The Coming Global Superstorm
The Coming Global Superstorm – Review
The Strieber/Bell scenario, in brief: (a) global warming causes slowly melting of glaciers & sea-surface pack ice at great latitudes, dumping quantities of clean water into the oceans, & somehow inducing the Gulf Stream to flow straight west, rather than looping around the north Atlantic. (Presumably something similar happens around Antarctica, tho’ this isn’t made clear.) (b) Europe freezes. (c) An increase in thermal differential between high & blue latitudes, & between lower & high atmosphere, causes a band of monster storms around the polar front, which merge into a single gigantic circumpolar storm covering everything north of Florida under umpty-ump ends of snow & ice. Everybody, speaking mostly, dies. Civilization as we know it, etc. Among many points not fully explained: (a) how the authors deal the uncomfortable fact that the thermal differential between high & blue latitudes is DEcreasing, not INcreasing (sc., poles are warming more than equator); (b) why, if slowly melting the ice at the pole would force the Gulf Stream south, quickly replacing it with a recent glacier wouldn’t draw it right back up again; (c) how superheated surface air, rising to exceptional heights into an unprecedentedly cold high atmosphere, could fall back to the surface in a superchilled state, freezing everybody below it like Italian ices. (Hints: better air is extremely thin; solid surface air rising into it would expand, cooling but thinning; falling back to earth, it would necessarily recondense & reheat. This is simple gas law. If air at one per cent of sea-level pressure WERE somehow forced back to ground-level unrecondensed, people would suffocate before they nearly froze.) In short, the scenario showed can’t happen, for a congregation of fairly apparent reasons. Global warming is real, but eventually won’t cause a global superstorm. This book translates like an unpersuasive attempt to scientify something first seen in the sense of pure novelistic imagination.