 0.6 degrees Celsius (about 1 degree Fahrenheit) around the world. Most scientists say the higher temperatures are a result of an atmospheric increase in carbon dioxide, caused by the burning of fossil fuels such as coal and petroleum.
Sea levels have risen 4 to 8 inches (10 to 20 centimeters) because of the expansion of warmer waters. A study in the science journal Nature this year predicted that climate change could drive more than a million species toward extinction by the year 2050. Many scientists also warn of a link between global warming and extreme weather events, like El Niño.
Too Extreme
There is some evidence that the shutting down of the Gulf Stream has happened in the distant past, leading to the dramatic cooling of temperature over a few decades in some parts of the world. But most scientists agree that the abrupt climate change depicted in the movie could not happen.
“The Earth’s climate is never going to flip in a matter of days the way it does in the movie,” Worldwatch’s Sawin said.
She worries that the catastrophic events in the film may be so extreme that audience members may not take the climate-change issue seriously.
“There is some concern that what the movie shows is so extreme that people will say, Oh, that could never happen, so I’m not going to worry about it,” she said. “That blows a very serious issue out of proportion and could cause people who are skeptical to become even more skeptical.”
Emmerich dismisses such worries. “People are smart enough to know this is a movie,” he said, “and in a movie everything is more extreme.”
No Science Fiction
Environmentalists see the movie as an opportunity to educate and hope the film will spark public concerns about climate change. The activist group MoveOn.org is recruiting volunteers to hand out flyers at theaters when the movie is released. The flyers read: “Global warming isn’t just a movie. It’s your future.”
Some observers speculate that the movie’s distributor, 20th Century Fox, is trying to distance itself from what could be construed as a political message in the film. Having a big action movie labeled a serious “issue” film could have a negative impact on its box office prospects, observers argue.
But Emmerich believes entertainment and education can mix.
“Like many other people, I have this feeling that we’re slowly but surely destroying our planet,” he said. “I came [to this issue] because of science fiction, and then I realized it wasn’t at all science fiction but something that is very real.”
MORE LINKS:
The Coming Global Superstorm on Amazon.com
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