[Subjectivist]

The movie, TDAT, wasn't totally unscientific, it's conclusions were a science fiction stretch.

Freezing hurricanes drawing super chilled air down from the Stratosphere was scientific? Instant ice age that froze the sea off the coast of New York was scientific?

Please, the movie was a lot of fun but any science in it was all fictional not fact.

[Newfie]

I wonder that I'd the Gulf Stream slows then hurricanes will have more of a tendency to move Westward, and make landfall on the US East coast more often?

[Timo]

I wonder that I'd the Gulf Stream slows then hurricanes will have more of a tendency to move Westward, and make landfall on the US East coast more often?

The US has seen fewer hurricanes than normal over the past couple of years. Cause and effect? No clue.

Also, no human alive today under the age of 30 has witnessed a year of below average global temperatures.

[Newfie]

I sure as hell just witnessed a year of below average LOCAL temperatures!

Buuurrrrr! Bludy Hell!

[Outcast_Searcher]

You could sell me on the mini ice age idea. Each of our last four winters has been colder than the previous one. This February was the coldest on record. Open fields are still snow covered even though we had less snow than normal this winter. Daily temperatures continue to average well below normal. Yesterday started off at -17 C and I had to dress the way I would in January for the bike ride to work. I have no memory of having to dress so warmly at the end of March in any previous year. I am really wondering if next winter is going to be even colder than this one was.

Really? Still? We're citing SHORT TERM WEATHER as climate change evidence? No, it doesn't work like that, as the scientists keep telling us, over and over.

Try actually looking at the Washington Post article cited in posts above.

Look at the map given for the global temperature deviation from average Dec. 15 to Mar. 15. The map is HEAVILY biased toward the warm side for the planet, and the far above normal AND record warm areas are really big, reflecting the overall trend.

And yes, there's a little blue area in the eastern US and Canada reflecting bitterly cold temps. in Feb and early March (after a lot of really mild winter weather in December and January, by the way) -- but it's just a blip in a big area of warmth.

Also, in the Post article, scientists are saying (I paraphrase) that this does NOT mean short term catastrophe or anything remotely like "The Day After", but it is a worrisome sign. One of the problems I have with this site is that people tend to wildly exaggerate ANY news and focus on trying to extrapolate the wildest outcome in the SHORT term, no matter how unlikely that is.

No wonder regular folks won't pay attention to the long term consequences of BAU growth and consumption -- the wild eyed finger pointers and shouters are so often proven wrong that they dismiss the entire serious conversation.

[PrestonSturges]

I sure as hell just witnessed a year of below average LOCAL temperatures!

Buuurrrrr! Bludy Hell!

Almost the only cold spot

[PrestonSturges]

We rely on the Gulf Stream to push low pressure systems north and out to sea. What would it be like if a hurricane just squatted in one spot for a week?

[yellowcanoe]

You could sell me on the mini ice age idea. Each of our last four winters has been colder than the previous one. This February was the coldest on record. Open fields are still snow covered even though we had less snow than normal this winter. Daily temperatures continue to average well below normal. Yesterday started off at -17 C and I had to dress the way I would in January for the bike ride to work. I have no memory of having to dress so warmly at the end of March in any previous year. I am really wondering if next winter is going to be even colder than this one was.

Really? Still? We're citing SHORT TERM WEATHER as climate change evidence? No, it doesn't work like that, as the scientists keep telling us, over and over.

Try actually looking at the Washington Post article cited in posts above.

Look at the map given for the global temperature deviation from average Dec. 15 to Mar. 15. The map is HEAVILY biased toward the warm side for the planet, and the far above normal AND record warm areas are really big, reflecting the overall trend.

And yes, there's a little blue area in the eastern US and Canada reflecting bitterly cold temps. in Feb and early March (after a lot of really mild winter weather in December and January, by the way) -- but it's just a blip in a big area of warmth.

Also, in the Post article, scientists are saying (I paraphrase) that this does NOT mean short term catastrophe or anything remotely like "The Day After", but it is a worrisome sign. One of the problems I have with this site is that people tend to wildly exaggerate ANY news and focus on trying to extrapolate the wildest outcome in the SHORT term, no matter how unlikely that is.

No wonder regular folks won't pay attention to the long term consequences of BAU growth and consumption -- the wild eyed finger pointers and shouters are so often proven wrong that they dismiss the entire serious conversation.

Mini Ice Age was definitely an exaggeration on my part. I do believe though that the conditions we have been seeing in Eastern Canada and the NE US are indicative of a shift in the climate and that we can expect to see more cold winters in the future. The science does suggest that one of the effects of global warming is colder winters in this part of the Northern Hemisphere. It is just our bad luck to be living in the only populated area of the Northern Hemisphere that is experiencing colder than normal weather while just about everywhere else is receiving unusually warm weather. Incidentally, we're always going to get more cold weather here in Eastern Ontario than the states to the south of us because the cold weather doesn't always push much further south. We did have unusually warm weather in December but that came to an abrupt end at the end of December.

[vox_mundi]

We rely on the Gulf Stream to push low pressure systems north and out to sea. What would it be like if a hurricane just squatted in one spot for a week?

Jet Streams, Coriolis Effect and Hadley Cell Circulation are more likely than the Gulf Stream to move a low pressure system north.

What the the Gulf Stream will do is supply the heat engine to drive a Cat 1 into a Cat 5. What happens if the Stream stops going north and piles up next to New York before heading east to Spain?

If In the late fall the 26 degree isotherm will be closer to NY, NJ shore. This is the minimum temp for hurricane intensification. Which means the Gulf Stream could shepherd a Cat 5 all the way up the East Coast - every year.



Moderately good news for Great Britain - Not so much for the Mediterranean.


http://phys.org/news/2014-01-atlantic-c ... -news.html

[Newfie]

I don't know, depends upon how much you like the East coast cities.

Sometimes ha just need a good flush, to clean the system.

They are all doomed in the long run anyway, due seal level rise.

[Timo]

You could sell me on the mini ice age idea. Each of our last four winters has been colder than the previous one. This February was the coldest on record. Open fields are still snow covered even though we had less snow than normal this winter. Daily temperatures continue to average well below normal. Yesterday started off at -17 C and I had to dress the way I would in January for the bike ride to work. I have no memory of having to dress so warmly at the end of March in any previous year. I am really wondering if next winter is going to be even colder than this one was.

Really? Still? We're citing SHORT TERM WEATHER as climate change evidence? No, it doesn't work like that, as the scientists keep telling us, over and over.

Try actually looking at the Washington Post article cited in posts above.

Look at the map given for the global temperature deviation from average Dec. 15 to Mar. 15. The map is HEAVILY biased toward the warm side for the planet, and the far above normal AND record warm areas are really big, reflecting the overall trend.

And yes, there's a little blue area in the eastern US and Canada reflecting bitterly cold temps. in Feb and early March (after a lot of really mild winter weather in December and January, by the way) -- but it's just a blip in a big area of warmth.

Also, in the Post article, scientists are saying (I paraphrase) that this does NOT mean short term catastrophe or anything remotely like "The Day After", but it is a worrisome sign. One of the problems I have with this site is that people tend to wildly exaggerate ANY news and focus on trying to extrapolate the wildest outcome in the SHORT term, no matter how unlikely that is.

No wonder regular folks won't pay attention to the long term consequences of BAU growth and consumption -- the wild eyed finger pointers and shouters are so often proven wrong that they dismiss the entire serious conversation.

Relax, OS. All of science is no more than pesonal observation. Any red-state politician can tell you that. A snowball in March is all the proof you need to disprove global warming. Why waste tax dollars to disprove the science of personal observation?

[vox_mundi]

I don't know, depends upon how much you like the East coast cities.

Sometimes ha just need a good flush, to clean the system.

They are all doomed in the long run anyway, due seal level rise.

Not disagreeing, but I can't afford to move and I'm thinkin' my roof will be going bye-bye if the breeze ever picks-up over 120 mph. The house is over a hundred years old and it's not a Ferrari.

Actually less concerned about that and more concerned about the fruit trees on the property. I don't have the time (left) to grow another orchard.

[Pops]

too bad there isn't bigger size fonts for subject...

Anyway, I took that temperature anomaly chart and jiggered it up some in photoshop so that it showed an anomaly over/under .5º from average instead of any variation at all from average. seems a little more useful.

[Lore]

The movie, TDAT, wasn't totally unscientific, it's conclusions were a science fiction stretch.

Freezing hurricanes drawing super chilled air down from the Stratosphere was scientific? Instant ice age that froze the sea off the coast of New York was scientific?

Please, the movie was a lot of fun but any science in it was all fictional not fact.

Stefan Rahmstorf who wrote the study we're talking about happens to be a fan of TDAT. Here is his take. Lots of fiction based on some facts.

THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW - some comments on the movie

The film shows a disastrous and abrupt climate change. Due to man-made global warming, first the Larsen B ice shelf breaks up (this did happen in the real world, see animation of satellite images - allegedly only after the authors had written it into the film). This event is used to introduce the main paleo-climatologist character, Jack Hall, who is drilling out there and narrowly escapes.

Later, in the north, meltwater inflow brings the North Atlantic Current to a halt, causing severe cooling. This happens in a matter of days. A super-storm is triggered by the oceanic shutdown. This covers much of the northern hemisphere in a few giant cyclones. It causes the flooding of Manhattan, huge hailstones in Tokyo, tornados in LA, and several days of severe snow storm covering the entire northern continents. In the eye of these super-cyclones extremely cold air is sucked down from the upper troposphere to the surface and shock-freezes the Manhattan sky-scrapers. When the super-storm clears after some days, most of the northern hemisphere is snow-covered and doomed to a new ice age due to the well-known snow-albedo feedback (i.e., the snow reflects so much sunlight that the climate stays cold).

Obviously it is easy to dismiss much of this scenario as unrealistic and exaggerated. It is – and viewers will be in no doubt that they are watching a fictional disaster movie and not a documentary. As an example: the flooding of Manhattan is described as a wind-driven surge, although this kind of massive wave (called a tsunami) could only be caused by an undersea earthquake or landslide or a meteorite hit - not by a storm or a change in the North Atlantic Current. And the shock-frosting in the eye of the storm defies the laws of thermodynamics.

The film makers are quite up-front about the fact that it's not a scientifically realistic scenario. The publicity material provided by the film company Fox says that when scientists talk about abrupt climate change they mean five or ten years, but that for dramatic reasons everything was compressed to a couple of weeks. In an interview, director Roland Emmerich also says that he is well aware that things could not happen in such a short space of time and that he knows the difference between weather and climate, but that they had to construct their own private theory to squeeze the theme into a 2-hour blockbuster movie format. To portray the dramatic effects of a major climatic disaster within a short time span, they simply took known weather extremes – tornados, storm surges, cyclones, hail storms and blizzards – and amplified those.

On the other hand, given the rules and constraints of the genre, it is remarkable to what extent the film-makers have tried to include some realistic background. Early in the film a UN climate conference in Delhi is shown where Jack Hall gives a talk about the possible risk of a shut-down of the North Atlantic Current. I gave a very similar talk at such a UN conference in Buenos Aires in 1998 - I even showed the same diagram. In the film talk, Hall states that a shutdown might occur in a hundred years, or a thousand, or not at all. Many real climatologists have said the same thing. In this way, what climatologists think is presented in a realistic way in the film, and it is very clear that the rapid drama that later unfolds is counter to what any climatologist expected - it's where the fiction starts.

The politics of climate change is also presented well. It is chillingly realistic how the head of the US delegation (the vice president in the film) responds to Hall's presentation. Thus small scenes with few sentences of dialogue are cleverly used to introduce a number of key ideas and conflicts, which are very familiar to climatologists but not to most of the people who will go and see such a movie. I also find the film quite successful in giving a flavour of the world of climate science – I did recognise our world, what the work places look like, the pictures on the wall, how the climatologists talk, etc.

After a preview of the film in Berlin I had the chance of a good talk with the script writer, Jeffrey Nachmanoff, and I was quite impressed how well-informed about the science and politics of global climate change he was.

Clearly this is a disaster movie and not a scientific documentary, the film makers have taken a lot of artistic license. But the film presents an opportunity to explain that some of the basic background is right: humans are indeed increasingly changing the climate and this is quite a dangerous experiment, including some risk of abrupt and unforeseen changes. After all - our knowledge of the climate system is still rather limited, and we will probably see some surprises as our experiment with the atmosphere unfolds. Luckily it is extremely unlikely that we will see major ocean circulation changes in the next couple of decades (I’d be just as surprised as Jack Hall if they did occur); at least most scientists think this will only become a more serious risk towards the end of the century. And the consequences would certainly not be as dramatic as the “super-storm” depicted in the movie. Nevertheless, a major change in ocean circulation is a risk with serious and partly unpredictable consequences, which we should avoid. And even without events like ocean circulation changes, climate change is serious enough to demand decisive action.

I think it would be a mistake and not do the film justice if scientists simply dismiss it as nonsense. For what it is, a blockbuster movie that has to earn back 120 M$ production cost, it is probably as good as you can get. For this type of movie for a very broad audience it is actually quite subversive and manages to slip in many thought-provoking things. I'm sure people will not confuse the film with reality, they are not stupid - they will know it is a work of fiction. But I hope that it will stir their interest for the subject, and that they might take more notice when real climate change and climate policy will be discussed in future.

http://www.pik-potsdam.de/~stefan/tdat_review.html

[Lore]

too bad there isn't bigger size fonts for subject...

Anyway, I took that temperature anomaly chart and jiggered it up some in photoshop so that it showed an anomaly over/under .5º from average instead of any variation at all from average. seems a little more useful.

Useful how, what do you think that is suppose to tell us? The reason I ask is because .5º from average is a hell of big deviation in decadal temperatures, but year to year, not so much. Even slight decreases and increases though have substantial effects.

[Lore]

Why waste tax dollars to disprove the science of personal observation?

Exactly, no data, no problem.

[Timo]

Why waste tax dollars to disprove the science of personal observation?

Exactly, no data, no problem.

Ignorance is bliss.

[Pops]

Seems to me that .5º is rather puny compared to 5º - removing the small makes the large more apparent.
I'm I mistaken?

[Lore]

You're correct if you're looking at daily weather temperatures, but putting this into some long term context, the difference between today’s average global temperature and the average global temperature during the last Ice Age is only about 5º C. So yes, small temperature changes do make a big difference.

[Pops]

You're right of course, sorry I intruded.