The Key Read Free Page A

is fluently visible in the fossil record, the mechanism that leads from sudden upheavals of climate to ages-long planetary entrapment in ice remains much debated, so I was quite interested when he said, “The next ice age will begin soon, and this will lead to the extinction of mankind, or to a massive reduction in population, given your inability to expand off the planet. This planet is at present a death trap.”
    I try never to allow myself to forget that every single person on earth is as valuable and important to themselves as I am to myself, and so I found this statement profoundly disturbing. I immediately wanted to sound a warning. I wanted to save us all.
    At that time, the great danger of global warming was thought to be a continuous rise in temperatures that would cause earth to become so hot that it was uninhabitable—but it was also something far off, a problem to be debated now, solved later.
    The Master of the Key suggested that it was a very much more immediate problem. He said that, as polar ice melts and floods the northern ocean with freshwater, the North Atlantic Current would fail, leading to a radical climate change that would unfold over “a single season.”
    If such a thing happened, it would obviously bring massive suffering to mankind. Even worse, the disaster would strike hardest at our most economically active and well-educated populations in North America and Europe.
    But was it the truth? In those days, I still didn’t have much in the way of verification of any of the man’s ideas, and this one seemed particularly radical. I was still extremely unsure about whether or not the whole encounter had simply been imagined. To keep me from just dropping the whole thing, my wife had to constantly remind me of the phone call I’d made to her.
    In those days, while there was controversy about what caused ice ages, it was generally agreed that the change was a gradual one. However, I did find an article in the January 1998 Atlantic Monthly called “The Great Climate Flip-flop,” by William H. Calvin, that suggested that the change might be very sudden.
    This same suggestion appeared in commentary about ice cores taken from Greenland and the Antarctic, but there seemed to be no clear mechanism that would cause such a dramatic change so fast.
    Putting what I had been told by the Master together with the research I was doing, I came to write The Coming Global Superstorm , which was turned into a film by Roland Emmerich called The Day After Tomorrow .
    The film was a terrific success with the public, and served to cause many millions to consider for the first time that the abstraction called “global warming” might have unexpected and serious consequences.
    For the most part, though, the press and the environmental movement condemned the film for compressing the period of change into too short a time.
    A hundred and thirty-seven million years ago, there was an event that caused dramatic and sudden climate change, which must have severely impacted animal populations on earth. Thirteen thousand years ago, a sudden dump of freshwater into the North Atlantic from a gigantic glacial lake in Canada triggered a return to ice age conditions known as the Younger Dryas.
    What happened on both of these occasions, and has happened on many others, is now clear. It is exactly what the Master of the Key warned might happen. The process is this: carbon dioxide levels rise, causing warming. This warming melts permafrost, which releases massive amounts of methane into the air. The methane is a devilishly efficient heat trap, and global temperatures rise dramatically. This results in rapid polar melt and a flood of fresh melt water into the ocean. Because freshwater heats and cools much more quickly than salt water, ocean temperatures rise. This reduces the difference in water temperature from north to south, weakening the natural heat pump effect that draws warm water into the