The Day After Tomorrow: Could it actually happen?

In the 2004 movie The Day After Tomorrow, a paleoclimatologist’s predictions of catastrophic climate change come true as a series of sudden and extreme weather events results in large-scale cooling across the Earth, ultimately triggering a new Ice Age.

The film drew mixed reviews from critics, and climate experts criticized the science behind the events that took place during the motion picture, researchers from the University of Southampton explained in a statement, but no one had ever put the scenario to the test using climate models.   

In the movie, global warming caused the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC) to abruptly collapse, leading to a series of catastrophic events such as New York being flooded, Los Angeles being leveled by tornados, and extreme freezing throughout the entire northern hemisphere.

To test the plausibility of this scenario, Sybren Drijfhout from the university’s Ocean and Earth Science used the ECHAM climate model at the Max-Planck Institute in Germany, and found that if global warming and a collapse of the AMOC were to occur at the same time, the planet would cool for a period of 20 years. After that time, global warming would resume as normal.

Some regions could need 100 years to recover from AMOC collapse

Professor Drijfhout, whose research was published last week in the journal Scientific Reports, explained that “Earth recovers from the AMOC collapse in about 40 years when global warming continues at present-day rates, but near the eastern boundary of the North Atlantic (including the British Isles) it takes more than a century before temperature is back to normal.”

The impact of atmospheric cooling due to an AMOC collapse has been linked to heat flow from the atmosphere into the ocean, which has been observed during the purported climate hiatus that has been taking place over the past 15 years. Other factors, including El Niño and Southern Ocean changes due to shifting and increasing westerlies, are also believed to be factors.

“When a similar cooling or reduced heating is caused by volcanic eruptions or decreasing greenhouse emissions the heat flow is reversed, from the ocean into the atmosphere,” Drijfhout said. “A similar reversal of energy flow is also visible at the top of the atmosphere. These very different fingerprints in energy flow between atmospheric radiative forcing and internal ocean circulation processes make it possible to attribute the cause of a climate hiatus period.”

“It can be excluded, however, that this hiatus period was solely caused by changes in atmospheric forcing, either due to volcanic eruptions, more aerosols emissions in Asia, or reduced greenhouse gas emissions,” the professor added. “Changes in ocean circulation must have played an important role. Natural variations have counteracted the greenhouse effect for a decade or so, but I expect this period is over now.”

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