Excerpt Interview with Whitley Strieber and Art Bell

from BeyondCommunion Website
January 11, 2000, Tuesday
NBC Television

MATT LAUER, co-host: Sixty-degree weather in New York City just last week. Violent storms across Europe two weeks ago. And now the government says the 1990s were the hottest decade in 1,000 years. It's enough to make us all wonder what's going on.

A new book, "The Coming Global Superstorm," by radio talk show host Art Bell and Whitley Streiber makes a dire prediction that global warming will eventually get so bad the result will be a catastrophic storm that could destroy civilization.

Art Bell, Whitley Streiber, good morning.

Mr. ART BELL ("The Coming Global Superstorm"): Good morning.

Mr. WHITLEY STREIBER ("The Coming Global Superstorm"): Good morning.

LAUER: Fact or fiction? Is this nonfiction or is this fiction?

Mm. BELL: I would call it documented reality. There's a little bit of fiction there, but it's very well-documented. Very well-documented.

Mr. STREIBER: We're a little confused about it right now, because it started out as speculative fiction based on fact. But in the past few weeks, we don't know anymore. Maybe it's turning into fact before our eyes.

LAUER: It sounds like you're rounding the corners there right now. But do you believe the conclusions you draw in this book? That would make it fiction or nonfiction?

Mr. STREIBER: The basic conclusion is that sudden climate change is the real issue.

Mr. BELL: It's occurred before.

Mr. STREIBER: Yeah.

Mr. BELL: It's going to happen again. They found the woolly mammoths with the green stuff undigested in the arctic.

Mr. STREIBER: In their mouths.

Mr. BELL: In their mouths. It came from somewhere. It was growing. They ate it. They froze instantly.

LAUER: All right. But before we don our chicken suits and yell 'The sky is falling,' let's talk about specifically the storms you talk about in this book and this coming global superstorm. Describe it for me. What's going to happen?

Mr. STREIBER: OK. We talk about a couple of things. First, as the North Atlantic current drops south, there will be an upheaval in the weather. Will it develop into one single, huge storm? We don't know.

LAUER: But worse-case scenario, in your opinion, it could?

Mr. STREIBER: If there's enough energy collected in the atmosphere from global warming when that happens, yes.

Mr. STREIBER: Worst-case scenario is the right way to put it.

LAUER: Well, let's talk about the worst-case scenario. According to the book, it's a storm that could last six weeks and make a nuclear war seem tame?

Mr. STREIBER: Yes.

LAUER: Your words. This storm would cover a quarter of the globe with ice. It would result in unprecedented death tolls and mass destruction. Here's one that will get people's attention here in the US. The US could lose three-fifths of its population.

Mr. BELL: There would be a mass migration to the south.

Mr. STREIBER: Right.

Mr. BELL: There would have to be. You'd see precursor events, like, just occurred in France and Germany. Three hundred million trees just came down in France in this last storm. Hundred and forty-mile-per-hour straight winds in Germany.

LAUER: Let's get something straight. Not a meteorologist?

Mr. BELL: No.

LAUER: Not a meteorologist?

Mr. STREIBER: No.

LAUER: Not a climatologist?

Mr. STREIBER: But informed amateurs who've worked hard...

LAUER: But not a climatologist?

Mr. STREIBER: No.

LAUER: Nor you?

Mr. BELL: Absolutely not.

LAUER: All right, so...

Mr. BELL: Talk show host.

LAUER: Where do you base this information?

Mr. BELL: Research. Certainly, if you take a look at history, we've seen these climate flips occur violently and quickly in the past. You don't have to be a climatologist to know that.

LAUER: We--we contacted a lot of meteorologists and climatologists.

Mr. BELL: I bet you did.

LAUER: Well-respected people. Here's what they said. 'While you are using correct data, your analysis of that data has drawn you to illogical and irrational conclusions.'

Mr. STREIBER: No, that's not true. I'll tell you why they said that. They said that because they don't believe there's enough energy in the atmosphere...

LAUER: Exactly what they said.

Mr. STREIBER: ...to create this storm.

LAUER: That the atmosphere can't sustain and hold enough energy to create the kind of storm you're talking about.

Mr. STREIBER: But every day that passes, the lower atmosphere gets warmer because heat's being retained. The upper atmosphere gets colder.

Mr. BELL: Mm-hmm.

Mr. STREIBER: The model is changing. Our book is a wake-up call. Maybe this won't happen. But the point is, we need science to be able to tell us what's going on right now, because the weather's changing so fast.

LAUER: But is it a wake-up call that comes real close to being a document that will just plain scare people?

Mr. STREIBER: It should scare people.

Mr. BELL: It should scare people. And it's not sufficiently scaring people yet. So the book is just, I think, publication date is actually today, though it's been out. It should scare people. People should be scared. Whitley and I disagree in one area. Whitley thinks that it can be mitigated to a great degree by human action. I don't think so. It's happened in the past before humans walked substantially and had industrial civilization. It's going to happen again.

LAUER: Mitigated by human action, meaning we cut down on the cars we drive, things like that?

Mr. STREIBER: There's a list of things in the book that any individual can do that are not intrusive into your life at all, that if everyone did them, would substantially reduce global warming.

Mr. BELL: Did you know, for example, that 40 percent of the arctic ice over the last two decades has melted? This is something we didn't know because our submarines were monitoring all this during the Cold War. Now we know. Forty percent of the arctic ice...

LAUER: But the contradiction there, Art, is, if you're saying we're getting warmer and warmer, yet you're predicting a storm that could cover a quarter of the globe with ice, it seems like those two things are at odds with one another.

Mr. BELL: Right. They are, in fact. But one precipitates the other.

Mr. STREIBER: The other. What happens is this. The ice melts, it floods the northern oceans with fresh water. This causes the temperature of the water to rise more quickly in the summer. The temperature between the arctic and the southern oceans becomes too much similar. The current stops flowing and suddenly you have a snapback into a situation where it's very cold.

LAUER: Let me--and I don't have to tell you, and I certainly don't have to remind the people who listen to your show every night--you spent an awful lot of time last year talking about the impending Y2K doom.

Mr. BELL: Mm-hmm.

LAUER: Let's be honest. Didn't happen.

Mr. BELL: I absolutely did.

LAUER: Didn't happen. So do you run the risk of sounding like the -- the radio host who cried wolf here when you come out with a book like this?

Mr. BELL: Kind of like I have egg on my face.

LAUER: Just that you've come up with another doomsday scenario.

Mr. BELL: We've spent worldwide, $ 250 billion on Y2K. So it was an event that was warned about and was mitigated. I assume that you own a home. You probably pay insurance. When your house doesn't catch on fire and burn down, you do feel like you have egg on your face when you pay the insurance premium?

LAUER: You're saying I'd better go out and pay my insurance on this one?

Mr. BELL: Well, I think that's it, yes.

LAUER: The book is called "The Coming Global Superstorm." Art Bell, Whitley Streiber, good to see you, gentlemen.

Mr. STREIBER: Good to see you.

Mr. BELL: Thank you.

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The Coming Global Superstorm

Book's Excerpt

from BeyondCommunion Website

Prologue: The Storm Begins

The earliest warning sign was something so small that it was hardly noticed at all.

The National Data Buoy Center's buoy 44011, anchored off Georges Bank 170 miles east of Hyannis, Massachusetts, appeared to be sending a faulty signal. That was the only sign from any scientific instrument anywhere in the world that two billion human lives had just come into mortal jeopardy.

The warning should have come weeks earlier, could have come years earlier. There were climatologists who were concerned enough to have begun studies that would lead to the deployment of a warning system. But there was no budget. Congress, mired in its false debate about whether global warming was even happening, wouldn't pay for any studies of the flow of the North Atlantic Current, even though it is the lifeblood of our world.

What happened off Georges Bank was this: The water temperature reading from this six-meter Nomad buoy fell suddenly from 48.1 degrees Fahrenheit to 36.3 degrees. This is a huge drop in seawater temperature to happen overnight, and it caused the National Data Buoy Center to list the buoy as malfunctioning.

 

The issue was noted, and a bulletin was distributed within the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to the effect that water temperature readings from this buoy were to be disregarded until after routine maintenance was next performed.

This standard notice never reached anybody who might have been concerned about its true meaning.

A few days later, another buoy appeared to malfunction. This one was part of the Global Ocean Observing System, feeding data to the Australian Oceanographic Data Centre from its station in the Southern Ocean a thousand miles from the Antarctic.

 

Operating under the protocols of the Global Temperature-Salinity Profile Program, AODC transmitted the data to Canada's Marine Environmental Data Service. Again, the failure of a buoy was duly noted, but the maintenance bulletin didn't reach the same people who'd seen the one for the buoy off Georges Bank. Why would it? Maintenance of the Antarctic buoy would be performed by the Australians, not the Americans.

Mankind's greatest civilization now had only a few weeks to live.

Had the scientists working on the Atlantic Climate Change Experiment known what had happened, they would certainly have been alarmed. As it was, their plan to release one hundred subsurface drifting buoys to study the North Atlantic Current was still in the preparation stage, still waiting on funding.

Even though there was no source of data to sound the warning that the world's greatest ocean current had just changed its route, it wasn't long before people from Sydney to Tokyo, from Vladivostok to Dusseldorf, from London to Los Angeles, knew that something had gone terribly wrong with the weather.

New York had been experiencing the warmest February on record. Temperatures were reaching their highest levels ever recorded for the month -- 91 degrees Fahrenheit.

Once, people would have been laughing. Nobody was laughing now.

Across the whole southern coast of the United States, from Brownsville, Texas, to Cape Fear, North Carolina, an unusual southerly flow of air began. Tender young leaves shuddered on early sprouting trees in south Texas. In Mississippi, ancient oaks tossed and bowed.

 

Along the Carolina coast, the wind hissed through pine forests. In the warm, winter-naked northeast, clattering limbs and moaning eaves made it sound cold. But it was not cold. In fact, temperatures and humidity were rising. As far as the United States was concerned, even though it was the dead of winter, summer had begun.

In Australia and New Zealand, the opposite happened. The austral summer, which had been fairly normal through January, began to show signs of an unexpected change in February, when snow now began falling in the mountains of New Zealand's southern island. Record cold gripped Auckland. Australia, farther north, remained locked in record heat, but it was clear that this would soon change.

At the Russian Federation's Meteorological Data Processing Center at Obninsk, an image was picked up off a high-density data stream from an orbiting ENVISAT satellite that confirmed what ground observers were reporting: an extremely unusual storm had suddenly formed over the Russian Arctic. Weather systems like this had been seen only a few times before.

 

The first one, which had formed over Duplin County, North Carolina, on the night of April 15, 1999, had been dubbed the "tornadocane." It was a massive tornado-producing supercell with the circulation characteristics of a hurricane. Winds in the system had reached 165 miles an hour. It had even formed an eye in an area near the mesocyclone, or tornado-producing region of the storm.

Instantly recognizing how unusual the storm they were seeing was, the Russian scientists reported it to the World Meteorological Organization. China's FY-1 Polar Orbiting Meteorological Satellite Program was also watching the storm's development. They sent the WMO an urgent message: The storm's CAPE, or collective available potential energy, appeared to be rising at a very high rate.

What a storm like that was doing there at this time of year, nobody knew -- let alone why it was becoming so powerful.

All across southern Europe, from Madrid to Istanbul, a hard, dry wind began roaring up from the south. In New York, low, wet clouds had been swarming northward for two days. In Atlanta, average wind speeds had reached thirty miles an hour. In Houston, the average speed was forty.

All over the world, meteorologists were watching the situation. So far, however, nobody had connected what was happening in different parts of the planet. Thinking was still highly localized, although numerous research facilities were observing the data being transmitted by the Russian and Chinese satellites.

Then a typhoon appeared in the central Pacific. It formed over a matter of hours -- faster, in fact, than had any typhoon ever previously recorded. Inside of a week, this massive storm was menacing coastlines from the Philippines to Japan. It was graded a Category 4 storm on the Saffir-Simpson scale, and declared a supertyphoon. It was called Max.

The U.S. National Severe Storms Laboratory, recognizing the extraordinary power of this storm, began to acquire data on it from all available sources. Close to the center of the system, wind gusts were exceeding two hundred miles an hour. Emergency weather bulletins went out across the whole of the Pacific.

Meanwhile, the Australian Bureau of Meteorology was observing another kind of system on the high seas south and west of Tasmania. This system was moving on a track that had never been seen before.

They also reported this storm to the World Meteorological Organization. Realizing that it was now receiving data on three extremely unusual storms in different parts of the world, the WMO appealed to the U.S. National Severe Storms Laboratory for help in interpreting the situation.

With wind speeds now reaching 200 miles an hour, Max was raised to Category 5. There was a possibility that it would become the strongest storm ever recorded. The "tornadocane" over the Russian Arctic was becoming part of a system of similar storms that appeared to be forming with the North Pole as their rough center.

But in Paris, temperatures were rising toward the nineties. In New York and Toronto, southerly winds in excess of forty miles an hour were being recorded.

A supertanker, the Exxon Invincible, reported that it was taking on water off Cape Race, Newfoundland, and in danger of breaking up. From Newfoundland to North Carolina the alert was sounded: The area was in peril of the greatest oil spill in history.

In Dallas, you could smell the salt tang of the Gulf of Mexico three hundred miles to the south. In London, temperatures, which had been reaching through records, had finally begun dropping. Across Europe, storms began to crash and roar, and the nights of fifty cities were streaked by lightning.

By now, climatologists and meteorologists worldwide were aware that the planet's weather was in upheaval. At the U.S. National Severe Storms Laboratory the crucial question was first asked: Why?



Chapter 1: Present Danger

Nineteen ninety-nine was the most violent year in the modern history of weather. So was 1998. So was 1997. And 1996. Anybody who glances at a weather report from time to time can see that something extraordinary is happening. But exactly what that is remains a matter of controversy.

For twenty years, we have been bombarded with warnings that global warming is a real and present danger. Equally, there have been claims that it's all nonsense.

On March 15, 1999, scientists at the University of Arizona and the University of Massachusetts reported on their construction of a thousand-year record of earth's average temperature. The results were shocking. What has happened is that a nine-hundred-year-long cooling trend has been suddenly and decisively reversed in the past fifty years. Due to the rise in heat-trapping greenhouse gases, ferocious warming is under way. The scientists predicted that the earth will shortly be warmer than it has been in millions of years.

A climatological nightmare is upon us. It is almost certainly the most dangerous thing that has ever happened in our history. However, there is a surprising amount that we can do about it. Some of it involves personal action. Some of it involves the whole society. None of it is particularly difficult or expensive, and none of it will place a cost burden on government, business, or the individual.

How effective will it be? That remains to be seen. So far, the fact that we cannot answer the question of just how dangerous global warming actually is, has meant that nobody is doing anything very decisive. But the situation is getting more and more serious. It has become clear that the deterioration of the atmosphere -- indeed, of the whole biosphere -- is happening a lot faster than even the most concerned climatologists imagined just a short time ago.

What does this mean? What might happen? We must find a way to understand. We must, because we have to empower ourselves to prevent it. Could it be that the worst climate disaster of all -- an event barely whispered about -- is actually happening right now? Could we be at the edge of runaway climate change -- an event so devastating that it could abruptly leave the world unable to feed itself, perhaps even visit it with unimaginable destruction?

To find out, we must take a journey not only through the shocking record of current climate change, but also into the amazing history of the world's weather.

At this point, almost any violent change in climate will batter our civilization because it is so enormous and makes such a massive demand on the environment. Even the unthinkable could happen: our civilization could fall.

Earth's climate works like a rubber band being stretched and suddenly released. For years, eons even, the stresses slowly build as the chemistry of the air changes. And then, in a matter of a few years or even a few months, there is a shift so vast that we can scarcely begin to imagine it.

Earth, it seems, has a powerful regulatory mechanism built into its climate. Heat increases to a certain point, and then the whole system breaks down. Cold air comes roaring down from the north, flooding the previously overheated Northern Hemisphere.

Suddenly, a new era of cold weather begins. We know, generally, how this happens. But not even science has as yet faced the fact that this change must be accompanied by an absolutely massive release of energy, as earth's climate strives to reorganize itself.

 

In other words, this great shift of climate is almost certainly accompanied by a great storm or series of storms, a weather upheaval outside of contemporary human experience. We believe that it has happened before, and that traces of what we are calling the superstorm exist in the fossil record. We believe that it comes on suddenly and that it is so destructive that it has the potential to end our civilization.

These are sensational claims, but we can prove that nature pulls the trigger suddenly and, therefore, that the rebalancing of the climate that follows must also be very sudden and involve titanic energies. This suggests that our present situation may be extremely perilous.

Over the past three million years the earth has been locked in an unusually harsh climate system. During this period, our climate has flipped from warm to cold conditions and back again many times. Again and again, earth has warmed up, getting hotter and hotter until -- very suddenly -- the glaciers have come back and entombed a quarter of the planet in ice for upwards of a hundred thousand years.

 

Sometimes, the cooling event has not resulted in a long-term buildup of ice. Sometimes, as happened around 8,000 B.C., sudden cooling has not led to the return of the ice, but has only interrupted the warming process for a short time.

All of the factors that have caused sudden climate change in the past are lining up right now. This change, which we will show is part of a vast natural cycle, has been sped up this time by human activity. When the change comes, it is likely to be much more violent than ever before, and we will offer evidence from recent and unexpected climatological data that indicates why this would be so.

We will look at the last great upheaval through the eyes of the people who were living then. Examining the fossil record, we will identify the season in which it took place. And we will see why that particular event did not result in a new ice age and learn exactly how to tell if the changes the next one brings will cause one or not.

What will this climate change be like for you and your family? This depends on where you live. The farther north your home, the more likely you will have to move quickly south.

When the warm ocean currents that now flow north cease to do so, our whole climate will change. It is our contention that the energy necessary for the superstorm will be created at that time.

Say you live in Dallas or Madrid or Rome. Your first indication that the superstorm is building might be weather reports to the effect that a series of cold fronts are moving down from the Arctic, one after another. This could happen at any time of the year.

 

You would hear that more northern places -- Toronto, Stockholm, Beijing -- were receiving extremely heavy weather -- extraordinary rain in the summer, unprecedented blizzards in the winter. This would continue for a week or more, always building in intensity.

 

Across the northern plains of the world -- the American High Plains, the central Asian steppe -- wind gusts of upwards of one hundred miles an hour would start to be recorded. We believe that it would get worse, and we will make our case over the course of this book.

Places like Edmonton and Semipalatinsk, then Minneapolis and Moscow, would cease to communicate with the outside world. Alaska and northern Siberia would have gone silent before.

From Europe to Asia to America, whole populations would be desperately attempting to move south. Because the same changes that affected currents in the North Atlantic would alter the movement of currents in the Southern Hemisphere, Australia and New Zealand would also be affected. There, summer would have turned to winter, or normal winter would have become extremely cold. Heavy seas would devastate the southern coasts of the continent. Typhoons, blowing up suddenly, would smash into the Philippines, Japan, and the Pacific islands.

The farther north you were, the more extreme conditions would be. Day after day, the storms would continue, becoming more complex and organized, larger, taking on forms never observed before.

All over the Northern Hemisphere, massive population movements would be taking place. There would be mass disorganization, and many, many people would be overrun by the superstorm.

After the superstorm was over, it would gradually become clear that a catastrophe of breathtaking proportions had occurred. The only reports from Europe would be coming from Portugal, southern Italy, and southern Spain. The entire American Midwest would be under a sheet of ice, one that would extend across Siberia and northern Europe as well. This ice would reflect vast amounts of sunlight and heat back into space.

If the storm -- as the last one appears to have done -- hit in summer, the ice would probably melt. It is possible that this happened the last time and, as we shall see, was recorded in myth all over the world.

If the storm took place in the fall or winter, then the ice could conceivably compress so much in the next few months and reflect back so much heat and light that the next summer simply would not be warm enough to melt it. The winter that followed would be the coldest in history.

The ultimate and ironic effect of global warming would have become clear to the survivors: a new ice age would have begun.

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