The Real Climate Day After Tomorrow

A little more than a decade ago, the first and so far only climate crisis disaster movie called The Day After Tomorrow based its disasters on the effects of a slowdown of major ocean currents caused by an influx of fresh water from Arctic melting.  (The same mechanism figures in the contemporaneous but much more scientifically realistic climate trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson.)

Today the climate sci world has been buzzing about evidence that this phenomenon is happening, much faster than models predicted.  The video above, and the most mainstream story about it so far (in the Washington Post), referenced the climate sci-fi of that movie.

The Post piece begins: "Last week, we learned about the possible destabilization of the Totten Glacier of East Antarctica, which could unleash over 11 feet of sea level rise in coming centuries.

And now this week brings news of another potential mega-scale perturbation. According to a new study just out in Nature Climate Change by Stefan Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and a group of co-authors, we’re now seeing a slowdown of the great ocean circulation that, among other planetary roles, helps to partly drive the Gulf Stream off the U.S. east coast. The consequences could be dire – including significant extra sea level rise for coastal cities like New York and Boston."

The consequences, unlike in the movie, aren't going to cause a sudden new Ice Age (the scientists say), although they could bring colder weather to specific places, such as the US East Coast--and maybe, says one blogger on the subject today, they already have:

As such, cold water bleeding from the great glaciers of Greenland not only poses a threat to ocean circulation, it also poses a risk for generating significant disruptions to atmospheric winds and related weather as well. Ones that could set off increasingly intense storm events in the Northern Hemisphere similar to what was seen for the US Northeast this winter (but likely worsening with time) and the extraordinarily powerful barrage of storms hitting England during the winter of 2013-2014."

So it's today as well as the day after tomorrow, though it may just be getting started. Notes another climate blogger, it "is expected to continue, even intensify through year 2100..."

Though the original research is published in a scientific journal, the authors summarize it at Real Climate.  Another relevant blog post adds some more scientific chatter and more links.

Finally, I had cause recently to look up my San Francisco Chronicle Insight piece of 2004 about The Day After Tomorrow, though it was published days before the movie came out.  I found it interesting to read now, given all that has happened and has not happened in the decade since.