Climate Change: 'The Day After Tomorrow' Disaster Scenario May be Possible

A researcher has found that the scenario presented in the climate disaster movie, The Day After Tomorrow, may actually be possible. Using a climate model, the scientist found that for a period of 20 years, the Earth will cool instead of warm.

In the disaster movie, climate warming caused an abrupt collapse of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulations (AMOC), leading to catastrophic events such as tornadoes destroying Los Angeles, New York being flooded, and the northern hemisphere freezing. These massive events happened all within the space of a few weeks. And while this particularly scenario would likely never occur, there may be some truth to it.

"The planet 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," said Sybren Drijfhout, the researcher, in a news release.

In fact, Drijfhout used the German climate model ECHAM at the Max-Planck Institute in Hamburg and found that the earth will continue to cool instead of warm if global warming and a collapse of the AMOC occur simultaneous. Then, global warming will continue as if the AMOC never collapsed, but with a globally averaged temperature offset of about .8 degrees Celsius.

Interestingly, the effect of atmospheric cooling due to an AMOC collapse is associated with heat flow from the atmosphere into the ocean, which has been witnessed during the climate hiatus of the last 15 years.

With that said, the recent period of very weak warming cannot be attributed to one single cause. Most likely El Niño played a role and possibly also changes in the Southern Ocean due to shifting and increasing westerlies.

"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," said Sybren. "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."

The findings are published in the journal Scientific Reports.

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