Aptly Titled Book Convincingly Forecasts Why and How Global Warming Impacts Our Planet
Written: Feb 04 '07 (Updated Feb 04 '07)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Explains how global warming impacts our planet. Good but frightening reading.
Cons: Not entirely convincing at times.
The Bottom Line: Its case is more than convincing that global warming will irrefutably change our planet. Buy it, read it, pass it to a friend.
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| swopedesign's Full Review: |
Global warming to many just means that the earth is getting warmer due to trapped greenhouse gases and a shrinking ozone layer in our atmosphere. Big deal, right? Nobody likes too much cold anyway! Well, global warming, is a very big deal. So big in fact that the United Nations has recently released its report on global warming. Long before the UN's report, however, these authors looked at global warming and published this book, which helps explain global warming's causes, impact, and one frightening but convincingly possible scenario: A New Ice Age!
In 1999, Art Bell and Whitley Strieber published a best-selling book called The Coming Global Superstorm. This book describes many things. In brief, this book describes first of all what a superstorm is. It also describes the conditions under which a superstorm will occur. Bell and Strieber also look into our historical past and theorize that superstorms have occurred in our ancient history, and conclude that nearly each superstorm coincided with global extinctions on the scale of 70% of the world's species alive at the time of the superstorm. Superstorms, they believe, also triggered past ice ages, in addition to extinctions.
The cause and effect possibilities and implications are powerfully convincing. Imagine it. In a period of just a few weeks, nearly half the globe covered in ice and snow dozens if not hundreds of feet thick, and deadly cold (How thick is the ice in an ice age? I don't know. Think of the Arctic shelf, and icebergs.) Most of humanity and billions of plants and animals will perish in the sudden climate change. Some will be flash frozen, solid. In fact, we have found such examples of animals that were frozen thus, stomachs full of food that didn't belong to the climate where the animals perished!
To elaborate on these theories, Bell and Strieber ask themselves whether mankind has written about such events in our ancient past, and so look at past ancient cultures, and consider some of the earth's greatest structures, such as the Great Pyramids and the recent discovery off the coast of Japan. Bell and Strieber believe these structures and others like them described in this book could not have been built by any culture known to modern man. The technology to construct them is impossible even with today's advanced building technology. They suggest, instead, that these ancient structures were built not by aliens but by other highly-advanced cultures that were here on earth before us and destroyed by superstorms, such that mankind sprang from the desolation and began anew after each superstorm. A rebirth if you will. The great Sphinx, for example, they claim has been eroded by rainwater sometime in the past, but it now rests in the desert where no water falls. For them, this indicates that the climate in that region was once far different than the climate in the region today, and that this change may have been caused by the last superstorm.
Bell and Strieber also consider and compare earth's religions and tales of the Great Flood which permeate modern and ancient religions and myths. Bell and Strieber believe that these MUST be based on some factual event or the event would not appear in cultures around the globe! Of course, many intellectuals believe this and accept this as fact, as proof that the Bible is an accurate written history of mankind. A Great Flood would be caused by such events as predicted by Bell and Strieber.
The superstorm such as Bell and Strieber describe is brought to entertaining life in the film The Day After Tomorrow, starring Dennis Quaid. While the film tells a good story and makes use of very effective special effects, most viewers don't realize that this film is a dramatization of the events described in The Coming Global Superstorm. Unfortunately, this dramatization does not provide enough factual information to understand what happens in the film. The filmmakers could have included some exposition to explain and foreshadow the chain of events as depicted in the film. Though this film is entertaining, and IMHO very good, when compared to the inspiration for it, the book is far better -- and frightening -- than the movie.
In the end, Bell and Strieber call readers and mankind to make great efforts to control our species' role in global warming, and if possible stall it. This dire warning has been dismissed as fanciful invention and preposterous theory, but if we examine in just the last few years weather patterns, the earth has experienced some of the most violent and unusual weather in modern history. The increasingly more powerful hurricanes. The more frequent and more powerful tornadoes beyond Tornado Alley. Bell and Strieber believe that a glance in the paper on nearly any given day provides evidence that something is happening to the earth's climate, and that no country on the earth is spared.
The truth as Bell and Strieber see it: if we do not find a way to balance the atmospheric conditions, a resulting superstorm might very well submit the earth once more to another great ice age where the entire northern hemisphere, including the U.S., Canada, Europe, Russia, etc. is covered by unimaginable ice, snow and cold. Of course, such conditions will kill every living thing in these areas and make them nearly uninhabitable. The uncertainty is which species will become extinct -- including mankind -- and which will survive should such a superstorm take place. Bell and Strieber, as does Quaid's character in The Day After Tomorrow, indicate that there is no way to know when this global superstorm will occur, but conditions are ripening for just such a storm to occur.
If you think global warming means little more than a higher cooling bill in the summer and milder winters, read The Coming Global Superstorm and watch The Day After Tomorrow, in that order. Then decide whether you believe, and what you will do to curb global warming and prepare for the inevitable, a global superstorm predicted by Bell and Strieber. Incidentally, the UN's report on global warming confirms much if not all the global warming facts and theories found in The Coming Global Superstorm.
Recommended:
Yes
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swopedesign
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Member: Mike Swope
Location: Wichita, KS
Reviews written: 40
Trusted by: 2 members
About Me:
Graphic/web designer. Grew brother's retail tire business. Now managing a similar long-established business.
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