Director Roland Emmerich, whose sci-fi films include Independence Day and Godzilla, is forsaking aliens and giant lizards for a whole new way of humbling New York: a catastrophically quick shift in the weather. Although abrupt climate change wouldn't cause the kind of mayhem seen in The Day After Tomorrow, due in theaters May 28, it's enough of a threat that the Pentagon commissioned a study on likely outcomes (summary: very bad news). Wired asked Jeff Severinghaus of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography - who, like Dennis Quaid's movie character, studies polar ice to understand climatic trends - to sort fact from fiction.
WIRED: The Day After Tomorrow makes abrupt climate change look devastating. How bad could it be?
SEVERINGHAUS: The traditional view is that climate changes gradually, and economists tell us that doesn't cost very much - we can adapt. Abrupt climate change alters that whole picture. If the climate changes in one year or three years, you're going to have war, refugees, and social instability.
In the movie, things happen even faster. Is that realistic?
The available evidence shows 23 such events in the past 100,000 years. The most recent of them happened 8,200 years ago and involved abrupt cooling, probably in less than five years, certainly less than 10. It became 5 degrees centigrade cooler in Greenland. Lakes dried up in West Africa; the North Atlantic became windier and stormier; there was a drop in rainfall in Venezuela and probably a monsoon failure. There were effects all over the Northern Hemisphere.
What brings on such sudden shifts?
They're characteristic of how climate changes. The climate is more like a light switch than a dial. You turn a dial, you get a gradual increase. With a light switch, if you push on it a little bit, nothing happens. A little bit more and nothing happens. A little bit more and all of a sudden the light goes on. By adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, we're increasing the likelihood of one of these abrupt events.
In the film, New York ends up frozen. How likely is that?
Highly unlikely. In the past, eastern North America cooled at the same time as Europe. But conditions are quite different today; carbon dioxide levels are much higher, and that will counteract some of the cooling. Britain and Europe may be in for low temperatures, but the rest of the world will almost certainly continue to warm.
The scientist played by Ian Holm spots the shift just as it's starting. In real life, how much warning will we get?
Probably not a lot. The system is so nonlinear, so sensitive - there's no credible model that shows where that threshold is. We'll have a couple of years of bad drought, and people will measure the ocean currents and they'll see something. So we'll probably be able to diagnose it after a year or two. But it's really, really unlikely that we'll be able to predict it.
- Oliver Morton
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