As a result, the earth would experience a 20 year cooling period.
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WHEN the hit doomsday movie The Day After Tomorrow was released in 2004, climate scientists laughed off the credibility of the threat depicted in the film.
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.
Prof Drijfhout used a German climate model called ECHAM to analyse the impact of such a weather event as shown in the film, which was criticised by climate scientists on its release. After that, global warming will be continuing as if there was no AMOC collapse; however, this time it will be accompanied by an average temperature offset of around 0.8°C.
Atmospheric cooling because of an AMOC collapse has much to do with heat flowing from Earth’s atmosphere to the ocean. This climate “hiatus” has been witnessed over the course of the last 15 years.
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”.
However, the study, which appears in Nature Scientific Reports, says that the recent period of very weak warming can not be attributed to one single cause. Yahoo! featured “The Day After Tomorrow” in a top ten list of scientifically inaccurate movies, while Duke University paleoclimatologist William Hyde declared, “This movie is to climate science as Frankenstein is to heart transplant surgery”. The manner with which such rise in temperatures battle it out with global warming has garnered numerous associated assumptions but was never tackled using a climate model.
Packed with information, The Inertia Trap is a rich compendium of scientific insights on the subject of the effect of climate change on the world’s oceans.
However, Drijfhout said in a few places it would take over 100 years for the temperature to finally return to normal.
The researchers found that the if the AMOC suddenly collapse as a result of global warming, global temperature would dramatically drop instead to warm.
Drijfhout said that the Earth will be cooling continuously for twenty years if global warming and AMOC collapse take place simultaneously.
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Science Daily quoted professor Drijfhout’s explanation of the heat flow and its reversal. Other factors, including El Niño and Southern Ocean changes due to shifting and increasing westerlies, are also believed to be factors.
