A researcher has found that the scenario presented in the climate disaster movie, The Day After Tomorrow, may actually be possible.
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In 2004 movie “The Day After Tomorrow”, Dennis Quaid played a climatologist who struggled to council global authorities that an ice age is just about to hit the planet earth.
In contrast, the study asserts that the latest warming period is one which simply can not be attributed to a single source.
In the film the shut down coincides with the arrival of a super storm which causes an nearly instant ice age in which humans venturing outside are frozen to death within seconds and a military helicopter sent to rescue the Royal Family from Balmoral plunges to the ground when its fuel suddenly freezes.
The scenario has faced criticism from science back then. Global warming will continue after this like the collapse of the AMOC hasn’t occurred, but the average temperatures in the world will get offset by at least 0.8 degrees.
Atmospheric cooling because of an AMOC collapse has much to do with heat flowing from Earth’s atmosphere to the ocean. A similar reversal of energy flow is also visible at the top of the atmosphere.
Drijfhout said that the Earth will be cooling continuously for twenty years if global warming and AMOC collapse take place simultaneously.
The researcher added that these diverse fingerprints in the flow of energy between internal ocean circulation procedures and atmospheric radiative forcing allowed us to locate a suitable cause for a climate hiatus. Due to the El Niño phenomenon along wth significant changes in the Southern Ocean in the Antarctic region, ocean temperatures and levels are constantly shifting and increasing.
Professor Sybren said: It can be excluded, however, that this hiatus period was exclusively caused by changes in atmospheric forcing, either due to volcanic eruptions, more aerosols emissions in Asia, or reduced greenhouse gas emissions.
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In the Hollywood film The Day After Tomorrow, the even leads to a sudden, new ice age, chilling the planet and killing thousands. Using German Climate model ECHAM, he found that the earth will be cooling for the next 20 years rather than warming if global warming and catastrophic disaster of AMOC eventuate at the same time. “Natural variations have counteracted the greenhouse effect for a decade or so, but I expect this period is over now”, Drijfhout concluded. As the oceans heat, and the current system of winds on the Earth slow down, thereby changing the global wind patterns such that warm air can no longer circulate in the Northern and Souther Hemispheres.
