June 1, 2004
THE SCIENCE BEHIND 'THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW'
I took some time out of an otherwise hectic holiday weekend to catch the disaster flick, The Day After Tomorrow, which depicts a world where global warming triggers an abrupt climate change, resulting in a three-pronged global superstorm that unleashes tornados in downtown Los Angeles, softball-size hail in Tokyo, and unimaginable tsunamis and blizzards in and around New York City. The movie's special effects are so convincing that they leave one to wonder, could this really happen... could global warming really cause such incredible disasters?
I recently finished working on a book about global warming (not writing it, mind you... just managing its authorship). So, while global warming could push the Earth's climate past a threshold where a sudden, irreversible climate shift just might occur, almost all of what we see in this movie is total fiction.
Take for instance the 300-foot high storm surge whipped up by the intense winds of the superstorm which smashes through Manhattan. There's a little problem here--the winds needed to create a storm surge of this magnitude are probably at least twice the speed of sound (1,200 mph), yet there is little apparent wind on the ocean's surface as the waves smashes ashore, and none of NYC's skyscrapers topple in the face of such powerful winds.
Also, the movieís storm sucks vast quantities of frigid upper atmospheric air down to the surface, flash freezing any living thing caught outside. However, any graduate of an AP high school physics course could tell you that the air would warm on its descent in response to the requirements of the Ideal Gas Law, and would never be able to flash freeze anything. One scientist in the movie does remember his high school physics and asks, "But wouldn't the air warm as it descends?" But the senior scientist replies, "No, it's moving too fast!" Sorry, but the Ideal Gas Law applies no matter how fast the air is moving.
Finally, the megastorm in the movie is shown in many scenes rotating clockwise, while in other scenes itís shown moving counter-clockwise. According to everything Iíve ever seen, storm systems in the Northern Hemisphere rotate counter-clockwise, thanks to one of the laws of physics on a rotating planet known as the Coriolis force.
If you need further evidence that the movie is nonsensically skewed, consider the book which inspired Roland Emmerich to write and direct The Day After Tomorrow, The Coming Global Superstorm, by Whitley Streiber and Art Bell. Streiber is a UFO expert and author of the best-selling 1985 book Communion, a non-fiction account of his own abduction by extra-terrestrials, while Bell hosts a nationally syndicated all-night radio show called Coast to Coast AM, which specializes in UFOs and the supernatural. Need I say more?
As far as Global Warming in concerned, what is more likely than anything else to happen is this. Increased precipitation and glacial melt water from the effects of global warming could flood the north Atlantic with enough fresh water to slow down the Gulf Stream ocean current. Without the Gulf Stream pumping warm tropical water to the Atlantic, average temperatures would cool in Europe and North America by around 5 degrees in just a few years--not enough, mind you, to trigger a full-fledged ice age like the one in the movie, but enough cooling to bring snows in June and frosts in July and August to New England and northern Europe, such as occurred in the famed "year without a summer" in 1816.
Posted by Mikal at June 1, 2004 5:07 AM
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If only those poor farmers had a weather forecaster that year. At least they could have planned and perhaps saved some livestock and crops. These days, some of our weathermen & weaterwomen go a bit overboard broadcasting the weather. "Oh, my gosh, get ready for the storm of the year!" Right, like I wasn't expecting it to snow in--JANUARY! While it's nice to know what the weather will be like a day or week from now, some of these news and weather channels are all about the hype. But, I'm sure 19th century farmers would have appreciated knowing what was to come.
This is very interesting, I saw the movie as well over the weekend. I was certainly entertained for the duration, but common sense prevailed and I did some post-movie research to validate my suspicion that much of the movie was either bending and/or ignoring the laws of science. Was it over the top exaggeration for entertainment purposes? Absolutely. Does this render an important message in the movie useless? Maybe, maybe not depending on who you are. For me, I got the message.
Several articles have been published in the last year that discuss the effects of global warming on the forces that impact weather. No we will not sink into a new Ice Age in 2 months as the movie indicates, but there is definite evidence that supports an increase in the frequency and extremity of various weather phenomena as global warming worsens. The study tracked the North American continent and showed a significant increase in number of destructive, violent tornadoes, heat and cold extremes and more violent and frequent tropical storms and hurricanes over the last 2 years.
Beyond the NA continent, JAMA did an exhaustive study that cited global warming as the cause of the heat-related deaths that numbered in the thousands in Europe (hardest hit France and Italy) last year, but most Americans were blissfully unaware that the death toll had hit such a high number. The effects of global warming on ocean currents and atmospheric activity has been proven to manifest itself in the way of violent weather extremes. So I very much enjoyed the movie from a cinematic, action-packed standpoint, but I got my facts elsewhere. What was not lost on me in the grandiosity of the movie is the message that we are headed in a dangerous direction that will have long-term negative effects on the Earth and we need to do something about it before it is too late. Of course, that all depends on who you are.
Michael Moore points out in Stupid White Men that there is a right-wing propaganda engine designed solely to prove that global warming not only does not harm the Earth, but actually does not even exist (we must all be crazy!) so that the oil and manufacturing companies that fill the pockets of the rich can continue to dump crap into our environment.
P.S. I will definitely pick up that book on global warming, Mikal. I see that it published in April 2004; nice timing with the movie :-)
Without SUVs and "Big Oil" to blame for the "year without a summer", I wonder what they blamed it on. Perhaps the natural, cyclical and unpredictable weather patterns of our planet - what a concept!
Hundreds of meterologists using radar, computer models and data from space can't get tomorrow's temperature right, but we're supposed to believe that the earth is warming at such an alarming rate that we must change entire business models - that sounds logical.
Great Blog.
But hopefully we all expected this movie to be nothing more than special effects and t-shirts.
:)
You mean it isn't true? So, should I take back all the cold weather gear I bought on sale at Galyans?
In response to the individual that points out that Big Oil and SUV's were obviously not to blame for the "Year Without a Summer" in 1816, no one is saying there will never again be unpredictable freak of naturish and *isolated* weather phenomena where the cause will never be known, that event was cited as an analogous end result of global warming, not something caused by global warming. The point is there is scientific evidence that supports traceable *patterns* of severe and more frequent damaging weather patterns, caused by global warming that certainly did not exist in 1816. The point is generally America supports a culture of overconsumption across the board when it comes to most everything, food, money, natural resources, etc. and we need to work to adjust this pattern before it causes larger issues.
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