In 2004, the movie “Day After Tomorrow” depicted a freak weather system that inundates Earth with Armageddon-style weather, from tidal waves engulfing New York City to a permafrost that kills billions, while survivors hunker down awaiting a thaw. Cool CG, including your basic mob panic and flying trucks in a debris storm you needed to jump out of the way from in order to survive.
This was, among other things, a warning fable about global warming and the trouble we’d be in for if we didn’t pay attention and do something now. They even included, a computer forecast of the continental-sized storm weather pattern forming on a globe scale that would do the number.
See any resemblance to what’s happening in the Caribbean today?
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| The "Day After Tomorrow" hurricane map |
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September’s real thing
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Spooky. As I write this, Irma is making landfall on US soil and no doubt will be a horrendous event affecting millions of people. But hopefully, the future will bring change that helps to regulate or even eliminate the worst natural disasters.
One such solution has been proposed by a group of serious science geeks based on a detailed plan to build thousands of giant floating plastic donuts -- enormous plastic rings made up of thousands of discarded automobile tires -- that would be strategically anchored in the Caribbean. As they floated on the surface, the water that washed over them would be gradually pushed down by its own weight through long hanging plastic tubes to exit in colder deeper water, exchanging the surface water with colder water from below the floats.
Done en mass, this could theoretically cool the surface temperature of the ocean enough to mitigate or entirely prevent the formation of the kinds of high pressure systems that typically turn into hurricanes, ridding us of this incredibly dangerous and repetitive disaster process. (more about it here)
Preposterous? Welcome to my daily world of scifi wonder, where magic is the stuff of greater dreams.
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