Don't Trust Hollywood Science: Global Warming Won't Cause a New Ice Age

Promoters of the global warming disaster movie "The Day After Tomorrow" must believe most of us were born yesterday.

As most movie fans know, the much-hyped film focuses on a global apocalypse of cataclysmic floods, tornadoes, storms and blizzards that threaten to destroy civilization.

Two hundred and ninety-foot tidal waves surge across New York Harbor and dash against Manhattan's skyscrapers, followed by a quick freeze that leaves Manhattan enshrouded in ice.

Dozens of other cities get hammered. A tornado levels Los Angeles, five-pound hailstones bombard Tokyo and San Francisco Bay freezes. It's a New Ice Age.

It's the latest brainstorm of German schockmeister Roland Emmerich, best known for "Independence Day" and "Godzilla."

Those movies, of course, were enjoyable as good examples of the "sky is falling" flight-of-fantasy genre.

"The Day After Tomorrow," however, is the subject of a multi-million dollar PR campaign touting it as if it were not fiction, but cinema verite - a realistic warning of what could happen if we don't dismantle our modern economy to stave off global warming. Yet the extreme scenarios promoted by global warming theory advocates are supported more by political ideology than by science.

It's probably no coincidence that this thinly-disguised political warhead is being launched in the midst of key election year. Nor would it be surprising to see it used in an effort to stampede the Senate to approve the McCain-Lieberman "Climate Stewardship Act," a costly piece of legislation that attempts to impose key Kyoto provisions on American consumers and taxpayers.1

Kyoto was formally rejected by President Bush because of the draconian burdens it would place on our economy - mandates so stringent that independent economists believe it would trigger a prolonged recession, and because the treaty wouldn't prevent global warming. Even treaty advocates admit it is "only a start."

In one respect, Bush was merely heeding the advice of the then-Democrat-controlled Senate, which voted 95-0 in 1997 to urge President Clinton not to send a Kyoto-like treaty to Capitol Hill for ratification because of its rib-shattering economic impact on American workers.

Left-leaning Hollywood, of course, would like to portray Bush as an extreme environmental anti-Christ, despite the fact that Clinton also heeded the Senate's advice, and didn't even try to get Kyoto ratified.

There is little scientific evidence that documents the need for a Kyoto-style crusade against climate change, anyway.

Excepting the El Nino year of 1998, since about 1979, the Earth's temperature apparently has not been increasing. What minor warming the Earth experienced over the past century primarily occurred before 1940, when there were far fewer motor vehicles and power plants.

The U.S., in any case, is not ignoring climate issues. Since 1990, the United States has spent $18 billion on climate research, three times as much as any other country. The U.S. government spent over $3.5 billion on climate change in 2003 alone.2

Many of the horrendous events predicted by global warming scaremasters have no basis in reality.

Paul Driessen, the author of a revealing new book entitled Eco-Imperialism, observes that the resurgence of malaria, yellow fever and dengue in Africa and Asia is related directly to the banning of the effective and cost-efficient pesticide DDT, not to global warming.

Virtually all of the major malaria and yellow fever outbreaks in the U.S. occurred long before the invention of the automobile. Wisconsin suffered surges of malaria in the 1880s, while yellow fever killed 19,000 in Memphis alone in 1878, Driessen says.

Even if global warming were to occur at the fast pace predicted by the alarmists, it wouldn't unleash the New Ice Age predicted in "The Day After Tomorrow." (The frequency of weather-related natural disasters has changed little over the past century.)

Says Andrew Weaver of the University of Victoria in British Columbia in the journal Science, "it is safe to say that global warming will not lead to the onset of a new ice age."

So, other than the legitimate business of huckstering a new movie, why all the hype over "The Day After Tomorrow?" The obvious answer is contempt that Hollywood's liberal elite holds for the intelligence of American voters.

Lamont's Broecker Warns Gases Could Alter Climate
Oceans' Circulation Could Collapse

BY LAURENCE LIPPSETT

Thermohaline circulation links the Earth's oceans. Cold, dense, salty water from the North Atlantic sinks into the deep and drives the circulation like a giant plunger.

n the eve of the international meeting on global warming that opened Dec. 1 in Kyoto, Japan, one of the world's leading climate experts warned of an underestimated threat posed by the buildup of greenhouse gases—an abrupt collapse of the oceans' prevailing circulation system that could send temperatures across Europe plummeting in a span of 10 years.

If that system shut down today, winter temperatures in the North Atlantic region would fall by 20 or more degrees Fahrenheit within 10 years. Dublin would acquire the climate of Spitsbergen, 600 miles north of the Arctic Circle.

"The consequences could be devastating," said Wallace S. Broecker, Newberry Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, and author of the new research, which appeared in the Nov. 28 issue of the magazine Science.

A complex of globally interconnected ocean currents, collectively known as the Conveyor, governs our climate by transporting heat and moisture around the planet. But the Conveyor is delicately balanced and vulnerable, and it has shut down or changed direction many times in Earth's history, Broecker reports. Each time the Conveyor has shifted gears, it has caused significant global temperature changes within decades, as well as large-scale wind shifts, dramatic fluctuations in atmospheric dust levels, glacial advances or retreats and other changes over many regions of the Earth, he said.

The Conveyor "is the Achilles heel of the climate system," Broecker wrote in Science. "The record ... indicates that this current has not run steadily, but jumped from one mode of operation to another. The changes in climate associated with these jumps have now been shown to be large, abrupt and global."

The ongoing accumulation of heat-trapping industrial gases blanketing the Earth threatens to raise global temperatures, he said, but such a rise would occur gradually. Far more worrisome is the buildup's potential to stress the climate system past a crucial threshold that would disrupt the Conveyor and set off a rapid reconfiguration of Earth's climate, predicted by existing computer models.

Broecker also offered a new theory: Scientists generally agree that periodic changes in Earth's orbit and the amount of solar radiation it receives have paced fundamental climate changes on the planet over millions of years. But the global climatic flip-flops may have been set in motion by sudden switches in the operation of the Conveyor.

Today, the driving force of the Conveyor is the cold, salty water of the North Atlantic Ocean. Such water is more dense than warm, fresh water and hence sinks to the ocean bottom, pushing water through the world's oceans like a great plunger. The volume of this deep undersea current is 16 times greater than the flow of all the world's rivers combined, Broecker said, and it runs southward all the way to the southern tip of Africa, where it joins a watery raceway that circles Antarctica. Here the Conveyor is recharged by cold, salty water created by the formation of sea ice, which leaves salt behind when it freezes. This renewed sinking shoves water back northward, where it gradually warms again and rises to the surface in the Pacific and Indian oceans.

In the Indian Ocean, surface waters are too warm to sink. Northern Pacific waters are cold, but not salty enough to sink into the deep. This is primarily because prevailing winds that whip around the planet hit the great mountains of the western United States and Canada and drop their moisture. The resulting snow and rain runs into the Pacific, adding a dose of fresh water that dilutes the Pacific's saltiness, said Broecker

Today, the Conveyor comes full circle, eventually propelling warm surface waters, including the Gulf Stream, back into the North Atlantic. In winter, warm water transfers its heat to the frigid overlying air masses that come off ice-covered Canada, Greenland and Iceland. The eastward-moving air masses make northern Europe warmer in winter than comparable latitudes in North America. Without the Gulf Stream, nothing would temper the Arctic air, and Europe would enter a deep freeze.

Warm air evaporates water much faster than dry air can sublimate ice. (Ice doesn't evaporate because it's a solid; it can melt into a liquid or sublimate into a gas. Sublimation requires the combined energy input of melting and evaporation, so it's not a particularly rapid process.)

Warm surface water transported northward through the entire latitudinal length of the Atlantic does sink somewhere vaguely around Iceland. After sinking, this water returns southward as deep water, apparently rising to the surface fairly evenly throughout the World Ocean.

Recent research (and I'm no expert on this, so I might be wrong) suggests that the sinking occurs in a few very small spots in the North Atlantic. Sinking in at least one of these spots may result from relatively warm, dry air descending off the ice caps (as a Chinook) at very rapid speeds and causing rapid evaporation. Evaporation in general is a function of the speed with which relatively dry air can reach the air/ocean interface.

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