When Art Bell and I published "Superstorm" in 1999, we were
criticized as being sensationalists who brought
environmentalism a bad name, and hurt the movement. In 2004,
when "the Day After Tomorrow", the film inspired by our
book, was released, we received humiliating press treatment,
and the film was generally condemned, once again, as being
too sensationalistic.
Throughout this whole process, I continued to make the
argument that it was NOT sensationalistic at all, but rather
that it accurately reflected a type of climate change event
that has been well documented. Now, however, two major new
pieces of information have emerged that make me repeat my
warning: sudden climate change is, indeed, VERY sudden, and
it is staring us right in the face right now.
The first new piece of data has just been announced by a
group of German scientists studying annual sediment layers
at a lake in Northern Germany have discovered that a period
of sudden cooling 13,000 years ago started in less than a
single year and lasted for 2,000 years.
This means, basically, that an extraordinary weather
upheaval took place over a SINGLE SEASON, which resulted in
the whole of northern Europe and much of North America
becoming radically colder for thousands of years.
If this happens again, western civilization will experience
the worst disaster in its history, even worse than the
climate upheaval 5,200 years ago that wrecked Egypt's Old
Kingdom and caused the ruin of the Mediterranean world as it
existed then. That disaster, which involved the sudden
creation of glaciers in places as disparate as Switzerland
and Peru, has, as yet, an unknown cause, but it was just as
swift as the event 13,000 years ago. 5,200 years ago, an ice
storm in Peru quick froze leafy plants--probably in a matter
of minutes--that are found at the bottom of glaciers that
exist to this day. In Switzerland, an ice storm overtook and
buried Oetzi, the ice man who was found in 1991 in the
Schnalstal glacier in the Ötztal Alps. When the storm
overtook Oetzi, he was running through an alpine meadow. The
glacier that resulted has only recently begun to melt.
The event that took place 13,000 years ago was even more
dramatic and long-lasting. It is called by scientists the
Younger Dryas, and previously it was believed that it
emerged over a period of about ten years.
Now, however, the work of the GFZ (GeoForschungs Zentrum)
German Research Centre for Geosciences at Potsdam, has shown
that the change took place with horrific suddenness.
Essentially, what happened was that temperatures plummeted,
probably over a matter of a few months, and the whole of
northern Europe was plunged into a deep freeze that, if it
happened now, would destroy mankind's most advanced countries.
The United States would survive in a greatly diminished
form, but the whole of northern Europe and the United
Kingdom would cease, for example, to have a growing season
long enough to produce crops. At the same time, their fuel
demands would increase astronomically, and their industrial
and social infrastructures would collapse.
The world would be plunged into a deep and abiding
depression, would suffer vast population decline, and
civilization as we know it now would simply unravel.
How likely is all of this to happen? Unfortunately, it is
quite likely.
The reason is that conditions are emerging right now that
mirror those that existed immediately prior to the Younger
Dryas. Specifically, it will be announced shortly that there
is massive outgassing of methane taking place in the arctic,
precisely as it did just before the Younger Dryas. This
outgassing is due to phenomenal arctic melt, and it is being
accompanied by a flood of fresh water into the northern
oceans, exactly the condition that caused the Gulf Stream to
collapse immediately prior to the Younger Dryas.
Let's take a closer look at just what happened in our world
between 15,000 and 13,000 years ago. 15,000 years ago, the
Pleistocene ended with extraordinary drama when the great
glaciers of that age suddenly collapsed. There has recently
been evidence offered that this was caused by an impactor
that struck the ice sheet where the Great Lakes are now,
instantanously vaporizing an area of ice the size of Rhode
Island that a mile deep, and causing a flood that left a mat
of algae across the entire North American continent that is
now known as the 'black mat' by archaeologists. The event
depopulated North America and caused the extinction of
thousands of species, including the great Wooly Mammoth that
ranged the area in huge numbers at the time.
Flooding followed worldwide, and is doubtless the source of
the flood myths that persist in most human cultures to this day.
After this, there was very rapid and dramatic warming of the
planet. This happened because the huge ice sheets were gone,
and with them, their white surfaces that had reflected so
much of the sun's heat back into space.
By 14,000 years ago, conditions on earth were strikingly
similar to what we see today, with rapidly rising carbon
dioxide content in the atmosphere and warmer and warmer
temperatures. Arctic melt then took place, and with it the
release of massive amounts of methane that had been trapped
in the permafrost.
By 13,000 years ago, temperatures were spiking dramatically
due to the extreme heat retention of the methane, which is a
much more powerful global warming gas than carbon dioxide.
Ocean currents, which must have been in decline for years,
must have stopped abruptly, with the result that the
catastrophic plunge in temperatures that the German
scientists have discovered, then took place.
This is virtually certain, at this point, to happen again.
But when we do not know. Soon, though, without question.
Prior to the shift to lower temperatures will come a period
of heating unprecedented in human history. As the methane
builds up in the atmosphere, surface temperatures will rise
far beyond the most dire predictions. Land areas that are
now at the edge of viability will become unviable as summer
temperatures routinely reach into the 120s across southern
India, southeast Asia, parts of Central Africa and the
United States.
At some point, the outgassing of methane will expend itself
and temperatures will stabilize, but at a much higher level
than we are used to now. Due to warming polar waters,
oceanic circulation, and with it, the jet streams, will
fail, and the world will experience a period of years with
very little air circulation and very high temperatures. Most
cities without stringent air pollution standards will fail
as communities. Places like Beijing, Tehran, Lima, Mexico
City and many others will literally suffocate.
The collapse of farming during and before this period will
bring on general food shortages and mass starvation in many
areas of the world.
At some point, the outgassing of methane will end as
abruptly as it began, and the amount of this short-lived gas
in the atmosphere will plummet. (And, judging from what the
world experienced at the beginning of the Younger Dryas,
this happens very suddenly.) Suddenly, the arctic will
become cold again. Without ocean currents to moderate the
effects of the change, cold air will surge southward, and
there will come a season of fantastic upheaval, as a world
already shattered by extreme warming, will be shattered
again by ferocious storms and extreme cooling.
When will all of this happen? Unfortunately, we don't have
enough information to be certain, but we will see the
beginning of the process when--and if--the solar maximum
develops in
2011 and 2012. How fast it will evolve from there is
anybody's guess. But the strength of the next solar max is
also anybody's guess, and it is now looking as if it could
be extraordinarily weak. If so, we might get a reprieve.
If not, is there anything we can do to reduce the effects of
the heating event, and prevent the inevitable sudden plunge
into devastating cold? Probably
not at this point. If we had begun an aggressive drive
against global warming back in the seventies and eighties,
we might have had some chance of managing the situation. But
instead we chose to debate the matter, and therefore nature
will now take its course. Unless some sort of a miracle
happens, we are going to see this unfold in the lifetimes of
most of us.
Meanwhile, clever politicians and their corporate masters
keep the false debate alive, with the result that there
won't even be any planning for the catastrophe, at least not
in the United States. Fortunately, Europe is not under the
control of powerful companies who look not to the future,
but to their profitability three months from now for their
policy positions. There is real concern among many European
governments about the problem, but the larger question
remains: can this be planned for?
The only way to interrupt the process would be to engage in
a massive and worldwide reduction in CO2 emissions, in the
hope of returning effective freeze to the arctic and
interrupting the outgassing of methane. But this will never
happen, not with the United States unwilling to make the
necessary sacrifices and China and Russia too disorganized
to do so effectively even if the did possess the political will.
The first clear sign of the coming disaster will be a
summer, possibly as early as the summer of 2011 or 2012,
that will be
marked by phenomenal heat waves across much of the northern
hemisphere. There will be generalized death in many areas,
primarily in the third world where people will not have
sufficient access to water and shelter. This will be due to
the fact that the human body cannot handle heat much
above 120 f. for very long, and even relatively small
amounts of movement at such temperatures can quickly be
fatal, or even, in the case of the very young and the very
old, simply being in heat like that for more than a few hours.
Is there anything to be done to prepare for this? On a
personal basis, people who live in areas near substantial
oceanic flow will experience the least amount of overheating
until the currents actually stop, so possibly the west coast
of the Americas are more survivable, say, than the high
desert areas.
But, in general, there is little that can be done. We are
going to experience this, as matters now stand. But the
human species has a powerful survival urge. Not everybody
agrees with the short-sighted, the greedy and the stupid,
and there is always a possibility that, even if no emergency
effort is made to correct the situation now, some
intelligent planning will take place in the future.
There is, however, a wildcard in all this, which is the sun
itself. August, 2008, saw the
smallest
amount of sunspot activity recorded in a hundred years, and
lower amounts of solar activity are strongly associated with
global cooling. So, maybe the sun will save us. Or maybe it
was somebody
else who is trying to give us a little more time to come to
our senses.
