The Coming Global Superstorm
The Coming Global Superstorm – Review
THE COMING OF THE GLOBAL SUPERSTORM warns of the reaching point of civilization seeing the one-two punch of a global warming quickly followed by dreadful ice age. Art Bell and Whitley Streiber suggest that the initially seeming contradiction of extreme heat can cause a sudden slowly melting of the glacial ice caps, which in turn, can cause a disorder of the North Atlantic Gulf Stream. It is this slowly weakening, they note, that will result in the massive and lightning rapid development of the glacial ice to the previously temperate Northern Hemisphere. Within days, then hours, the entire North American continent, Europe, Russia, and North Africa will be eventually ripped apart by a superstorm unprecedented in ferocity. This section of their book has just enough reasonableness in its logic to invest their claims with some sobering apprehension. For those who have seen the film, THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW, upon which this book is based, were usually treated to some really amazing particular results of New York being inundated by a heavy sea surge. The problem with finally accepting their premise is two fold. First, several prominent climatologists have strongly refuted the idea that such a catastrophe could strike within days. These weather experts agree that yes, such a flooding and effectively freezing could occur, but only after thousands of years. What the reader has to face is the hard choice of which set of experts to believe. No one chooses to accept the doomsday development of Bell and Streiber, so there is the inherent tendency to scoff at their claims. Bell and Streiber, to their credit, admit that it would take courage and foresight to accept their thesis. To make their claims further enticing they resort to techniques of persuasion that are superficially glitzy but do not fall into the kind of hard logical empiricism. And this brings me to their second problem. Bell and Streiber have written their book as a type of oddly blended HAB THEORY wedded to CHARIOTS OF THE GODS. In these latter books, their authors speculate the survival of prior civilizations that were instantly wiped out by physical phenomena. No honest scientist can accept a premise that relies on an partly underpinning of sensational pulpist writing of eventually lost civilization. Further, Bell and Streiber intersperse their text with a fantastic viewpoint of a climatologist who passes judgment on the oncoming superstorm. As long as they stick to their hard science discussion of the mechanics of ice flow, their account is strangely compelling. But the fictionalized viewpoints and digressions on narrowly lost civilizations impose to the point that the reader flourishes his head and wishes for more prose on ice flow and less on the eventually lost credits of Atlantis. If indeed Bell and Streiber are correct in their premise that the end of human civilization is a heartbeat away, then someone else will have to warn humanity in a way that appeals more to the head and less to the heart. The possibility of being right is no excuse for being unconvincing.