- Global Warming Conference -
-UN Conference on Global Warming-
0:06:20 - The main part of the movie kicks off with the "UN Conference on Global Warming, New Delhi". The UN Conferences on Global Warming do actually take place where countries across the globe discuss, what else, global warming. In real life, the conferences initially started in 1992 with the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) which was a treaty where countries got together and vowed to make a difference in climate change (UNFCCC.int). Following that, the UN set up an annual Conferences on the Parties (COP) about Global Warming. The COP started in 1995 in Berlin and continues to run up through today (as of 2013 when this is being written). In 2002 the conference was held in New Delhi (COP 8), as depicted in the movie (UNFCCC.int). The conference took place from October 23rd - November 1st. I find this amazing that they actually went to that level of detail to get this right.
- Climate Shift 10,000 Years Ago -
There is also an event that took place around 10,700 years ago termed the Younger Dryas, which seems to be a direct result of polar melting. This polar melting caused to temperature of Southern Greenland to rise by 7°C in about 50 years (Dansgaard et al., 1989). This event ushered in the warming that is known from 10,000 years onward. However you slice it, it appears that a shift in the climate did take place 10,000 years ago, as recorded in the ice cores. Although the shift seems to be more towards balance than out of balance.
The problem though is that Jack goes on to state that what was detected in the ice cores, in the movie, was a concentration of natural green house gases that resulted in a smaller ice age that lasted 200 years. I have found no evidence of such an ice age. As mentioned in the previous paragraphs, I have found just the opposite, that 10,000 years ago was the beginning of stability in the climate. The ice age ended around 11,700 years ago and the glaciers took about 2,000 years to melt. That melting is what is visible as the strong uptick in the graph (to the left) before the final leveling out. This even led to climates being warmer and drier than they are today from 9,000 to 5,000 years ago (snu.ac.kr). So other than getting the timing right, the movie completely made up the "cataclysmic" event.
- Warming Leads to Cooling -
The main problem with this part of the movie though, is the map that they use (pictured left, arrows added to show direction of the movement as emphasized in the movie). It is a much simplified version of the already simplified figure above and to the right. The current they show of the Gulf Stream is actually running along the coast of Africa and Europe instead of from the Gulf of Mexico to England.
0:07:10 - The timeline of all of this occurring is also brought up in the movie which is a major flaw of the movie itself. Hall is asked when he thought this could happen and acting like a scientist he gives his best estimate, which could be any time really, anything from 100 years to 1,000 years. he stipulates though that something needs to be done today to help curb future catastrophes. Although, the timeline mentioned by Hall is feasible, this could take place over the course of the next few thousand years, the timeline of the movie takes a different course and is much sped up from that that is predicted.
0:32:23 - The North Atlantic Current is said to rely on the delicate balance between salt and fresh water. The movie then goes on to state that the current has reached a "critical desalinization point" due to the amount of fresh water dumped into the ocean by the melting of the polar ice, i.e. the Greenland Ice Sheet. What is meant by this "desalinization point"? Restating a little of what I said before, the way that the water circulation works in the North Atlantic is that warm water is carried north from the Gulf of Mexico. As it reaches the northern latitudes it then sinks. The heavier water is rich in salt, making it denser. Fresh water from rainwater and the melting of ice and snow, like from glaciers, is less dense than saltwater and therefore will actually float on top of seawater until enough mixing has taken place. This happens at all river deltas where fresh and salt water meet. What the movie is predicting is that the fresh water content has reached a maximum where suddenly the current is no longer dropping down into the ocean, cutting off oceanic circulation for the entire planet, or at least rerouting it, cutting off the warmer waters to the north.
This scenario is a distinct possibility. The melting of the ice caps could have a significant impact on the planet, plunging us into a colder climate due to the melting of the polar ice caps (NASA). The problem though, is that if this were to happen it would take decades at the least to feel any significant impacts. The global temperature is not going to drop to freezing overnight, which is literally what the movie is stating. The globe is such a large place that it takes a large time for anything to change. Think of a truck versus a car driving down the highway. The larger the vehicle the more time it takes to alter its course.
- The Kyoto Accord -
0:07:10 - The Kyoto Accord is the next thing brought up in the movie. A controversial international treaty among nations that was started in 1997 and officially adopted in 2005. The purpose of the treaty was to legally bind countries to alter their greenhouse gas emissions (UNFCCC.int). The main controversy was that the United States would not back the treaty due to the harm it would place on the economy by putting an unwanted demand on industry (Newsmax.com) and that it did not include China and other fast growing developing countries, which were responsible for a large percentage of the global greenhouse gases (USAToday). Since the US is one of the largest producer of greenhouse gas emissions, this was seen as a possible failure of the document, although it has gone through without US backing. The depiction of the delegate from the United States shown in the movie is supposed to represent George W. Bush's rejection of the Accord due to the reasons that are mentioned in the movie.
Hear of the Hamaker hypothesis? I link to a movie on the web about it in this article: http://www.transitiontownsca.org/forum/topics/how-serious-is-climate-change . I also speculate that noctilucents, their rise in frequency and duration, may play a role as to how warming can lead to cooling. Methane increase seems particularly to increase those highly reflective clouds at the mesopause. Since I made that article which links to a site that claims to use USGS data to show an increase of earthquake activity over the last four decades or so, a Youtube video was posted entitled "Proof earthquakes are increasing." I recently got USGS data from their web site and find that in the last 40 years 8.0+ earthquakes tripled in number and the only 9.0+ quakes were in the last ten years. There is evidence posted in that paper of research showing some areas of the globe did freeze seriously fast as well as evidence the thickness of the atmosphere has reached record lows recently though it is hard to believe such cold descending so fast as depicted in the movie.
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