Could The Day After Tomorrow’s Apocalyptic Climate Scenario Really Happen?

When the disaster film by Roland Emmerich, “The Day After Tomorrow” was released in 2004, moviegoers got to see a world in which the climate of the Earth had undergone many rapid changes which resulted in a number of weather conditions which ravaged cities with large populations.

The study, published in the journal Nature, said such a scenario would “obliterate” global warming for the roughly 15 to 20 years, offsetting global temperatures by 0.8C.

In the movie, global warming caused the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC) to abruptly collapse, leading to a series of catastrophic events such as New York being flooded, Los Angeles being leveled by tornados, and extreme freezing throughout the entire northern hemisphere.

With the help of ECHAM, a climate model from the Max-Planck Institute in Hamburg, Germany, the scientists was able to analyze the effects and possibility of the AMOC’s collapse.

He said that this heat flow will get reversed when the planet cools because of a reduction in volcanic eruptions or greenhouse gas emissions.

Rather than the flow moving into the oceans on Earth from the atmosphere, it moves from the large bodies of water to the atmosphere.

He also said that a similar reversal in energy flow will even be observed inside the atmosphere.

The changes to the climate depicted in the film centered on a major disruption in the North Atlantic Ocean Current, which is an extension of the Gulf Stream. And while this particularly scenario would likely never occur, there may be a few truth to it. This means that instead of the same amount of heat energy added to global climate systems each year, feedback loops make the changes more pronounced over time.

The new study by the University of Southampton also showed that the recent period of weak global warming temperatures should not be attributed to one factor.

But, it turns out that the events presented in the film could actually happen, according to the findings of Sybren Drijfhout, a professor at the University of Southampton’s Ocean and Earth Science. These scenes of the movie received a few criticisms from climate scientists and it affected the scientific reliability of the film. However, a few areas to the east of the North Atlantic, which rely up on the warm water brought north by the Gulf Stream for their mild climate, take longer to recover.

Using advanced computer models, the researchers found global temperatures could drop as much as 50 degrees Fehrenheit in a very short amount of time. Most probably El Niño plays a role and possibly also changes in the Southern Ocean due to shifting and increasing westerlies.