Here we go again.
In the 2004 film The Day After Tomorrow, humanity is plunged into a nightmarish international storm that sends the planet into a new ice age.
And although the blockbuster was consigned to the realms of sci-fi, the science behind the frightening scenario is true.
In a matter of years, melting glaciers could shut down the Gulf Stream – the system of currents that brings warmth to the northern hemisphere, experts say.
Without this additional heat source, average temperatures could drop by several degrees in North America, parts of Asia and Europe, and people would see ‘severe and cascading consequences around the world’.
Scientists warn that an abrupt shutdown of Atlantic Ocean currents is looking more likely than ever, as computer simulations…
Yeah, stopped reading right there. Computer simulations = made up bollocks.
This scare is a recycled one, it was predicted years ago and didn’t happen so they think that if they dust it off and plug it again they might get lucky this time.
At its peak, permanent ice cover was about 25% of global land area during the Last Glacial Maximum (the fifth or sixth one in the planet’s history), including all of Greenland and Scandinavia, and almost all of Canada and the British Isles. Today it is a little under 11%. During the retreat of the ice sheets over the last 20,000 years, sea levels rose about 120m, at times at more than ten times the current rate, submerging large land areas such as Doggerland which connected the British Isles to mainland Europe, and Sundaland which connected Sumatra, Java and Borneo to mainland Asia.
Ice in the polar regions has not been the norm during the Earth’s history. During times when ice was absent, unsurprisingly, temperatures were warmer not colder. During the Cretaceous Thermal Maximum when there were forests at both poles, temperatures were up to 14C higher than today.
I may be wrong but didn’t the film actually include a computer simulation of three low-pressure areas spaced around the Arctic? They probably didn’t need to do any new modelling for this scare story, just re-used whatever the film director did to generate that graphic. I mean, it’s a computer simulation …
So then this will offset the Global Boiling the UN and WEF (and EU, too, probably) have been banging on about for the last few years, and we’ll continue to have the One Perfect Temperature Climate whatsit thingie, right? Crisis averted.
What – no? But I thought they said Carbon is the only thing controlling the temperature, and we’ll still have all that Evil CO2 in the atmosphere, so the Greenhouse Effect is still going to be on blast, right? So even if the currents stop, we’ve got the Greenhouse Effect keeping us warm.
Also DocBud is correct – the Arctic used to have a climate like the US state of North Carolina, not exactly frozen tundra. But what are facts when there’s a good scare scam to run.
Idiots, and their little troll Greta, too.