One can’t extrapolate too far from past events – but my understanding is recent research suggested the onset of glacial conditions could have occurred within as little as months (and a few years at the outer limit).

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/11/091130112421.htm

I would imagine that once there was significant snow and ice cover this would have tended to reinforce the effect – a cooling positive feedback driven by albedo increase. Today albedo is decreasing increasingly rapidly in the Arctic as sea ice and land snowpack retreats earlier each year.

How fast does it need to be to count as “abrupt” climate change?

The eye forms when higher momentum air from the low levels advects upward into lower momentum air. The air aloft has lower momentum because there is a weaker height gradient in a warm core system such as a hurricane. This causes the eywall to slope outward with height due to the conservation of angular momentum. The upward motion in the convection surrounding the eyewall leads to divergent airflow all around the eyewall and thus some weak convergence over the center of the storm. This causes the air aloft to sink slowly in the center, warming and drying the air through adiabatic compression.

The fact that air sinking from the troposphere to the surface warms compressionally due to the increase in pressure is the real error in this part of the movie. Fast sinking air will warm as much as slowly sinking air since the air is increasing its pressure by the same amount as it moves from tropopause to the surface.

So even if the air temperature at the tropopause was -100C and the tropopause was at an air pressure of 200 hPa, the air temperature at the surface would still warm to 1C.

“Your question reminds me of a young lady whose blog I found by accident a few years ago. She was a high school student interested in global warming. Now she’s a college student studying to be a climate scientist. And she’s a class act. You could visit her blog and ask the same question — I’ll bet she would have excellent advice to offer. It’s here:

http://climatesight.org/

Her name is Kate, and she’s one of my heroes. Maybe soon, you will be too.”

tamino — 3 May 2012 @ 4:32 PM – http://www.realclimate.org/?comments_popup=11654#comment-234771

FYI, “tamino” is the nome de plume of a professional statistician who has worked a lot on climatology – see http://tamino.wordpress.com/. If he thinks highly of you, you’re doing a lot of things right – congrats! And thanks for continuing this blog.

Back to the topic at hand – “It would not have been very difficult or expensive for the film’s writing team to hire a climatologist as a science advisor – in fact, given that the plot revolves around global warming, it seems strange that they did not do so.” They didn’t need to – most of the audience doesn’t know or care if the picture is technically accurate.

This is part of the problem with communication to the general public – If you point out that giant storms are low pressure cells and have updrafts, and downdrafts generate heating of the atmosphere(like Foehn winds as Garth noted) and clear weather, they won’t get it, and may not believe you. We’re lucky that most people understand that high altitudes are colder, but maybe only 10% of the population understands ‘adiabatic lapse rate” or “latent heat”. If part of the plot involved fueling the helicopters with gasoline, and it resulted in a spectacular fiery explosion, they would accept that, because gas tanks on cars blow up all the time in movies – and practically never in real life; and most people are unaware that modern gas turbine engines will run unmodified on jet fuel(which is a high grade kerosine) or heating oil, or gasoline, or vegetable oil, or diesel. Most people don’t know how much of what they think they know is wrong, and colored by their social and political beliefs. Unfortunately, they are just as likely to accept it when Rush Limbaugh says “volcanoes emit 100 times the CO2 as humans” as they are to accept that AGW spawned storms will blow icy stratospheric winds to the surface.

I have to admit though, that I once watched and kind of enjoyed TDAT on the telly after coming home from work, tired. Tired is a requirement, it helps suspend disbelief :-)