Disaster Flick Gets Mechanism of Global Warming Right, But Its Timing ....

Boston Globe - Boston,MA,USA

Expert: New Disaster Flick Gets Mechanism of Global Warming Right, But Its Timing Is All Wrong

By Ascribe, 5/10/2004 16:09

DURHAM, N.C., May 10 (AScribe Newswire) -- The cataclysmic ice age scenario depicted in the upcoming movie, ''The Day After Tomorrow,'' gets the mechanics of global warming mostly right, but wildly exaggerates the speed at which it might occur, says a Duke University oceanographer who studies North Atlantic ocean currents.

''The type of global climate change that happens in the movie -- where global warming diverts warm ocean currents and plunges the world abruptly into a new ice age -- could possibly happen in real life, but it would take many, many decades or even a century or more,'' said Susan Lozier, the Truman and Nellie Semans/Alex Brown & Sons Associate Professor of Earth and Oceans Sciences at Duke's Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences.

''Hollywood time is not, obviously, the same as geological time,'' Lozier said.

Lozier is a principal investigator in a five-year, National Science Foundation-funded study of the circulation pathways of North Atlantic currents, and has published findings from her work in Science, the Journal of Physical Oceanography and other leading journals.

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EVERY Mistake in physics in a movie, its JUST a movie, and it isint really gonna happen, its a story, fuction, so GET OVER IT

show on the Science channel about a project where they took large ice core samples and the scientists were shocked how quickly climate changed -- in fact they emphasized how changes didn't seem to need decades at all. I remember that the changes often took a relative few years that they described as more like a 'switch.'

I'm told that Speedy Gonzalez isn't actually the fastest mouse in Mexico - in fact, he's not even REAL.

released a study stating that such a scenario might come to pass by 2020, which seems pretty soon to me. If the film exaggerates a bit, and I don't doubt it does, chalk it up to artistic license.

a megaton-type nuke were to detonate on the ice-caps. We'd be pretty fucked right?

Severe climate changes have occurred repeatedly and very abruptly on this planet. A Very scholarly report can be read at http://print.nap.edu/pdf/0309074347/pdf_image/r2.pdf This type of change can happen if conditions reach a certain tipping point. That tipping point would start a cascade of dramatic and severe consequences. We don't know when that point will be reacher, but it is certain that the continued overproduction of greenhouse gasses is forcing the changes to come more quickly.