Tag Archives: the day after tomorrow

Climate Change and Atlantic Circulation

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Today my very first scientific publication is appearing in Geophysical Research Letters. During my summer at UVic, I helped out with a model intercomparison project regarding the effect of climate change on Atlantic circulation, and was listed as a coauthor on the resulting paper. I suppose I am a proper scientist now, rather than just a scientist larva.

The Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC for short) is an integral part of the global ocean conveyor belt. In the North Atlantic, a massive amount of water near the surface, cooling down on its way to the poles, becomes dense enough to sink. From there it goes on a thousand-year journey around the world – inching its way along the bottom of the ocean, looping around Antarctica – before finally warming up enough to rise back to the surface. A whole multitude of currents depend on the AMOC, most famously the Gulf Stream, which keeps Europe pleasantly warm.

Some have hypothesized that climate change might shut down the AMOC: the extra heat and freshwater (from melting ice) coming into the North Atlantic could conceivably lower the density of surface water enough to stop it sinking. This happened as the world was coming out of the last ice age, in an event known as the Younger Dryas: a huge ice sheet over North America suddenly gave way, drained into the North Atlantic, and shut down the AMOC. Europe, cut off from the Gulf Stream and at the mercy of the ice-albedo feedback, experienced another thousand years of glacial conditions.

A shutdown today would not lead to another ice age, but it could cause some serious regional cooling over Europe, among other impacts that we don’t fully understand. Today, though, there’s a lot less ice to start with. Could the AMOC still shut down? If not, how much will it weaken due to climate change? So far, scientists have answered these two questions with “probably not” and “something like 25%” respectively. In this study, we analysed 30 climate models (25 complex CMIP5 models, and 5 smaller, less complex EMICs) and came up with basically the same answer. It’s important to note that none of the models include dynamic ice sheets (computational glacial dynamics is a headache and a half), which might affect our results.

Models ran the four standard RCP experiments from 2006-2100. Not every model completed every RCP, and some extended their simulations to 2300 or 3000. In total, there were over 30 000 model years of data. We measured the “strength” of the AMOC using the standard unit Sv (Sverdrups), where each Sv is 1 million cubic metres of water per second.

Only two models simulated an AMOC collapse, and only at the tail end of the most extreme scenario (RCP8.5, which quite frankly gives me a stomachache). Bern3D, an EMIC from Switzerland, showed a MOC strength of essentially zero by the year 3000; CNRM-CM5, a GCM from France, stabilized near zero by 2300. In general, the models showed only a moderate weakening of the AMOC by 2100, with best estimates ranging from a 22% drop for RCP2.6 to a 40% drop for RCP8.5 (with respect to preindustrial conditions).

Are these somewhat-reassuring results trustworthy? Or is the Atlantic circulation in today’s climate models intrinsically too stable? Our model intercomparison also addressed that question, using a neat little scalar metric known as Fov: the net amount of freshwater travelling from the AMOC to the South Atlantic.

The current thinking in physical oceanography is that the AMOC is more or less binary – it’s either “on” or “off”. When AMOC strength is below a certain level (let’s call it A), its only stable state is “off”, and the strength will converge to zero as the currents shut down. When AMOC strength is above some other level (let’s call it B), its only stable state is “on”, and if you were to artificially shut it off, it would bounce right back up to its original level. However, when AMOC strength is between A and B, both conditions can be stable, so whether it’s on or off depends on where it started. This phenomenon is known as hysteresis, and is found in many systems in nature.

This figure was not part of the paper. I made it just now in MS Paint.

Here’s the key part: when AMOC strength is less than A or greater than B, Fov is positive and the system is monostable. When AMOC strength is between A and B, Fov is negative and the system is bistable. The physical justification for Fov is its association with the salt advection feedback, the sign of which is opposite Fov: positive Fov means the salt advection feedback is negative (i.e. stabilizing the current state, so monostable); a negative Fov means the salt advection feedback is positive (i.e. reinforcing changes in either direction, so bistable).

Most observational estimates (largely ocean reanalyses) have Fov as slightly negative. If models’ AMOCs really were too stable, their Fov‘s should be positive. In our intercomparison, we found both positives and negatives – the models were kind of all over the place with respect to Fov. So maybe some models are overly stable, but certainly not all of them, or even the majority.

As part of this project, I got to write a new section of code for the UVic model, which calculated Fov each timestep and included the annual mean in the model output. Software development on a large, established project with many contributors can be tricky, and the process involved a great deal of head-scratching, but it was a lot of fun. Programming is so satisfying.

Beyond that, my main contribution to the project was creating the figures and calculating the multi-model statistics, which got a bit unwieldy as the model count approached 30, but we made it work. I am now extremely well-versed in IDL graphics keywords, which I’m sure will come in handy again. Unfortunately I don’t think I can reproduce any figures here, as the paper’s not open-access.

I was pretty paranoid while coding and doing calculations, though – I kept worrying that I would make a mistake, never catch it, and have it dredged out by contrarians a decade later (“Kate-gate”, they would call it). As a climate scientist, I suppose that comes with the job these days. But I can live with it, because this stuff is just so darned interesting.

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The Day After Tomorrow: A Scientific Critique

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The 2004 film The Day After Tomorrow, in which global warming leads to a new ice age, has been vigorously criticized by climate scientists. Why is this? What mistakes in the film led Dr. Andrew Weaver, Canada’s top climate modeller, to claim that “the science-fiction movie The Day After Tomorrow creatively violates every known law of thermodynamics”? What prompted Dr. Gavin Schmidt, NASA climatologist, to say that “The Day After Tomorrow was so appallingly bad, it was that that prompted me to become a more public scientist”? What could an innocent blockbuster movie have done to deserve such harsh criticisms?

A New Ice Age?

The Day After Tomorrow opens with a new scientific discovery by paleoclimatologist Jack Hall, played by Dennis Quaid. After a particularly harrowing trip to gather Antarctic ice cores, he discovers evidence of a previously unknown climate shift that occurred ten thousand years ago. Since the film is set in the early 2000s, and ice cores yielding hundreds of thousands of years of climate data have been studied extensively since the 1960s, it seems implausible that such a recent and dramatic global climatic event would have gone previously unnoticed by scientists. However, this misstep is excusable, because a brand new discovery is a vital element of many science fiction films.

Jack goes on to describe this ancient climate shift. As the world was coming out of the last glacial period, he explains, melting ice sheets added so much freshwater to the Atlantic Ocean that certain ocean circulation patterns shut down. Since thermohaline circulation is a major source of heat for the surfaces of continents, the globe was plunged back into an ice age. Jack’s portrayal of the event is surprisingly accurate: a sudden change in climate did occur around ten thousand years ago, and was most likely caused by the mechanisms he describes. To scientists, it is known as the Younger Dryas.

The world’s ascent out of the last ice age was not smooth and gradual; rather, it was punctuated by jumps in temperature coupled with abrupt returns to glacial conditions. The Younger Dryas – named after a species of flower whose pollen was preserved in ice cores during the event – was the last period of sudden cooling before the interglacial fully took over. Ice core data worldwide indicates a relatively rapid drop in global temperatures around eleven thousand years ago. The glacial conditions lasted for approximately a millennium until deglaciation resumed.

The leading hypothesis for the cause of the Younger Dryas involves a sudden influx of freshwater from the melting Laurentide Ice Sheet in North America into the Atlantic Ocean. This disruption to North Atlantic circulation likely caused North Atlantic deep water formation, a process which supplies vast amounts of heat to northern Europe, to shut down. Substantial regional cooling allowed the glaciers of Europe to expand. The ice reflected sunlight, which triggered further cooling through the ice-albedo feedback. However, the orbital changes which control glacial cycles eventually overpowered this feedback. Warming resumed, and the current interglacial period began.

While Jack Hall’s discussion of the Younger Dryas is broadly accurate, his projections for the future are far-fetched. He asserts that, since the most recent example of large-scale warming triggered glacial conditions, the global warming event currently underway will also cause an ice age. At a United Nations conference, he claims that this outcome is virtually certain and “only a matter of time”. Because it happened in the past, he reasons, it will definitely happen now. Jack seems to forget that every climate event is unique: while looking to the past can be useful to understand today’s climate system, it does not provide a perfect analogue upon which we can base predictions. Differences in continental arrangement, initial energy balance, and global ice cover, to name a few factors, guarantee that no two climate changes will develop identically.

Additionally, Jack’s statements regarding the plausibility of an imminent thermohaline shutdown due to global warming fly in the face of current scientific understanding. As the world continues to warm, and the Greenland ice sheet continues to melt, the North Atlantic circulation will probably slow down due to the added freshwater. The resulting cooling influence on parts of Europe will probably still be overwhelmed by warming due to greenhouse gases. However, a complete shutdown of North Atlantic deep water formation is extremely unlikely within this century. It’s unclear whether an eventual shutdown is even possible, largely because there is less land ice available to melt than there was during the Younger Dryas. If such an event did occur, it would take centuries and still would not cause an ice age – instead, it would simply cancel out some of the greenhouse warming that had already occurred. Cooling influences simply decrease the global energy balance by a certain amount from its initial value; they do not shift the climate into a predetermined state regardless of where it started.

Nevertheless, The Day After Tomorrow goes on to depict a complete shutdown of Atlantic thermohaline circulation in a matter of days, followed by a sudden descent into a global ice age that is spurred by physically impossible meteorological phenomena.

The Storm

Many questions about the Ice Ages remain, but the scientific community is fairly confident that the regular cycles of glacial and interglacial periods that occurred throughout the past three million years were initiated by changes in the Earth’s orbit and amplified by carbon cycle feedbacks. Although these orbital changes have been present since the Earth’s formation, they can only lead to an ice age if sufficient land mass is present at high latitudes, as has been the case in recent times. When a glacial period begins, changes in the spatial and temporal distribution of sunlight favour the growth of glaciers in the Northern Hemisphere. These glaciers reflect sunlight, which alters the energy balance of the planet. The resulting cooling decreases atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases, through mechanisms such as absorption by cold ocean waters and expansion of permafrost, which causes more cooling. When this complex web of feedbacks stabilizes, over tens of thousands of years, the average global temperature is several degrees lower and glaciers cover much of the Northern Hemisphere land mass.

The ice age in The Day After Tomorrow has a more outlandish origin. Following the thermohaline shutdown, a network of massive hurricane-shaped snowstorms, covering entire continents, deposits enough snow to reflect sunlight and create an ice age in a matter of days. As if that weren’t enough, the air at the eye of each storm is cold enough to freeze people instantly, placing the characters in mortal danger. Jack’s friend Terry Rapson, a climatologist from the UK, explains that cold air from the top of the troposphere is descending so quickly in the eye of each storm that it does not warm up as expected. He estimates that the air must be -150°F (approximately -100°C) or colder, since it is instantly freezing the fuel lines in helicopters.

There are two main problems with this description of the storm. Firstly, the tropopause (the highest and coldest part of the troposphere) averages -60°C, and nowhere does it reach -100°C. Secondly, the eye of a hurricane – and presumably of the hurricane-shaped snowstorms – has the lowest pressure of anywhere in the storm. This fundamental characteristic indicates that air should be rising in the eye of each snowstorm, not sinking down from the tropopause.

Later in the film, NASA scientist Janet Tokada is monitoring the storms using satellite data. She notes that temperature is decreasing within the storm “at a rate of 10 degrees per second”. Whether the measurement is in Fahrenheit or Celsius, this rate of change is implausible. In under a minute (which is likely less time than the satellite reading takes) the air would reach absolute zero, a hypothetical temperature at which all motion stops.

In conclusion, there are many problems with the storm system as presented in the film, only a few of which have been summarized here. One can rest assured that such a frightening meteorological phenomenon could not happen in the real world.

Sea Level Rise

Before the snowstorms begin, extreme weather events – from hurricanes to tornadoes to giant hailstones – ravage the globe. Thrown in with these disasters is rapid sea level rise. While global warming will raise sea levels, the changes are expected to be extremely gradual. Most recent estimates project a rise of 1-2 metres by 2100 and tens of metres in the centuries following. In contrast, The Day After Tomorrow shows the ocean rising by “25 feet in a matter of seconds” along the Atlantic coast of North America. This event is not due to a tsunami, nor the storm surge of a hurricane; it is assumed to be the result of the Greenland ice sheet melting.

As the film continues and an ice age begins, the sea level should fall. The reasons for this change are twofold: first, a drop in global temperatures causes ocean water to contract; second, glacier growth over the Northern Hemisphere locks up a great deal of ice that would otherwise be present as liquid water in the ocean. However, when astronauts are viewing the Earth from space near the end of the film, the coastlines of each continent are the same as today. They have not been altered by either the 25-foot rise due to warming or the even larger fall that cooling necessitates. Since no extra water was added to the Earth from space, maintaining sea level in this manner is physically impossible.

Climate Modelling

Since the Second World War, ever-increasing computer power has allowed climate scientists to develop mathematical models of the climate system. Since there aren’t multiple Earths on which to perform controlled climatic experiments, the scientific community has settled for virtual planets instead. When calibrated, tested, and used with caution, these global climate models can produce valuable projections of climate change over the next few centuries. Throughout The Day After Tomorrow, Jack and his colleagues rely on such models to predict how the storm system will develop. However, the film’s representation of climate modelling is inaccurate in many respects.

Firstly, Jack is attempting to predict the development of the storm over the next few months, which is impossible to model accurately using today’s technology. Weather models, which project initial atmospheric conditions into the future, are only reliable for a week or two: after this time, the chaotic nature of weather causes small rounding errors to completely change the outcome of the prediction. On the other hand, climate models are concerned with average values and boundary conditions over decades, which are not affected by the principles of chaos theory. Put another way, weather modelling is like predicting the outcome of a single dice roll based on how the dice was thrown; climate modelling is like predicting the net outcome of one hundred dice rolls based on how the dice is weighted. Jack’s inquiry, though, falls right between the two: he is predicting the exact behaviour of a weather system over a relatively long time scale. Until computers become vastly more precise and powerful, this exercise is completely unreliable.

Furthermore, the characters make seemingly arbitrary distinctions between “forecast models”, “paleoclimate models”, and “grid models”. In the real world, climate models are categorized by complexity, not by purpose. For example, GCMs (General Circulation Models) represent the most processes and typically have the highest resolutions, while EMICs (Earth System Models of Intermediate Complexity) include more approximations and run at lower resolutions. All types of climate models can be used for projections (a preferred term to “forecasts” because the outcomes of global warming are dependent on emissions scenarios), but are only given credence if they can accurately simulate paleoclimatic events such as glacial cycles. All models include a “grid”, which refers to the network of three-dimensional cells used to split the virtual Earth’s surface, atmosphere, and ocean into discrete blocks.

Nevertheless, Jack gets to work converting his “paleoclimate model” to a “forecast model” so he can predict the path of the storm. It is likely that this conversion involves building a new high-resolution grid and adding dozens of new climatic processes to the model, a task which would take months to years of work by a large team of scientists. However, Jack appears to have superhuman programming abilities: he writes all the code by himself in 24 hours!

When he has finished, he decides to get some rest until the simulation has finished running. In the real world, this would take at least a week, but Jack’s colleagues wake him up after just a few hours. Evidently, their lab has access to computing resources more powerful than anything known to science today. Then, Jack’s colleagues hand him “the results” on a single sheet of paper. Real climate model output comes in the form of terabytes of data tables, which can be converted to digital maps, animations, and time plots using special software. Jack’s model appeared to simply spit out a few numbers, and what these numbers may have referred to is beyond comprehension.

If The Day After Tomorrow was set several hundred years in the future, the modelling skill of climate scientists and the computer power available to them might be plausible. Indeed, it would be very exciting to be able to build, run, and analyse models as quickly and with as much accuracy as Jack and his colleagues can. Unfortunately, in the present day, the field of climate modelling works quite differently.

Conclusions

The list of serious scientific errors in The Day After Tomorrow is unacceptably long. The film depicts a sudden shutdown of thermohaline circulation due to global warming, an event that climate scientists say is extremely unlikely, and greatly exaggerates both the severity and the rate of the resulting cooling. When a new ice age begins in a matter of days, it isn’t caused by the well-known mechanisms that triggered glacial periods in the past – rather, massive storms with physically impossible characteristics radically alter atmospheric conditions. The melting Greenland ice sheet causes the oceans to rise at an inconceivable rate, but when the ice age begins, sea level does not fall as the laws of physics dictate it should. Finally, the film depicts the endeavour of science, particularly the field of climate modelling, in a curious and inaccurate manner.

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. One can only hope that future blockbuster movies about climate change will be more rigorous with regards to scientific accuracy.