why is the "superstorm" impossible?

[phantom power]

The fashionable position regarding "Day After Tomorrow" appears to be that "they exaggerated, and it wouldn't be that bad". And I more or less count myself among that crowd.

On the other hand, I haven't yet heard any specific argument about why a superstorm is impossible. Does it violate the laws of physics? I don't think so. Is it simply so improbable that we can call it "impossible"? Maybe, but if so, why?

Just for fun, here's my layman's argument that it might happen: In our current climate system, a vast amount of heat energy flows from equator to poles via the ocean currents. So, what *does* happen if these currents shut down? The northern hemisphere gets colder. But that represents a vastly increased gradient of heat energy between equator and poles. Energy will want to follow that gradient. If it can no longer travel via the ocean currents, the only path left to it is via the atmosphere. That increased flow of energy has to manifest itself via wind, and that means more violent storms. And we're talking about a lot of energy, so imagining storms the like of which we've never seen doesn't seem like a big stretch.

Am I nuts?

[blackcat77]

1. There's still a limit to individual storms.

Storms are caused by MOTION in the atmosphere, and you're just not going to have that large an area of motion to support the storm.

[phantom power]

5. why not?

the area is there. Are you saying there's something that will prevent any one storm from occupying all that area?

[MnFats]

2. NPR did a funny critique...

...instead of sending a critic to review the film they sent somebody with a science/meterology background...(sorry, can't remember the name....in the beginning of the piece they used a sound bit from the film of the lead character intoning, with dead sincerity and amazement, "This is unbelievable!" then, as they guy describes some of the things that happen, we hear "This is unbelievable" after every paragraph. then the guy rips the science behind tornadoes in L.A., tidal waves inundating NYC to the chin of the Statue of Liberty, horrible ice storms in London...all in a matter of a few days....
it was pretty funny.

[phantom power]

8. that would have been funny.

So, did this guy have anything specific to say about what's wrong?

I agree about the tornados in LA. That seemed like it was just pulled out for some cool effects. I also agree about the timeline. In my imaginary scenario, the currents shutdown, and then it takes some time for a heat gradient to build up.

The whole cold air from the troposphere thing seems dubious to me too, but that doesn't preclude the posibility of some other kind of very large, catastrophic weather.

[leftistagitator]

10. Knowing our new and improved NPR

It was probably an esteemed scientist from the Heritage foundation. NPR's not even worth listening to anymore.

[NNadir]

19. I thought the NPR criticism was very much spun to the right wing.

The so called NPR "science editor" made a big deal about the claim that the consequences of global climate "will take decades" as if it were something that were going to happen in the late 21st century. This of course is simply right wing propaganda in the sense that global climate change is happening NOW.

I also thought the NPR propagandist was pretty over the top in ridiculing the Cheney role in the movie. Simply because the disaster in a week scenario is silly doesn't mean that the charactiture of Cheney is off the mark. Even if the consequences of global climate change were in fact as dire as portrayed in the movie , Cheney would still blame "natural fluctuations" and still find whore "scientists" and whore "science journalists" to back him up.


Whether or not the movie is silly from the point of describing the real life course of events, the fact is that the consequences of global warming are potentially very dire indeed. They may not happen in a week, but they may be relatively rapid in geological terms, possibly on the order of a single decade. It's a pretty scary thing; especially because the probability for reinforcing postive feedback loops (such as catastrophic outgassing of methane hydrate from oceans) is non-zero. Measured in expectation value (number of deaths times probability) the risks of continued reliance on fossil fuel are rather enormous when compared with almost any other scenario.

Whatever merits NPR had in the past as giving independent news reports are severely undermined by "reporting" like this.

[3 Cents and Change]

22. What?

They never said global warming isn't possible. They said this movie was more humor than science.

The only 'proof' that the movie could happen has come from people who say things like "well prove it can't happen" as if movie-science somehow holds merit.

I keep coming back to the Jurrasic Park comparison. The science behind Jurrasic Park is theoretically possible too.

[NNadir]

24. What I objected to was not their criticism of the movie, but their attempt

to do so from a position that they were more informed about "real science." It sounded to me that the issue was clearly phrased in "someday" terms rather than "right now" terms, to wit, (as I heard it) "Global climate change will happen over decades or centuries."

Global Climate change is not something that "will happen." Rather it is something that "is happening." Last year, the number of people killed by record heat in Europe exceeded the number of people killed in the World Trade Center attacks. You certainly wouldn't know that listening to NPR. If one were not offering the official Republican Party Review of this movie, one might focus on that side of the coin, but I very much doubt that the "science editor" at NPR is even aware that such a real life example exists.

To cap it off, I repeat, they spent most of the review lampooning the caricature of Dick Cheney. The fact is that even if New York is not likely to be glaciated in a single week, Dick Cheney's behavior is not all that different than the pretend Vice-President in the movie; he ignoring the extremely serious warnings of scientists (The World Meteorological Organization last year issued an unprecedented warning about Climate instability.)

I am not here to defend the movie, which I am hardly going to pay money to see. I am here to criticize the critic, in this case the folks at NPR, who in my opinion are media whores who easily match their commercial competitors.

[yellowcanine]

3. I suspect it is more complicated than that but your reasoning makes sense

in that heat energy will follow a gradient from hot to cool. I am not a climatologist nor an oceonographer but I suspect that if one ocean current would "shut down" others would replace it. Because water has the capability of holding more heat than air, it would seem to me that ocean currents would continue to play a much greater role in the movement of heat than the atmosphere would (of course the atmosphere contains water as well). As I said, I am not an expert on this, just relying on my high school physics and earth science. My take on the "Day After Tomorrow" is that the basic premise of rapid climate change triggered by a change in ocean currents is possible but that the change would be nowhere near as rapid nor as dramatic as that depicted in the movie (I haven't seen the movie). Nevertheless, as to the politics of it, I suspect that the global warming "advocates" are much closer to the truth than the global warming skeptics. Part of my feeling that way is, I admit, a result of knowing that many of the global warming skeptics are financed by the oil industry, making me skeptical of the motives of the GW skeptics.

[Stocat]

4. they are possible just not on earth

From what I understand its becuase of the land masses featured on the planet earth...Land masses sap super storms of their energy, and they eventually sputter out because of that. Super storms are possible though and visible every day on our big neighbor Jupiter. The red spot is a superstorm of gigantic porportions and it has been there for centuries.

[phantom power]

7. ah, but what if there *was* enough energy available...

to overcome that resistance? Take away the ocean currents, and perhaps enough of a gradient could build up...

[Q3JR4]

6. Sounds good to me,

but then again, what do I know? I'm just an undergraduate physics student. :P

[LARED]

9. I really liked the ionosphere effect

The part where the eye of the storm in somehow allowing rarefied extremely low density "air" from the ionosphere (about 80Km up) to travel down to the earth and instanly freeze anything in its path.

Good Scifi, bad science.

[kcwayne]

13. Probably it is bad science, ... but

I remember a discussion in physics class 30 years ago on super cooling. We were talking about how water could be cooled (in labs) to a temperature below 32 degrees Fahrenheit, and it would stay in liquid form. Then by slightly vibrating the water, it would instantly freeze.

The prof offered it as a possible (but not probable) reason why a woolly mammoth found in the early 1900's in Russia was preserved so well that its latest meal was still undigested, and the meat intact enough that mammoth steaks were served at a function to marvel at the find. The prof did not think it was probable because you do not find vibrationless conditions on the earth with out mechanical dampers. (On the theory that the mammoth fell into a pool of supercooled water).

But it leaves the question, how did that mammoth get instantaneously frozen (apparently)?

[Speck Tater]

14. The problem with that, of course...

... is that when air from the stratosphere descended it would also be compressed to near sea-level density, and compressing a gas heats it. Thus it would no longer be super-cold. Cold, perhaps, but not minus 150 F.

[phantom power]

16. interesting, they had an answer for that in the movie

I think it was a bogus answer, but (in the movie) the super-cold air was descending fast enough that it "didn't have time to warm up".

That explaination doesn't add up, in terms of adiabatic warming. It would work, *if* the air remained at the same density, but then everyone on the ground would have been suffocating from lack of oxygen.

[markus]

11. There's some evidence the Gulf Stream may have shut down in the past

I'll have to go grab the book out of the library if you want the details.

It was from a climatologist who studies ice patterns (and sails up to Greenland a lot; I read it for nautical interest originally). I believe the book may have been called The Riddle of the Ice.

I'm also curious if you could have a very large stationary storm over the ocean the way there are large stationary highs (notably the one over Bermuda much of the year).

[Speck Tater]

12. It is possible because it has happened.

How else can you explain mammoths flash frozen, standing upright with half-chewed fresh flowers and vegetation in their mouths?

Here's the catch, however. All of the mammoths that were flash frozen were well above the arctic circle, however, the climate above the arctic circle at the time it happened was quite warm and temperate.

Here's how it happened. Gradual warming allowed the forests to spread northward over thousands of years. The ice caps melted and the tundra became forest and grassland. The mammoth migrated north with the vegeataion since the lower latitudes were becoming unbearably hot for them.

Once they were well established in their new range the abnormally warm polar weather that had been the rule for the previous thousand years or so sudden "snapped" back to normal. The ice returned to the poles and the creatures who were caught there were flash frozen.

Could New York city ever be flash frozen like it was in movie? Not a chance. It's not north of the arctic circle. When the next ice age decends it will probably take many years, or many decades to happen. In the meantime, summers would suddenly become shorter, and eventually non-existant as the North Atlantic current failed.

It is remotely conceivable that it could happen in a few years, but not in a few days.

[Dogmudgeon]

15. More of the "Bad Science" claim

One of these days, someone is going to have to explain to me why The Day After Tomorrow is "Bad Science™". All the trailers I've seen show events that are in line with weather that has actually been observed to happen.

Supercold downdrafts figure prominently in spurious claims of Bad Science™. I know it's fun to be a Skeptic and Nobody's Fool, but these have been observed, too. The phenomenon is usually described as "cold pooling" in mesoscale storms (big-ass thunderstorms); stratospheric involvement is also well-known.

Nobody ever thought that continental Europe could ever have weeks of sustained temperatures over 100F/40C, until last Summer. It was played in the press as the wicked Frenchies getting their comeuppance, but I found it a lot more sinister.

There's Bad Science™, of course ... it's the Bad Science™ that we've accepted as part of both the rape of the environment and gross ignorance of our planet's climatary cycles.

--bkl

[3 Cents and Change]

21. umm.

"Nobody ever thought that continental Europe could ever have weeks of sustained temperatures over 100F/40C, until last Summer."


Hate to burst your bubble, but yes, they did.

[Fovea]

17. I dont think you are nuts

but I am not sure about how the various forces in a storm like this would behave together.

This is not a lower latitude storm like a hurricane, and I am dubious about the movie's troposphere collapse in the storm. How much energy would that take? Could it sustain itself, or would the sudden energy difference shut itself off, like blowing out an oil well?

In conventional thunder storms, warm air moves upward forming a thunderhead. In hurricanes, the center is the low pressure zone.

In this one, the cold air moves down from the center like high pressure air. How does that work?

In the movie, cold seems to act like a form of energy, as opposed to the absence of same.

[phantom power]

18. very true... How about this:

a storm powered by cold air from the upper atmosphere, falling thru the "eye", then flowing outward. A sort of inverse hurricane. It would require a buildup of cold AND dense air in the upper atmosphere, which is dubious.

I'm not really stuck on the idea of the specific storms from the movie. Or that it necessarily happens all at once. A period of extreme weather over a few decades would be a more plausible scenario. It might manifest itself in ways we've never seen before, or maybe just on a scale we've never seen before.

[3 Cents and Change]

20. Jurrasic Park is POSSIBLE Too.

It's not impossible. Of course, Jurrasic Park isn't impossible either.

You'll hold a lot more credibility if you talk about things that are much more likely than the "Coming Global Superstorm". Just remember one thing, Art Bell is one of the people behind the original story that TDAT is based on.

[phantom power]

23. how can posing a question damage my credibility?

I started this thread because (imo) people are very quick to throw around the word "impossible" about speculative ideas, without being able to explain WHY it's impossible.

I wanted to see if anybody could explain for me what makes it impossible. And, I played devil's advocate. Just because somebody has an explaination, does not mean it's correct.