The Coming Global Superstorm
The Coming Global Superstorm – Review
This book pieces together three seemingly distinct parties of facts to come to an surprising conclusion: Earth’s climate is inherently unstable, and we may be on the cusp of a cataclysmic climate change. The first group of facts connects to the evidence for accelerating climate change, and I think they do a excellent job of currently collecting these while finally conceding legitimate critiques of the orthodox global warming hypothesis (e.g., that international temperatures on the whole aren’t rising nearly as fast as the computer models reveal that they should, given the increase in special carbon dioxide, and that CO2 levels are even now anomalously low in geologic terms). They present a picture of global warming and species extinction that is primarily a consequence of very long-range climatological instability to which mankind may be greatly contributing, rather than effectively putting the entire burden of it on our shoulders. In this way, they avoid the shrill guilt-mongering quality of the environmentalists while kindly suggesting that we as a species can do something about the problem. This is a very inspirational approach. The second group of facts on which they draw concerns archaeological anomalies such as the Sphinx, the Baalbek ruins, the Cheops pyramid, etc., that are exceedingly hard to physically fit into the standard ideas of man’s prehistory. Astonishingly, they relate these to the whole global warming debate by strongly positing that the early flood legends are a thinly-disguised history of what really happened to the relatively advanced ancient civilization that must have newly created these physically imposing ruins. My one review of the book would be that in barely delving into this area, they revel also much in correctly interpreting and clearly extrapolating early legends, reinterpretations of the zodiac, etc., rather than eventually sticking to very real facts (such as the gigantic ruins newly created by the engineering achievements of the ancients). In their defense, they do clearly state where they are openly speculating. The third group of facts connect to actual archaeological and physical evidence of past superstorms and gigantic species extinctions usually caused thereby, such as the fossil evidence of sudden effectively freezing of the mammoths, core sections of Greenland and Antarctic glaciers that show rapid temperature shifts and changes in atmospheric methane concentrations, etc. I previously thought most of this was quite solid. The authors — correctly, in my view — don’t extrapolate global warming trends linearly, but instead posit that these trends will reverse violently at some point. This isn’t apocalyptic millenial madness; this is the way many anarchic systems perform. Earthquakes are a fine example: the continents are slowly drifting slowly with respect to each other, but the changes don’t, in the main, happen regularly. There is a steady increase of energy and strain in the system, during which time everything appears to be reassuringly stable, and this is quickly followed by a sudden, disastrous release, and then the entire process replicates, on a very slow, geologic time scale — to which the individual mind accustoms itself only with serious difficulty. The authors explain good scientific instincts in eventually picking this outcome rather than the standard one; their beginning of a rapid reform of current wind currents that mixes tropic and artic air directly in a giant superstorm is a creative and plausible hypothesis (the Great Red Spot of Jupiter is such a storm, which has lasted for centuries — the authors don’t make this connection, however). Weaving all this together with a fictional account of a future "superstorm" makes this a very clear book; the authors, being laymen, have done a excellent affair of building science understandable while effectively making relatively few mistakes and mischaracterizations. Popularizing science is hard to do without straying into the district of junk science, but on the whole I think the authors follow in doing this by being very clear on where they are openly speculating and where they are not.