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Dec. 14, 1999 - Art Bell

02:51:09

Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell - Whitley Strieber - The Coming Global Superstorm

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	The Coming Global Superstorm by Whitley Strieber and Art Bell
	read by the authors.
	The earliest warning sign was something so small that it was hardly noticed at all.
	Buoy 44011, anchored in the North Atlantic Ocean off Georgia's bank about 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 2 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, would pay for any studies of the flow of the North Atlantic Current, even though it's a lifeblood of our world.
	What happened off Georgia's bank was this.
	The water temperature reading from this buoy fell suddenly from 48.1 degrees Fahrenheit to 36.3 degrees.
	This is a huge drop in seawater temperature tonight, and it caused the National Data Buoy Center to list that buoy as malfunctioning.
	A few days later, another buoy appeared to malfunction.
	This one was feeding data to the Astrographic Data Center from its station to ocean a thousand miles from the Antarctic.
	Again, the failure of the buoy was duly noted.
	But the maintenance bulletin didn't reach the same people who'd seen the one for the buoy off Georgia's 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.
	The world's greatest ocean current had just changed its route.
	And it wasn't long before people knew that something had gone terribly wrong with the weather.
	New York had been experiencing the warmest February on record.
	Temperatures reaching the 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 Australian summer 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 this, too, would soon change.
	At the Russian Federation's Meteorological Data Processing Center on Oblinsk, an image was picked up off a high-density data stream from an orbiting satellite that confirmed what ground observers were reporting.
	An extremely unusual storm had formed suddenly 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 15th, 1999, had been dubbed the Tornado Cane.
	It was a massive tornado-producing supercell with the circulation characteristics of a hurricane.
	Winds in the system had reached 165 miles per hour.
	The Russian scientist sent the World Meteorological Organization an urgent message.
	The storm's potential energy appeared to be rising at a very high rate.
	What a storm like this 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 30 miles an hour.
	Houston, the average now was 40.
	Then, suddenly, a typhoon appeared in the Central Pacific.
	It formed over a matter of hours.
	Inside of a week, the 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 super typhoon.
	They called it 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 200 miles an hour.
	Emergency weather bulletins went out across the whole of the Pacific.
	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 tornado cane 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 90s.
	In New York and Toronto, southerly winds in excess of 40 miles an hour were now being recorded.
	A supertanker reported it was beginning to take on water off Cape Race, Newfoundland, and now 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 300 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 50 cities were streaked by lightning.
	By now, climatologists and meteorologists worldwide were aware the planet's weather was in upheaval.
	At the U.S.
	National Severe Storms Laboratory, the crucial question was first asked.
	Why?
	1999 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 20 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 the 15th, 1999, scientists at the University of Arizona and the University of Massachusetts reported on their construction of a thousand-year record of the Earth's average temperature.
	The results were shocking.
	What has happened is that a 900-year-long cooling trend has been suddenly and decisively reversed in the past 50 years.
	Due to the rise in heat-trapping greenhouse gases, ferocious warming is underway.
	The scientists predicted that the Earth will shortly be warmer than it has in millions of years.
	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 few short years ago.
	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.
	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.
	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.
	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 a quarter of the planet is entombed 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 8000 BC, 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, sped up this time by human activity.
	When the change comes, it is likely to be much more violent than ever before.
	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 an Ice Age 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 Kansas City, or Bristol, or Hamburg.
	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 100 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, 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 storm 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.
	The superstorm has almost certainly happened before, probably many times.
	The last such incident may actually have been recorded by early man.
	The established story of the human past is this.
	For the last two million years, pre-human species such as Homo erectus and later Neanderthal man wandered the African landscape, spreading slowly into Europe and Asia.
	They used crude tools.
	We know this, because we have found them.
	They did not have very well-developed language.
	We know this, because their necks were too short to support the kind of breath control that complex speech requires.
	They could have uttered only simple words.
	Then, about a hundred thousand years ago, Cro-Magnon Man appeared.
	He was built very differently from his predecessors.
	He stood tall and had a broad, light skull without heavy simian brow ridges.
	With his long neck, he did have the capacity for complex language, which was one of the things that made it possible for him to develop civilization.
	About 7,000 years ago, the first towns began to be built, followed by the first cities a thousand or so years later.
	As recently as 1995, that was scientific dogma about the past, backed by many years of careful archaeological research.
	Recently, however, controversial researchers such as Graham Hancock, Richard Thompson, and William Corliss have begun urging us to take a harder look at our own past.
	Hancock, in books such as Fingerprints of the Gods, has suggested that ancient civilizations must have been far more scientifically capable than we have thought.
	Corliss, with his sourcebook series, has delved into abandoned and ignored research to unearth hundreds of unexplained discoveries in the process, gently reminding the scientific community that it has a bad habit of dismissing what it can't explain instead of evolving better theories.
	It is at last being recognized that ancient man may have been a careful observer of his world.
	And that the stories he has bequeathed us in the form of myth and legend may not reflect just a primitive imagination, but actually offer observations that are vitally important to us now.
	But before we get to the human past, we need to go way back, all the way to the first few billion years of Earth's existence, long before a single living thing existed.
	At that time, what was to become the Earth was a glowing dust cloud centered on a molten ball about half the size of the current planet.
	For eons, this mass had been orbiting the Sun, growing slowly larger as it cooled, and more and more of the dust got sucked into the ever-darker, more planet-like center.
	Then something happened, something that was improbable, but not impossible, especially not in the comet-ridden murk of the early solar system.
	An enormous object crashed into the ball of rock and lava we now call Earth.
	Within moments it became a double planet.
	The smaller body orbited the larger at first quite quickly, but as the smaller object gradually moved away, its orbital speed also dropped.
	The impact it had created was huge.
	We now call the crater it left the Pacific Ocean.
	So we ended up with a planet with a huge moon that was orbiting it more and more slowly.
	Over time, the gradually increasing drag of the Moon's gravity slowed down the rotational wind of the Earth, which would otherwise blow in excess of 200 miles an hour.
	The balance of the Earth-Moon system is exquisite.
	Were it not for the Moon being just the size that it is and orbiting the Earth just as it does, nothing more complex than a lichen would ever have evolved here.
	The march of life on Earth would never even have started.
	So now we have two improbable events.
	First, the moon broke off from the Earth without the whole planet being pulverized.
	Second, the way it ended up orbiting Earth slowed down Earth's rotational wind, creating a weather environment in which higher life forms could develop.
	One improbable event can be put off to chance.
	So can two, maybe.
	But there are more.
	Many of them.
	One example is the Jupiter effect.
	If not for the fact that Jupiter is the size that it is and has a perfectly circular orbit, Earth would not be as far from the Sun as it is.
	Even 50,000 miles closer and we would be outside the envelope of livability.
	Earth would be too hot.
	A few thousand miles farther out and the Earth would be frozen.
	There's even more.
	Our Sun is a yellow dwarf.
	If it was a larger star, it probably wouldn't have a zone around it that was congenial to the evolution of life.
	There would be too much radiation involved.
	A smaller star wouldn't emit enough heat.
	There is also something about the evolution of species that suggests that we may be extremely rare.
	Extinction events, seemingly random, have played a huge role in the evolution of life on Earth.
	But there is something about these events that is crucial to our understanding of ourselves.
	An example of what this is can be seen by examining what happened after the event that killed the dinosaurs.
	As many as 75% of all species died, including the vast majority of all animals.
	For every thousand creatures alive before the event, only ten were alive afterwards.
	And yet the same thing that has happened after all the other events happened again.
	Earth didn't become sterile.
	Life didn't have to claw its way up from nothing.
	Instead, the devastated landscape burst forth with new creatures, and in 10 million years, it was teeming once again with animals, better animals than before.
	The new creatures were smarter, stronger, and more adaptable than the ones that had been destroyed.
	Every time Earth takes a hit, it seems that it comes back as a better model.
	The fossil record demonstrates this clearly.
	It is hard to see how chance can be the only thing at work here.
	The Earth-Moon system is a life-creating machine, and the periodic extinctions that take place seem to actually accelerate the process of evolution.
	The astronomer Carl Sagan was an advocate of the idea that there must be billions and billions of intelligent species in the universe.
	As a result of society's deep assumption that the universe must be teeming with life, we may have devalued ourselves.
	We may not realize how rare we actually are and therefore fail to understand how terribly, terribly important it is that we always err on the side of caution when we are dealing with possible harm to the human species.
	We must not tempt extinction.
	When we face how alone we probably are, we see ourselves in a new way and we begin to understand the motives that might have led our ancestors Trapped in the maelstrom of just such an extinction event like the superstorm, to try to leave a warning about it for future ages.
	It's urgent that we find this message if it is there, because the winds of time are blowing harder every day, and it will not be long before we are going to need shelter from their power.
	Today will be fine with a high of 22 in Sydney, cooler at the beaches.
	That's what the crowds along Bondi Beach expected.
	At the Australian Meteorological Bureau, however, they were still watching the unusual storm system to the south, but it was hanging well offshore.
	By noon, it was clear the weather forecast was off.
	Thunderstorms were becoming visible just above the horizon.
	The surf was getting up along beaches as far south as Wollongong.
	At the Meteorological Bureau, the weather forecast was being changed.
	Normal air flow had collapsed in a matter of hours.
	The pattern was now characteristic of July, the dead of winter for Australia.
	The radio announcer was handed a new forecast.
	Turning colder by evening with temperatures ranging down to 14.
	Possibility of rain and gusty winds after sunset.
	The storm barreled into an astonished Sydney, bringing with it a rocketing drop in temperatures.
	Freezing rain swept through the streets, emptying them of crowds.
	Confused tourists, lacking cold weather gear, huddled in their hotels.
	Restaurants began to empty when the rain turned to sleep.
	At four minutes of nine, the first fatality of the storm occurred.
	An Indonesian tourist inexplicably wandering around on Southhead's slippery flanks got swept away by the wind and fell into the wild ocean.
	Publicly, the Australian Meteorological Bureau attributed this strange weather to an unusual frontal system that was a result of the powerful typhoon now approaching Japan.
	Behind the scenes though, the entire meteorological world was in crisis, not only Australia's.
	The weather in the Northern Hemisphere was far worse.
	In fact, Continuing to deteriorate, Moscow was reporting snow, as was Beijing.
	Enormous storm complexes were still developing in the Arctic, centering now over the Eastern Polar Sea.
	Just weeks ago, the fact that the North Pole had been replaced by blue water for the first time in a quarter million years made headlines.
	This seemed far from Southern Australia.
	And local problems were beginning to capture everybody's attention.
	Word from New Zealand was grim.
	South Island was in the grip of the worst blizzard in history.
	Satellite photography told meteorologists in Sydney that an even stronger storm was building and extending out of the one that was causing all the damage in New Zealand.
	In fact, a new frontal line had developed along a route that had never been recorded before.
	It was longer and stronger than anything previously seen.
	A great roiling mass of rain and snow squalls that extended for 2,000 miles across seas that at this time of year ought to be warm.
	Summer had suddenly turned to winter in the southern hemisphere.
	The government began asking airlines to take tourists home as quickly as possible.
	Airports across the nation were jammed.
	It was like a war zone.
	This time, the southern horizon turned black.
	Overnight, the storm came in, bringing unseasonable tides with it and blanketing the whole of New South Wales with ice.
	Trees caught in full leaf, some in blossom, were overwhelmed.
	The awful explosive crack of their destruction punctuated the howling of wind and rumble of thunder.
	Tower lines, winded down by ice, fell one after another.
	The entire regional power grid was soon down and repair crews were completely incapable of coping with either the weather or the thousands of breaks.
	Emergency response efforts were chaotic because the disaster had been so unexpected.
	From the Russian Federation to France, from Japan to the US, meteorologists and climatologists were exchanging increasingly frantic emails.
	What's happening?
	What's going on?
	Nobody realized that events in the Antarctic Ocean and the North Sea could be linked by a single earthly cause.
	The only explanation that seemed logical at the time was that there must have been some sort of change in the output of our sun.
	NASA was called upon to use its solar orbiting satellites to detect what it was.
	Then, Typhoon Max, which had been building strength in a relatively unpopulated region of the Pacific, suddenly changed direction and headed for Japan.
	The world forgot about arguments over whether the sun had suddenly gotten cooler.
	What would happen when a storm bearing sustained winds of 221 miles per hour struck Tokyo?
	The human species possesses among its earliest myths an extensive record of some sort of upheaval.
	For the most part, the stories concern flooding.
	If we can accept the idea that our ancestors may have been capable observers of their world, then these myths may turn out to be carriers of information, possibly urgent information.
	Throughout the history of our species, from before we were even fully human, the Earth has been experiencing a massive and violent weather cycle.
	It has caused our climate to fluctuate between long periods of horrendous cold and short ones of benign warmth, which end abruptly and probably violently.
	Mankind has remained in southern and central latitudes during most of this time, migrating slowly from Africa into Asia, generally avoiding the more northern habitats.
	Only during the closing millennia of the last Ice Age did expansion into these regions take place, when the Cro-Magnon peoples began to move north, supported by stone tools of really sophisticated design, better clothing, and more effective shelter building.
	This amounted to an explosion of human culture and technology on a scale never seen before.
	The assumption has always been that there was a steady, linear progression of development after that, And that gradual change adequately describes the growth of human civilization.
	But the record does not necessarily support this view.
	What the record supports is a less Victorian, more modern view that cultural growth is much like physical evolution, with long periods of equilibrium being punctuated by sudden bursts of change.
	It also supports the idea that even very advanced civilizations can and do die and become lost.
	As we will see, it is perfectly possible that there was an advanced civilization on this planet that predated our own, and that many of our most ancient myths are actually devalued versions of that civilization's own perfectly accurate, but very different descriptions of the world in which it found itself, and of the disaster that killed it.
	When civilizations become extinct, their achievements can be lost even for thousands of years, even forever.
	The fragility of civilization is most recently evident in the collapse of the Roman Empire.
	A highly sophisticated, technologically potent, and economically efficient civilization had spread throughout Europe by A.D.
	200.
	It had a universal language, a universal currency, and a single government that operated according to a consistent set of written laws.
	It was literate and healthy, highly organized and durable.
	It was organized around a system of roads that in many places remain in use to this day.
	A combination of adverse changes eventually caused it to fall, whereupon what would seem to be an unlikely aftereffect occurred.
	The Roman Empire was forgotten.
	Within 300 years of its demise, Western Europe had degenerated into a welter of tribal fiefdoms speaking dozens of languages, where writing was almost a lost art and money was considered a form of magic.
	Shepherds grazed their flocks in the hollow ruins of Rome itself.
	Rome's glory became a myth.
	It would not be until the Italian Renaissance, a thousand years later, that the glory of Rome would begin to be recovered.
	If such a potent civilization could be lost within historical times, what about more distant eras?
	The world is, in fact, filled with strange ruins, the best-known example of which is the Sphinx.
	It has been thought by archaeologists that it was built by the pharaoh Kephra in about 2500 BC.
	This is because the symbol of Kephra can be seen on a stela erected in front of it by Thutmose IV when he restored it.
	There are three problems with this theory.
	The first is that there is a reference to the Sphinx on another stone record, the inventory stele.
	This stele was created before the reign of Khafre, so it is hard to see how the Sphinx could be attributed to him.
	The second problem is that the Sphinx has been carved out of a huge piece of sandstone, much of which is below the level of the surrounding desert.
	This means that it is constantly being covered with sand, Who would build a monument in a place where it was destined to be buried within a matter of a few years?
	The third problem is the largest one.
	Geologists have made a powerful case that the Sphinx was eroded by water.
	But there has not been enough rain in the Egyptian desert to account for this erosion.
	Scholar John Anthony West argued that not only the Sphinx, but the enigmatic building known as the Assyrion showed scientifically irrefutable evidence of such erosion.
	If the Sphinx was eroded by water, then it had to have been constructed before historical times by a lost civilization.
	This must have happened at least 10,000 years ago when Egypt had a much wetter climate.
	Yet the only tools we find in Egypt at that time are simple ones.
	The world is littered with other such artifacts.
	Could it be that a lost civilization of some substantial power existed in some isolated or lost area and created monuments worldwide?
	Could it be that it was destroyed by something so terrible that only its very most massive works remain?
	If so, then why aren't the unexplained structures stylistically consistent?
	In truth, they are vastly different in appearance, claiming only one consistent feature.
	They are massive and fantastically well-engineered, and we have no idea who made them or how it was done.
	In rejecting the idea that these monuments are as ancient as they would seem to be, science claims that mankind simply hasn't been competent in things like writing and language long enough to have created two fully developed worldwide civilizations.
	But there is some very surprising evidence appearing right now that might force a change in this view.
	A group of scientists at the University of New England in Australia have discovered strong evidence that a human ancestor called Homo erectus, which we had dismissed as little more than a clever ape, was actually making journeys by sea out of sight of land nearly a million years ago.
	Language of some kind would have been essential to boat building and navigation.
	This suggests that we need to fundamentally revise our ideas about the actual intelligence and abilities of pre-human beings.
	And also, perhaps, to set a much earlier date for the evolution of the ability to create civilizations.
	We have always assumed that civilization was dependent on the written word.
	It may be, however, that a very complicated social organization that included things like engineering ability evolved first, and that writing, like complex language, was an after effect.
	Previously, it had been believed that the first signs of complex human thought and action began about 150,000 years ago.
	But now that view has changed.
	We were thinking, planning creatures, making sophisticated tools, even before we were fully human.
	Even with his smaller brain, early man could talk, sail the seas, and make sophisticated tools, all of which was happening eons before we had previously believed.
	Thus the mind is much, much older than we thought.
	Have we built and lost a whole civilization before this one?
	Lost it to some terrible, nameless upheaval that periodically sweeps the world clean of all our works, so that we entirely forget who we were and what we accomplished?
	A discovery made off the coast of Japan suggests that civilization is much older than previously thought.
	It has given credence to claims that many monoliths and monolithic structures whose dates are in dispute, such as the Osirion and the Sphinx, really are as old as some observers have been suggesting.
	75 miles southwest of Okinawa lies the little island of Yonaguni.
	Something unique has been found near the island.
	In 1988, scuba divers discovered what was thought to be a huge natural formation 75 feet underwater.
	But a geologist at Ryukyu University in Okinawa, Dr. Masaki Kimura, investigated the structure and said, The object has not been manufactured by nature.
	If that had been the case, one would expect debris from erosion to have collected around the site, but there are no rock fragments there.
	Additionally, he discovered what appears to be a road around the gigantic structure, which is almost as big as the Great Pyramid at Giza.
	Robert Shock, professor of geology at Boston University, dived the site in April of 1998.
	in 1998. He said, It basically looks like a series of huge steps, each about
	a meter high.
	Essentially, it's a cliff face, like the side of a stepped pyramid.
	He added, It's possible that natural water erosion combined with the
	process of cracked rock splitting created such a structure.
	But I haven't come across such processes creating a structure as sharp as this.
	The possibility that this is a man-made object is strengthened by the fact that smaller underwater stone mounds have been discovered nearby.
	These are also made of stepped slabs.
	They are about 30 feet across and 6 feet high.
	There are no records at all of people capable of building on this scale in prehistoric Japan.
	But as we have seen, there are no records of people able to build the Sphinx in 10,000 B.C.
	either.
	At least, none that they themselves left.
	But peoples as diverse as the Babylonians and the Maya have legends that civilizing deities came to them out of the sea.
	But what about the Okanomans?
	There is indeed such a legend on Okinawa.
	The god Niraikanai came to them from the sea, bringing happiness.
	Like the Sumerian Oannes, the Viracochas of Peru, and Quetzalcoatl of the Maya and the Aztecs, this deity seems to have arisen from the ocean.
	Strangers coming on boats could have given rise to such a myth.
	So, how old is the Japanese site?
	Dr. Teraki Ishii, professor of geology at Tokyo University, explains that the land on which the structure was built sank into the ocean 10,000 years ago.
	The structure has been mapped, and it seems to have no architectural relationship to any other known building, except for the fact that like other very early structures, it is unadorned.
	It presents a strange picture indeed, unless, of course, the mind that made the object was very different from our own, and what appears to be chaos actually conceals the kind of order that we no longer understand.
	If somebody that long ago made anything like the sunken structure near Yonaguni, surely there would also be remains of their civilization elsewhere in the Pacific Basin.
	As it turns out, some of the most mysterious remains in the world are in the Pacific Basin.
	Among these are the stone ruins of Nan Madol on the island of Ponape in Micronesia.
	They appear to be made of huge logs, but the logs are actually basalt rock.
	The ruins are extensive, stretching over 90 man-made islands that cover 11 square miles.
	The basalt logs were dragged many miles and then rafted across bays to create the structures.
	Some of the blocks weigh 50 tons.
	To first construct nearly a hundred artificial islands, then to add these enormous basalt structures to them would be a huge task even for modern engineers.
	Even more difficult would be to create the extensive system of underwater tunnels in the area, which have been hewn directly out of the coral reef.
	How this was done without modern breathing equipment is a mystery.
	The fact that much of the city is sunken suggests great age.
	But there is no geologic evidence to support a date for this sinking.
	The local population has legends about Nan Madol, most specifically that the blocks were moved through the air by magic.
	As with the Sphinx and the sunken structure off Yonaguni, it is hard to relate these huge constructions to the primitive peoples who were apparently the only inhabitants of the area in which they are found.
	So?
	Could it be that we are actually looking at remains that are much older than anyone has yet guessed?
	Possibly.
	There are some mysterious ruins in the Pacific that have been carbon dated with fascinating results.
	On the island of New Caledonia and the nearby Isle of Pines there are found numerous cylinders made of cement.
	They are three to six feet in diameter and three to eight feet long.
	They are made from a very hard lime mortar cement which contains pulverized shells.
	Since the shells are organic, they are accessible to radiocarbon dating, which indicates that the cylinders are between 7,000 years old and 13,000 years old.
	Dates that are right in line with the time that the Yonaguni structure sank into the sea.
	Not only the Pacific, but the whole world is dotted with strange monoliths or monolithic structures that appear to come from a very distant time.
	One of them, the platform at Baalbek in Lebanon, probably could not be built today, not without manufacturing special tools, lifting devices, and transporters.
	Like most anomalies, the Baalbek structure has been largely ignored in favor of maintaining present theories about the past.
	The platform at Baalbek has been there for thousands of years and is indisputably a constructed object, not a natural one.
	Nobody knows who built it, although there are numerous later remains in the same area.
	The platform itself consists of three gigantic stones known collectively as the Trithlon.
	These three stones are among the heaviest objects ever moved by man, possibly the heaviest ever to have been moved as much as 35 miles, which is the distance between the platform and the quarry where the stones were cut.
	Given our understanding of the materials available to the peoples in the area during antiquity, it is not possible to see how they could have moved these stones at all.
	The ancient world had no ropes strong enough to bear the tension necessary to drag such objects, nor wheels or rollers able to support them without crumbling.
	The platform at Baalbek could not have been built using the tools and materials available to the cultures known to have been in the areas where it is found.
	And as far as the ruins off the Japanese coast and elsewhere in the Pacific are concerned, we once again have not found the faintest trace of any civilization that could have built them, let alone the engineering methods that were used.
	But the enigma doesn't stop there.
	To see a little more of the wonders that have been created by our forefathers, let's go to Peru.
	The single most incredible achievement in the known history of stone transport involves the ancient fortress of Saksakwaman.
	This astonishing ruin, lying north of the ancient Inca capital of Cuzco, may be the most accomplished piece of stone engineering on the planet.
	This is not because of its size.
	The stones involved, at 300 tons each, are only half as big as those at Baalbek.
	But they are shaped to a tolerance so fine that a hair cannot be inserted in the joints between them.
	In his 16th century chronicle, Royal Commentaries of the Incas, Garcilaso de la Vega, whose mother was allegedly of royal Inca blood, said that an Inca king had tried to move a gigantic boulder from a few miles away to add to the fortress.
	It was hauled by hand by over 20,000 men who eventually dropped it, crushing 3,000 to death.
	In other words, the Incas, as the Spanish found them, did not know how to build some of the buildings that they claimed as their own.
	Certainly they used them, and for this reason archaeologists simply assumed that they also built them.
	But no explanation was ever forthcoming from the Incas about how they might have done it.
	The world may be littered with the debris of a much earlier civilization than any we have identified.
	How much earlier, we don't know.
	Whatever destroyed this civilization, it spread across the earth in the twinkling of an eye, bringing with it a destructive fury of unprecedented horror.
	But the world that it destroyed apparently was not entirely silent on its nature or its potential to return.
	The people of that world left us a message about it, in fact, many messages.
	When we look past our own comfortable assumptions about those messages, that they are nothing but meaningless myths and legends, the confused output of people who understood their world not at all, we will find an amazingly coherent structure.
	When we unlock that meaning, we will discover what happened to that old lost world,
	and why so long ago it pointed its finger straight at our era, at the next few years, at us.
	Japanese Meteorological Agency was in an emergency situation.
	Super Typhoon Max was going to come inland.
	What they were seeing were sustained winds reaching 213 miles an hour for long periods of time.
	It was Japan's worst nightmare.
	A pristine typhoon hitting the island's full force.
	It was going to make landfall in just a few days, and there was no way to evacuate a coast populated by 50 million people.
	Storm surges of 30 feet seemed possible.
	Millions of people were going to drown.
	While much of Tokyo is built of glass and aluminum and concrete, much more is still constructed of far more delicate materials.
	Japanese may live in apartments that look entirely Western, but they also live in surprising numbers in the same sort of light-built structures that once defined the community.
	Typhoon Max moved with the nasty grace of a snake.
	It would swell toward land, then cringe back into its mid-Pacific lair, would rush inland, then seem to rest or lie in wait for shipping.
	During its days in the mid-Pacific, it dispatched no fewer than nine major ships and fourteen smaller ones.
	Normally, the waters are much cooler in this area, their temperature governed by the flow of the Pacific circulation, so storms weaken as they approach the home islands of Japan.
	This time, there was a major problem with the Pacific circulation, a problem that had its roots half a world away, a problem that nobody understood.
	Something had changed the surface temperature of the Western Pacific and done it very suddenly.
	Because of it, the Japanese Meteorological Agency made an error of historic proportions.
	It predicted that Max would weaken as it approached Japan.
	But the winds were unimaginable.
	They tore into the whole nation, devouring homes, sending cars and trucks flying through the air, stripping aluminum panels off skyscrapers, turning their windows into millions of tiny lethal daggers.
	All over the nation, people clustered around portable radios.
	The broadcast, though, soon failed.
	As one radio tower after yet another was torn from its moorings and sent tumbling off into the sky, television transmissions stopped.
	Even cable-based ones, satellite uplinks, were being destroyed throughout the islands.
	The power grid collapsed just after midnight of the first night.
	And then and only then did the storm come ashore.
	Water surged up Tokyo Bay.
	Thousands were forced into the streets by rising water only to be carried away by the floods or to be battered to death by the wind.
	Super Typhoon Max.
	Highest sustained wind speed, 218 miles per hour death toll.
	1,288,704.
	The most deadly storm in history.
	It was only a prelude.
	Like heat lightning, like distant thunder, Paris, London, Berlin, Stockholm, Brussels, all looked to Tokyo and breathed a silent prayer.
	New York did too.
	At least nothing that terrible could ever happen in New York.
	Or so they thought.
	If they happen, super storms are rare.
	About 18,000 years ago, the last ice age reached its maximum.
	Huge glaciers stretched as far south as the central United States, and winter temperatures in Texas were like those presently experienced in Canada.
	Sea levels were much lower than now, with the land line stretching many miles from present shores.
	The world was populated by thousands of large animal species, the mastodon and the mammoth, the cave bear and the dire wolf, the giant beaver and the short-faced skunk.
	For the next 8,000 years, the ice retreated steadily, apparently caused by a persistent increase in methane in the atmosphere.
	Although it dissipates quickly if it isn't replenished, methane is a potent heat-trapping greenhouse gas, and its buildup at this time led to a global warming event like the one we are experiencing now.
	There followed a period of sharp cooling that lasted approximately 200 years, apparently caused by a flood of fresh water into the Arctic Ocean.
	Did the sudden drop in ocean salinity caused by this flood of freshwater cause the southward movement of the North Atlantic Current that we believe can trigger the superstorm?
	To determine this, it will take a careful re-examination of the fossil evidence.
	Entire populations of animals disappeared, almost exclusively large ones.
	Eight different genera of mammals ceased to exist in North America.
	Worldwide, 27 were rendered completely extinct.
	This process started before the cooling event, but the last extinctions took place then.
	It has been claimed that the extinction of large animals in the Americas coincides with the spread of man, but something much more bizarre appears to have happened, something involving the climate.
	The remains of mammoths are found all around the Arctic Circle, with food still in their mouths and stomachs.
	This indicates that they were grazing in a temperate climate when they died.
	Not only that, masses of mammoths and rhinoceros bodies are found heaped on the highest points of plateaus.
	Were they fleeing the floods that occurred as the snow and ice left by a superstorm rapidly melted?
	The vegetative matter found in the animals suggests the death took place in the summer, exactly the time of year the superstorm would be most likely to occur.
	What appears to have happened is that the climate went into a state of greenhouse warming due to excessive methane in the atmosphere.
	And these animals died during the extremely violent weather that came about when there was a brief snap back to a cooling trend.
	Did this event also end a human civilization?
	It certainly caused a dramatic drop in human population in the Americas, in Australia, in Europe.
	Although there is, of course, not the slightest trace of evidence of an engineering civilization in Europe or anywhere else at the time.
	If a change in worldwide ocean currents occurred, these three areas would have been hardest hit.
	Whatever happened, it was extremely violent.
	Far more violent than the combination of disease, economic problems, and invasion that ended the Roman Empire.
	It is possible for history to lose track of an entire civilization.
	So what happened seven to ten thousand years ago might well have erased the memory of a civilization.
	But if such a civilization existed, then it would probably have left some of its ideas behind.
	Which would have resurfaced in the form of myths.
	One thing that was almost universal among our earliest civilizations was an interest in calendars.
	Most of these were seasonal and used in agriculture.
	There is one universal calendar, however, that is different and has a much more obscure purpose.
	This is the Zodiac.
	It is a stellar calendar that is designed to measure the angle at which the Earth is facing the Sun over the 24,000 year precession of the equinoxes.
	Who cares about a 24,000 year cycle?
	Why even design a Zodiac?
	In their book, Hamlet's Mill, Giorgio di Sant'Ania and Hertha von Dechend argued that there is a profound coherence behind many thousands of myths, legends, and calendrical markers throughout the world that point to the notion that the Zodiac is meant to identify widely spaced times of upheaval.
	Hamlet's Mill is named after the legendary Danish king and Shakespearean character Hamlet.
	Who ruled wisely and well, except for brief periods during which he went mad and devastated his whole realm.
	Normally, he turns his mill with great regularity, but sometimes he goes mad.
	Ancient stories suggest that a great catastrophe took place around the time that the last superstorm may have occurred.
	As Graham Hancock explains in Fingerprints of the Gods, the Mayan Popol Vuh, the sacred book of the ancient K'ichi Maya of Mexico and Guatemala, Associates a flood with much hail, black rain and mist, and indescribable cold.
	He reports a legend from Tierra del Fuego in southern Argentina that the sun and the moon fell from the sky.
	According to John Beerhorst, in the mythology of Mexico and Central America, there is a Mayan legend that states, it happened that the sun was still bright and clear, then at midday it got dark.
	There followed years of darkness and agonizing cold.
	Such a superstorm would cause black skies, rain, floods, and precipitate global cooling.
	We have the evidence of sudden extinctions and the legends of floods.
	We have evidence of a sudden reversion to a much colder climate at that time that conceivably mirrors the present threat.
	Through most of the Earth's history, the tropics have extended well north and south of their present limits, and climate change has been slow.
	In general, the polar caps have been small or even non-existent.
	The state that we have been in for the past three million years, with recurrent periods of glaciation and thaw, is almost unprecedented in Earth's geologic history.
	The rising of the Central American land bridge not only changed the climate, it forced it into a huge cycle.
	A cycle that our ancestors may have discovered just before it destroyed them, and attempted to warn us about.
	If their civilization existed, it died during a period of similar climate change, leaving behind only a few magnificent structures that silently defy our own science with the riddle of their construction.
	But the old legends may conceal the meaning and definition of our own epoch, a time during which we have climbed painfully back to a certain level, only to find that we are hanging by a thread over the abyss of an equally uncertain future.
	From Alex Rich, the Hadley Center for Climate Prediction and Research, U.K.
	Meteorological Office, to Bob Martin, National Severe Storms Laboratory, U.S.
	National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
	Bob, we have a situation developing here that I believe to be unprecedented.
	As you are aware, there's a very substantial frontal system moving rapidly southward that appears somehow linked to the trans-arctic disturbance that we've all been observing for the past week.
	The strength of this system should be apparent when I tell you that Yorkshire experienced its first tornado an hour ago, and a C3 no less.
	There are villages shattered, people with no idea of what's happened to them.
	The Minster, which is our great cathedral in the city of York, has had its windows blown out.
	I've already considered the idea of calling it a freak system, but I think we're in more trouble than that.
	With a mass of extremely cold air dipping down from the Arctic along roads in Scotland, people have been frozen to death in their cars.
	Anybody outside is liable to be killed in 10 minutes up here.
	We don't have a death toll, but there is one.
	You can be sure of that, and it's doubtless growing.
	What ungodly, monstrous force is driving that Arctic air?
	London is still relatively normal.
	But the city is bracing for what's expected now to be a drop well below zero degrees centigrade by midnight tonight.
	What I do not have is data on the Gulf Stream.
	And naturally, we're all wondering if perhaps you might not have such a thing through your Navy.
	We need rate of flow for the mid-Atlantic water temperature and salinity.
	It's my personal belief, and I would never, ever speak this out loud around these parts, old friend, But I think something has happened to the North Atlantic Current.
	I think an entire shift of climate is underway.
	The notorious climate flip.
	Should it be true that the Arctic is suddenly expanding as if it is sliding down the planet into Europe, well, that's a collision we cannot handle.
	Review the data there and please do respond at your earliest convenience.
	Best as ever, Alex PS.
	Give Jennifer and Robbie the best wishes of their uncle and reassure my dear sister that interesting weather never strikes where I might be able to view it firsthand, so she is not to worry.
	When we asked ourselves what the past might have left behind, we answered with another question.
	What, from the past, is old enough to matter and also useful in pinpointing dates and times?
	That brings us back to the Zodiac.
	It is a long-count stellar calendar.
	It counts the amount of time it takes for the North Pole to slowly move backward around a complete circle.
	It is divided into 12 segments or signs of 2160 years each.
	Over the course of its full transit, True North will pass slowly through each one of the signs.
	The constellations of the Zodiac appear to be arbitrarily created, their names different in different cultures, their configurations having only a coincidental connection to the figures they describe.
	Gemini, for example, is indeed twin stars, but Taurus is no bull, and Aquarius is hardly somebody pouring out a jug of water.
	The constellations are a mnemonic device, there to keep us from forgetting the calendar.
	Why should people remember it, though?
	We believe that we have discovered a possible reason.
	It appears that the arrival of each age of the Zodiac may have been commemorated by the creation of a great monument, but not always a physical one.
	Each of these monuments expressed the sign under which it was created and seems to have defined the age in which it was made.
	Over time, they have become increasingly subtle and spiritual and powerful.
	Indeed, the most powerful of all the monuments is still richly alive today.
	In fact, it is the foundation of our civilization.
	The first of these monuments that was identified as such was postulated by Graham Hancock.
	Who observed that the constellation of Leo rose directly behind the Sphinx in approximately 10,500 B.C.?
	Could it be that the Sphinx, a representation of a lion with a human head, was constructed to somehow identify the age of Leo during which it was apparently built?
	But why decide that a particular sign of the zodiac should identify a particular 2,000 year period?
	This returns us to the question, is astrology a superstition or the remains of an ancient predictive science?
	If it is a superstition, then does it measure some sort of subtle influence based on the movements of planets and stars?
	Or does it use their positions as indicators of the progress of a large-scale process of change that is hidden in society itself?
	If so, this might mean that the Zodiac's creators thought that cultural change unfolded according to laws of some kind that could be understood and manipulated.
	Maybe, therefore, they understood that our age would parallel this earlier period, and thus that we would face the same catastrophe that destroyed them.
	So let's take a journey across the half of the Zodiac that has unfolded since the age of Leo, and see if we can perhaps gain some insight from it.
	First, we need to go back to the time when the Sphinx was built, and the place.
	In those days, Egypt was radically different.
	When the Sphinx was constructed, there was substantial rainfall in the area.
	As Leo ended, the weather changed dramatically.
	It got suddenly colder, and this temperate area became a desert.
	The whole upheaval took place as Leo transited into Cancer.
	After Leo came Cancer, then Gemini, then Taurus and Aries, as the procession moved backward through the signs of the Zodiac.
	Pisces brings us up to modern times.
	We are exactly half the zodiac away from Leo, or approximately 12,960 years.
	For our journey, we will not use modern interpretations of the signs, but rather the oldest ones we have been able to find.
	To begin with Leo, there is a very ancient riddle applied to the Sphinx.
	It asks the question, what has the haunches of a bull, the claws of a lion, and the head of a man?
	The ancient Greek play Oedipus by Sophocles contains an early expression of this riddle, although it was written nearly 7,000 years after the Sphinx was carved.
	The answer, although never given in the play, was, A man, for man is the measure of all things.
	A man, or historical mankind.
	For it cannot be denied that the foundations of what would become human history were laid down in the age of Leo.
	Trade began, occasional sea voyages were undertaken, and the earliest beginnings of transmitted memory took place.
	Also, there may have been a superstorm at the end of this period, and its effects may be recorded in legend.
	It was probably during this era, for example, that the oldest saga in Western imagination, the Epic of Gilgamesh, began to be recited.
	This epic described the struggle of the hero Gilgamesh to survive a great flood by floating on a raft.
	It is the prototype of the story of Noah in the Bible.
	Do the legends of the expulsion from Eden also date from this period, when the Middle East became a desert?
	As their temperate world withered beneath the brutal sun, it must have seemed very much to the peoples of that area that they were being driven from a garden by a fiery sword.
	Is it possible that man first gained self-knowledge, the fruit of a forbidden tree, that would lead him into becoming a civilized being at this time?
	If so, one might ask, then who carved the Great Sphinx if man was not yet civilized?
	Rather than answer that question directly, let's move deeper into the procession of the equinoxes to the next sign, that of Cancer.
	Prehistory was universally characterized by the advent of goddess religions.
	The goddesses of Greece and Rome and in the present time the Virgin Mary are very late manifestations of this ancient religion, which would have been ascendant during the Age of Cancer, which is also the sign of the Mother Goddess.
	So it was under the sign of the Sphinx that mankind, at least in the Middle East, was forced to end a long period of easy hunting and gathering and begin to gain the rudiments of civilization.
	And under the next sign, Cancer, that the first great universal religion developed, the worship of the goddess who granted humankind the children needed to continue the race.
	The human journey since then can be seen as a long struggle toward an ever more coherent picture of God, as if man had been awakened in Leo and shown his strength and set on a long journey of discovery.
	The next stage, Gemini, was when recorded history began, This period, judging from the way religions evolved, was the era during which mankind gradually came to understand that sexuality and pregnancy were connected.
	Powerful new male gods were ascending in the mind of man, the greatest of them among the Egyptians.
	Moreover, a new kind of religious practice was emerging.
	We were not only worshiping our gods, we were telling ourselves moral stories about them and learning to take the lessons into our lives.
	Among the earliest of these stories was the tale of Isis and Osiris, which was derived from the ancient idea of the female as life giver and resurrector.
	Osiris, Isis' brother, was killed by the jealous set and cut into pieces.
	Isis was able to reconstruct them and give Osiris renewed life after a fashion.
	This idea was preserved down into historical times, reappearing as the powerful story of the death and resurrection of Christ, which has remained central to Christian religious belief into our own era.
	The story of Isis and Osiris marked the end of the Age of Gemini, as the resurrected male god of the archaic hunter-gatherers, the people who had walked the earth prior to the coming of the Age of Cancer, reasserted himself.
	Under the next sign, Taurus, the male gods gained ever more complete ascendancy, but always templed by the female influence that lingered from the age of the goddess.
	It was during this era, around 4000 BC, that the hero emerged into the Western imagination, marked by the first hero story, the Sumerian epic of Gilgamesh who survived the Great Flood.
	This was also the first era since Leo, during which there was the suggestion of a planned relationship between the fundamental ideas of the period and the astrological sign under which it was developing.
	In this case, it did not take the form of a single monument, but was the introduction of the concept of the bull into evolving religions.
	In his book, Primitive Mythology, Joseph Campbell says that the image of the bull emerged in the early Bronze Age during the transit from Taurus to Aries, with its influence extending from the Indus Valley to England.
	The next two signs are Aries and then Pisces, which are associated with powerful Western religious symbols.
	The Old Testament contains 55 references to the ram, more than to any other animal.
	The Old Testament was written during the middle centuries of the Age of Aries, and is on one level the story of the ultimate replacement of the old goddess with a new masculine god.
	At the same time, civilization reached ever higher levels of organization.
	At the beginning of the Age of Aries, the first great cities of our historical epoch appeared in Sumeria, Egypt, and the Indus Valley.
	Toward its close, the Jews colonized the land of Canaan and became the Israelites, and the idea of the single God finally found its place in human culture.
	The Jews began to worship the most sophisticated God yet conceived, a formless, eternal, and yet deeply personal essence called Yahweh.
	Out of this worship came a whole new social order.
	Moses gave the Jews a set of commandments that turned natural morality into written laws.
	It was the emergence of the Jewish God that would provide the symbolic focus of the next era, the Age of Pisces, at the end of which we now live.
	Pisces had a living avatar in Jesus Christ.
	He appeared shortly before the actual turn of the calendar during the period when Aries was winding down.
	The deep connection between Christ and the Zodiac is revealed by the fact that His earliest symbol is the fish.
	He is called the Fisher of Men, and His ministry began early in the Age of Pisces.
	His apostles are drawn from a group of fishermen, and early Christians identified themselves by the symbol of Pisces the fish, a practice that Christian fundamentalists have revived, but without realizing the astrological origin of the symbol.
	Christianity mixed the humane tenets of Greek thought with the moral rigor of Judaism, emerging as the most ethically directed and compassionate religion yet seen.
	The reason that a calendar as long-term as the Zodiac would have been invented becomes clear.
	It is a template being used by whoever it is that is influencing human life on this massive scale.
	So what does it tell us as we leave the age of Pisces and enter the age of Aquarius?
	Christian civilization is the fish that has been swimming happily in the water of faith.
	Until now.
	Because now everything is once again changing.
	Yet again, new beliefs are challenging the old.
	The 18th century saw the beginning of our transition into the next age, when rationalism began to challenge faith.
	In the 19th century, Christianity began to contract as more and more people started to see the world around them in terms of reason and science.
	Now there are major environmental disruptions all around us.
	And as our situation gets more desperate, it becomes less and less clear that prayer is the best tool to use against the relentless mathematics of something like global warming.
	It is getting hotter and hotter.
	The weather is getting stranger and stranger, and the future is looking dark.
	The action that characterizes the beginning of Aquarius has started.
	The pond of belief and assurance in which Pisces swam so comfortably is being drained.
	It's living water being poured out by Aquarius.
	We who have always relied on Earth's ecosystem to sustain us must now find a way to sustain ourselves.
	But how can we?
	We're not made to breathe this harsh new air.
	The age of Aquarius will not be the new age of directionless freedom that has been foretold in popular culture, but rather a period of intense search as mankind seeks to somehow do what ancient fish did back at the beginning of time, learn to survive outside the ocean.
	We have perhaps decoded the secret of the Zodiac and read the message that our forebears left for us.
	Our ancestors warned us about Hamlet's Mill, and their warning turns out to reflect, with uncanny accuracy, scientific knowledge about the way climate changes.
	Hamlet's Mill turns for long periods with great smoothness, then suddenly, an explosion.
	The great majority of our century's weather catastrophes have happened within the past 30 years, a blink in geologic time.
	The most deadly cyclone of the century hit Bangladesh in 1970.
	Upwards of 300,000 people were killed.
	The heaviest hailstones ever recorded, upwards of two pounds each, hit that same country in 1986.
	Recent hurricanes, such as Mitch and Gabriel, which had a storm system above it that reached high into the stratosphere, are indications that catastrophic weather systems are getting more powerful.
	The long El Niño of 1997-1998 has given way to abrupt cooling of the Central Pacific, La Niña, and there are indications that another El Niño event will start soon.
	This means that the Pacific is now wobbling between temperature extremes, another symptom of growing instability.
	The year of 1998 was one of absolutely extraordinary weather upheavals.
	Droughts caused massive fires in Mexico, Brazil, Indonesia, Florida, Southern Europe, Australia, and Siberia.
	New Guinea had its worst recorded drought.
	The Panama Canal became so low due to drought that it was too shallow for many ships.
	East Africa endured its worst floods in 40 years.
	Tibet had its worst snows in 50 years.
	Ice storms devastated trees from Maine to Quebec.
	Cocoa and rubber crops failed in Malaysia.
	Coffee in Indonesia and Ethiopia.
	Rice in Thailand.
	Cotton in Uganda.
	And fishing off Peru.
	The ozone hole over the Antarctic became larger than ever.
	And the ozone layer over the Arctic thinner than ever.
	And it was the hottest year on record.
	So where is all this leading?
	There is every likelihood that halfway around the Zodiac from its last appearance, the Superstorm will come again.
	The northern reaches of the world were in danger.
	The storms were not like ordinary blizzards.
	First, the cloud tops were reaching well into the stratosphere, developing fantastically powerful circulatory patterns.
	High-altitude air, made ultra-cold by the fact that greenhouse gases were now holding so much heat close to the ground, went speeding to the surface.
	NASA's new satellite-borne wind measurement system could scarcely be believed.
	Surface gusts in excess of 200 miles an hour were apparently present in some of the cells.
	The storms were short-lived, speeding across flatland and the sea so fast, their own speed tore them apart.
	Events in the Southern Hemisphere suggested this was part of a fundamental change in trans-oceanic current flows.
	The storms that were battering Australia and New Zealand Man, only one thing.
	The change in the currents was profound.
	The whole planet is going to be affected.
	A second ferocious typhoon was already forming in the Central Pacific, again heading toward Japan, which was still reeling from the effects of Max.
	By this time, everybody was fairly sure what was happening.
	The Atlantic circulation transports warm, salty surface water to the north and sends cold, dense water flowing south.
	The effect of all this water transport is to keep ocean temperatures, and thus also air temperatures, in a zone that we are familiar with.
	Cold, deep flow into the Pacific had stopped, causing a rapid warming of surface water, suddenly deprived of its heat exchange from below.
	Thus, the monster typhoons.
	Meanwhile, warm water was no longer being pumped into the Arctic.
	And that was why the very life of Canada now hung by a thread.
	It had been known the North Atlantic Current could destabilize.
	Ice cores had proved that it had happened before, even as recently as 8,000 years ago.
	There had been violent Arctic extinctions then, followed by 200 years of cold, the result of a superstorm.
	Perhaps with the cold being caused by the reflectivity of the ice cover it had left behind, the melting.
	But nobody had thought that it would happen again soon.
	An ad hoc committee of climatologists decided that the disruptions would play out over a period of four or five years, during which time the public would have time to adjust to a new condition.
	But it wasn't exactly that they were wrong.
	The weather would certainly remain in chaos for many years, but they just had not been able to imagine the ultra-violence with which the process would start.
	It was too far outside of their experience and all human experience.
	Nobody in recorded history had seen nature at its most violent.
	Nobody could conceive of what this actually meant.
	But then something happened that brought every scientist assigned to the problem to a dead halt.
	People were paralyzed with amazement as soon as they understood the data.
	There had been a report from a small Inuit village in northern Canada that the temperature had dropped in a matter of an hour by over a hundred degrees Fahrenheit.
	This could mean only one thing.
	But the idea that storm circulation could be so violent that it would draw super-cooled air all the way to the surface was the subject for classroom speculation.
	It wasn't a real-world problem.
	But it was now.
	Scientists at various National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration facilities in the northern part of the U.S.
	began quietly arranging for their families to move south, seeking shelter with relatives in Texas, the desert southwest in Florida, and Southern California.
	Thus began the greatest migration in human history.
	Wind speeds were picking up all across the Arctic as one ultra-violent storm after yet another appeared, their cloud tops bulging to ever more unprecedented heights, their surface winds rising higher and higher.
	A presidential order was sent to the Immigration and Naturalization Service, distribution restricted, informing it that the U.S.-Canadian border was to be opened for migrants.
	Emergency shelters and food banks began to be organized.
	FEMA representatives surprised many a county and school district official across the country with a call asking they designate their large space buildings as emergency shelters.
	Food and medical supplies began to be moved into place.
	More discreetly, body bags began to be distributed, but only a few hundred thousand.
	Still, nobody really understood.
	Congressman began asking questions.
	What was going on?
	What was all this money that was being spent?
	What budgets were involved?
	The General Accounting Office was ordered to audit FEMA's storm preparation activities.
	Plans were put on hold.
	The food supplies were not delivered to the designated shelters.
	Hospitals were not informed of the possible crisis.
	The International Red Cross and the World Health Organization were left ignorant of the fact that the greatest climate change in history was building, and building fast.
	Baffin Island was being wracked by a storm that had blown up so suddenly that the few thousand inhabitants of the world's third largest island were taken by surprise.
	The winds gusted in excess of 200 miles an hour.
	Vast quantities of snow poured down, suffocating animals where they stood.
	Temperatures dropped so low that uncovered skin froze instantaneously.
	To take a breath of air too fast was to risk death by frost in the lungs.
	Caribou and grizzlies began to die.
	Then human beings.
	People whose ancestors had lived in this hard country for 10,000 years died on foot, swathed in warm clothes.
	They died in trucks and four-wheel drive vehicles that struggled south until the snow stopped them.
	A few even died in airplanes, which fluttered like butterflies in a summer breeze as a storm overtook them.
	All died, in the end, as the environment crossed a line beyond which nothing but simple creatures like lichens could survive.
	And then the series of supercells that made up the storm organized themselves yet further, as if they were melding themselves into a greater being.
	Something born of terror.
	Meteorologists called the storm Legion, for it was, indeed, many, many made into one.
	Canadian authorities saw that it was going to come south very quickly, perhaps in a matter of days.
	So from Vancouver to Calgary to Winnebago to Toronto, the warning was passed.
	Prepare a shelter, gather food, organize the population.
	But there was only one thing really to do to live.
	You had to move.
	You had to go south.
	And you had to do it immediately.
	Otherwise, you would die.
	Nobody likes to think about environmental problems because we seem to blame ourselves for the condition of our world.
	But should we?
	While we are definitely affecting the speed at which things are unfolding, nothing mankind has done, harmful to the environment or helpful to it, has changed the fundamental cycle of destruction that grips planet Earth.
	But also, without quite realizing it, our civilization has graduated into an era of supermassive engineering capability.
	Not only can we plan projects on a transcontinental scale, we have the capability to execute them.
	As an example, we could build mirrors in space that would reduce darkness.
	This was attempted in 1999 by the Russians.
	Fortunately, it failed.
	But it wouldn't even be a particularly expensive undertaking.
	Street lighting, with all its expense and power usage, would become unnecessary.
	But would we want to do this?
	Would we want to give up the night?
	What about the stars?
	If we blind ourselves to all but their memory, might not future generations forget that they're even there?
	There is little serious interest in flooding the night with light.
	Our point is that we are capable of engineering on this scale, and there is a possibility that we could re-engineer our planet to end the persistent climate upheavals that have probably been our genesis, now that their continuation has become such a danger to us.
	However, it is also true that the alteration to the planet that we are discussing would cause enormous environmental changes, and they must be understood first.
	As the planet is now configured, the gigantic heat exchange system that is in place acts as a preventive to runaway global warming.
	On the surface, the environmental situation we are now in appears worrisome, but not immediately dangerous, as stated in Life Magazine's August 1988 issue.
	The consensus among climatologists is that global warming will continue unless we dramatically curb our industrial emissions, particularly carbon dioxide, that trap heat which would otherwise escape into space.
	The magazine then quotes Jerry Malman of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, who says that we have about 25 years to start acting to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.
	Is the situation really that stable?
	The cycle that is responsible for our present climate is an established scientific reality.
	There is not only strong evidence in the geologic record of what happened the last time, there is also a compelling human memory that has been embedded in myth and legend.
	This could be one of those times when Hamlet's mill goes berserk.
	If this is true, then be warned.
	We are about to live through a prime moment in the destiny of Earth and man.
	It looks as if we are involved in the terminal climax of a massive extinction event, one that is unfolding on the truly enormous scale of such legendary extinctions as the Permian event, which destroyed almost all living things, and the Cretaceous, which extinguished the dinosaurs.
	The event we are living through began nearly three million years ago, and is following a pattern that has been established for most of the history of life on Earth.
	In this scale, the past 15,000 years can be seen as the terminal phase of the present extinction event, and the hundred-year period since the advent of the Industrial Revolution is eerily similar in its effect on Earth's species to the massive fires and pollution that followed the cometary asteroid impact that brought the dinosaurs to an end.
	Even the rate at which human activity is destroying other species is similar to the speed at which the burning forests and lack of sunlight of 65 million years ago destroyed species at that time.
	Whether humankind will be among the victims of its own destructive presence on Earth, we don't yet know.
	The past 10 years have revealed a new and ominous pattern which has, since 1995, grown rapidly more intense.
	The changes are so dramatic that the presence of powerful voices still claiming that there is no such thing as global warming shows that human beings remain as capable as ever of self-delusion.
	Signs of rapid mass extinction are growing.
	It is not impossible the human food chain will be broken by some crucial extinction.
	Such breaks can be indirect.
	An example would be migratory bird populations in North America, which are under increasingly severe pressure from a number of different factors, ranging from lighted cities in their flight paths to weather changes and pesticides in their food.
	If these birds go extinct, the huge weight of insects that they eat will remain unchallenged at a time when global warming will be causing insect populations to explode.
	The resultant increase in the number of bugs would be uncontrollable, not without the use of chemicals so dangerous that they would render the food they protected inedible.
	Many subtle and dangerous challenges to species survival have begun to develop in the latter half of our century.
	In the late 80s, the whole planet's ozone layer was observed to be thinning.
	Holes appeared over the Arctic.
	Thinning became severe over Europe.
	Without the ozone layer, ultraviolet light reaching the Earth's surface increases.
	Reduced ozone seriously disturbs the growth of plants, especially food species that have been bred to grow fast.
	Exposed animals are at risk for eye damage, skin cancer, reduced immune response, and genetic problems.
	The process was thought to be primarily due to chlorofluorocarbons, a type of chemical widely used in the manufacture of coolants.
	International efforts were made to reduce chlorofluorocarbon emissions, with the result that they were in measurable decline by 1995.
	However, in September of 1998, it was announced by British and Australian researchers that another ozone-destroying chemical, Halon-1202, was rapidly increasing in the upper atmosphere, and ozone destruction was continuing.
	At the same time, it was revealed that the source of this chemical was not known.
	Between 1975 and 1991, the incidence of skin cancer in men except melanoma increased 812% according to the U.S.
	National Cancer Institute.
	During the same period, melanoma increased 66% and the mortality rate from this disease went up 30%.
	Also, a dramatic increase in sickness among wild species and herd animals in various parts of the world has been observed.
	From widespread sickness among frogs and other amphibians, to mad cow disease in England, to a rabies pandemic among the forest creatures of the eastern United States.
	The Global Biodiversity Assessment presented by the United Nations Environment Program in Jakarta revealed that the rate of extinction among flowering plants and vertebrate animals was 50 to 100 times greater than expected just a few years prior to the creation of a report.
	It seemed that the stage is being set for another mass extinction event.
	In fact, the climax of the one that has been going on since long before mankind even appeared.
	The storm over Baffin Bay isn't the only storm.
	Conditions are the same all over the southern Arctic.
	The long nights are black as death, and when thin light does come, the clouds can be seen to be rushing west to east.
	On the ground, there's an eerie silence.
	The Weather Channel is now the most watched television channel in the world.
	When satellite communications are not disrupted, that is.
	Without the North Atlantic Current to moderate things, there is nothing to prevent cold air aloft from surging downward into the hot, wet atmosphere below.
	Storms of unprecedented power begin to build along the frontal lines.
	As all this energy struggles to find a balance, there is no balance.
	A tornado smashes into Warsaw.
	Venice is flooded by a wind-driven storm surge that comes blasting up the Adriatic.
	120 mile per hour gales wrack southern England.
	The great floodgates in the mouth of the Thames have to be closed.
	In the Netherlands, a flood emergency is declared as tidal waters inundate dyke after dyke.
	Paris experiences a ferocious electrical storm that kills a dozen people.
	Near Kansas City, a tornado is observed on the ground and on radar that remains organized for three hours.
	900 lives are lost.
	The Red Cross is finally warned there is a dangerous situation building.
	Winds gusting to a hundred miles an hour sweep across New England, bringing with them ice-flecked rain that falls in torrents.
	Beneath the black skies, temperatures that were abnormally high now begin to fall.
	The clouds are reflecting so much sunlight that even the overheated tropics cannot provide enough energy to keep temperatures up.
	Surface temperatures drop further, winds rise higher.
	Refugees begin appearing in British Columbia with tales of sleep storms so heavy that buildings are collapsing and roads are becoming impassable.
	Soon though, too soon, the flow of refugees drops, then it stops.
	Residents of Quebec, then Ottawa, then Toronto begin moving south.
	The governor of Maine activates the National Guard.
	But just a few days brings a dramatic deterioration in conditions.
	120 mile per hour winds roar across the Great Lakes, bringing with them cold rain mixed with snow.
	The cloud tops reach higher than ever before recorded, penetrating deep into the stratosphere.
	Half a dozen storms begin to organize into larger systems, and now a new phenomena enters the picture.
	The air that is being frozen to extremely low temperatures in the trans-stratospheric cloud tops is reaching the ground so fast that it has no time to warm.
	Anything these columns of death touch is frozen solid within minutes.
	Some people frozen so quickly, their dinners are still in their mouths.
	And like the mammoths who preceded them in the last storm, their remains will suggest to the future that something strange and terrible happened.
	A special meeting is convened at the White House, and during that meeting, wind gusts in Washington exceed 100 miles an hour.
	Russia is no longer available by telephone.
	Sweden, Norway, and Finland are all reporting unprecedented spring snows, accompanied by blizzard conditions and winds of 180 kilometers per hour.
	The President declares a state of national emergency and imposes martial law.
	Highways are packed with cars moving south.
	Two days after the meeting at the White House, the government begins to make plans to move out from under the storm area, but it's too late.
	The president and his entourage, forced to use the roads like everyone else, join the stalled massive traffic that jams highways from Virginia to Texas.
	The storm is now fully organized.
	A single, massive cyclone.
	Its circulation extending from the Tropic of Cancer to the Arctic Circle.
	Stockholm, Helsinki, Moscow, St.
	Petersburg, Toronto, Vancouver, and Fairbanks are now among the large cities that no longer communicate in any way.
	China has joined Russia in a chorus of silence.
	Incredibly, the storm continues to grow.
	Outside of the storm area, air pressure drops lower than thought possible.
	The planet's atmosphere itself is being distorted.
	And this, in the end, is what finally unbalances the weather system and causes it to begin to break up.
	As this happens, the storm turns loose the water vapor that it's been carrying, dropping it in the form of a vast, continent-girding snowfall.
	This process finally equalizes the energy, and the storm slowly winds down.
	It takes two weeks, though, before so much as a shaft of sunlight reaches the surface of what had been the richest and most developed part of the world.
	After the storm, the landscape has completely changed.
	There is not a tree standing north of Oklahoma.
	The land is a glaring sheet of ice.
	At the Canadian border, the ice is 10 feet thick.
	Across the tundra, it's 40 feet thick.
	The northern polar ice cap has reappeared, and seen from space, it appears to have grown three-fold in just a few weeks.
	This is deceptive, however.
	This is all new ice, very loosely compressed.
	As March turns to April, its southern reaches begin to melt.
	A month later, the Mississippi is ten miles wide in places.
	New Orleans, inundated.
	The Delta, destroyed.
	Over the summer, the most massive flood that mankind has ever seen, at least in historical times, takes place.
	Those areas that survived the storm must now deal with its aftermath.
	Whole cities will be inundated.
	Farther north, the air temperature remains low.
	This is because the ice itself is so reflective, and also because the winds beating across the North Atlantic have caused so much evaporation that the salinity of the water has risen again, Tripping the system of currents even further out of balance.
	The North Atlantic Current now returns southward off New York instead of Greenland.
	The Gulf Stream no longer goes north, bringing mild winters to Europe.
	Instead, it ends near the Bay of Biscay, near France and Spain.
	England now has a climate similar to Lapland's before the storm.
	Next winter, the frost line in the United States will extend all the way to central Florida.
	Underneath all that ice being ravaged by those howling winds, a billion people have died in what was the planet's most productive, educated, and civilized region.
	A shattered United States, now reduced to a strip of still intact states bordering the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico, begins to fail in fundamental ways.
	The states lacking a central authority fall away into independent entities.
	Western civilization as we know it has passed into history.
	The present mass extinction did not begin because of man.
	The sudden overgrowth of human population is rather a reflection of climactic imbalances that have temporarily favored our species over others that are less intelligent and flexible.
	Our exploding population is just part of the extinction climax.
	If present rates of extinction continue, it would appear that the present event will climax with a loss of about two-thirds of all species.
	This will mean that the Earth will be left with a very small number of hardy creatures still alive.
	Things such as rats, weeds, roaches, mosquitoes, and such.
	And man?
	Perhaps.
	But our large size is not a plus.
	During extinctions, the larger species are generally the most vulnerable.
	The structure of extinction events appears to follow a rough pattern.
	About two and a half million years before the impacting asteroid or comet ravaged what remained of the dinosaurs, the extinction event began.
	There was a dramatic global temperature change, followed by a drop in sea levels.
	Coral reefs and bottom-dwelling marine creatures were extinguished.
	There were climate changes that caused a wave of extinctions among plants.
	The climate became drier and colder.
	Huge jungles dried up and grasslands appeared.
	When that happened, a process took place that would be repeated many millions of years later when it would have something to do with us.
	Racing across those plains, there came bright, quick dinosaurs, the brightest a creature called Strothomimus.
	These plains-dwelling predators were fast and smart, and may have hunted in organized packs, not unlike the bright, land-dwelling apes that appeared at the beginning of the present mass extinction.
	The clever, quick little apes that have become the human beings of today, that must now cope with the climax of the extinction event that brought us about in the first place.
	By the time the comet that killed the dinosaurs struck, their world had, like ours has now, already been in upheaval for millions of years.
	Like us, Strothymimus lived out its entire history inside the context of an ongoing period of extinction.
	Strothymimus was eventually overtaken by it, and the earlier, brilliant predator became extinct.
	The current extinction process, as before, has not been continuous, but rather has come in pulses.
	Each time, life has adapted to the changes and the diversity of species has risen again.
	But during the past 20,000 years, we have entered the same kind of intensive extinction climax that closed the era of the dinosaurs altogether.
	As happened then, the chemical content of the atmosphere is changing rapidly.
	In those days, the disaster was caused by burning continental forests and volcanic eruptions.
	Nowadays, it is caused by burning fossil fuels and chemical factories.
	No matter, though, the effect is the same.
	It took 5 to 10 million years for the Earth to regain animal populations that even approached the dinosaur era in numbers.
	Especially in the oceans, there were many species that started and failed many evolutionary misfires.
	It was not until 35 million years had passed that Earth again bore a stable population of creatures as diverse and highly evolved as had existed before the extinction.
	It is almost impossible for us to think in such vast epochs of time But it is only over such stretches of eons that the history of life on Earth begins to reveal its larger meanings.
	From Bob Martin, National Severe Storms Laboratory, U.S.
	National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, to Alex Rich, the Hadley Center for Climate Prediction and Research, UK Meteorological Office.
	Alex, I'm damn sorry I haven't written before.
	It's been hell here, obviously.
	What preparations are you making?
	And I mean personally.
	What about Janet and the kids?
	I think Portugal, southern Portugal, of course, is going to be jammed.
	Jesus, I've sent Marty and our kids to Texas.
	It's ugly.
	Getting them out before the public knows, but what can we do?
	Have you seen that thing that went up over Baffin?
	My God!
	I think there might be a hundred percent kill rate up there.
	You were looking at pockets where the temperature dropped a hundred degrees in minutes.
	I worry about you, man.
	I want a reply to this.
	UK is a debtor.
	You're not going to make it.
	The flow.
	We're getting this whole thing fed as a single storm.
	I think the flow anyway.
	Sorry.
	I'm disjointed.
	About 50 people are screaming at me.
	The flow is unbelievable.
	There's a planetary structure to this thing.
	Buy gold.
	Gold coins.
	Whatever the hell they sell.
	Then go home and get your family and go south.
	Christ, how can I say this?
	To hell with duty.
	Jump ship.
	There.
	I did what I gotta do.
	But I know you won't.
	Me, neither.
	I'm here till the damn roof comes down on my bald damn head.
	God bless you, Alex.
	May we make it to better days, brother-in-law.
	Bob.
	Just under three million years ago, something happened that disturbed a period of nearly 60 million years of relative climactic stability and gradual species change.
	The disturbance was radical enough to identify this era of ours as an extinction event.
	When the geologic epoch known as the Pliocene was ending, Earth was a very different sort of place.
	Looked at from above, the continents would have seemed a lot like they are now.
	But there were no polar caps, and there wasn't any land connecting North and South America.
	Because of this, the climate was totally different from what it became when the Central American Land Bridge appeared.
	Then the Earth began an agonizing cycle of alternating ice ages and brief warming periods.
	Looking back to the world before this period is like looking at a vision of a distant Eden.
	About six million years ago, during the Pliocene, an event rare in Earth's history began to occur.
	The Antarctic continent, which had slowly drifted into the southern polar area, started forming an ice cap.
	While sea ice often covered polar waters, it was rare for a landmass to end up in such a position.
	As the continent began to ice over, ocean levels dropped so low worldwide that the Mediterranean became an inland sea, and then dried up.
	At this time, the African forests in which our primate ancestors lived collapsed, and the long journey toward man began.
	The creature that had to cope with this change was probably a proto-ape called Panthropus robustus, which began to spread across Africa.
	It was at this time also that a period of geologic unrest started.
	Volcanism began to spread across the world.
	As a result of all the volcanic and seismic activity, Central America rose out of the sea.
	It blocked the all-important flow of ocean currents around the equator that had served to stabilize Earth's climate for millions of years.
	This alteration of the Earth's geography contributed to what would soon become the biggest change in climate that had happened in 60 million years.
	It was the beginning of the Great Extinction event, during which we have appeared.
	Our branch of the family of primates has reacted to the continual pressure of an environment in chaos by becoming ever more adaptive and intelligent.
	In Africa, Paranthropus disappeared, replaced by a series of more advanced primates.
	By three million years ago, Australopithecus africanus began to roam the spreading belt.
	Australopithecus was a hunter and likely tool user, and it is thought to be the first human ancestor.
	He probably hunted in groups and possessed a social structure.
	He was smarter than the modern chimpanzee.
	The world he lived in was a hard one, plagued by drought and wracked with change.
	All around him, species were dying.
	Because of the Central American land bridge, ocean currents were forced into a north-south flow.
	A new system of heat exchange between the tropics and the Arctic began.
	It brought with it weather of a kind that had not been seen on Earth in a very long time.
	It must have caused a huge die-off of forests, because the carbon dioxide balance of the air changed noticeably.
	CO2 levels began to fall.
	Over a million year period they were cut in half and kept falling.
	This meant that the atmosphere was less able to hold heat.
	Winters grew longer.
	The North and South Poles were now covered by ice year-round.
	Blizzards and hurricanes became commonplace, and tornadoes must have marched the plains.
	At this time, the sort of superstorm that may mark the change between ice ages and warming periods would not have occurred, but it probably became a rare but devastating feature of our climate in the near future.
	For the past three million years, the ice cover has waxed and waned, and every time the ice has reappeared, the extinction rate has soared.
	Whole species vanish in the snows and droughts every time the glaciers come crashing south again.
	The world is now in a state of spasmodic alternation between large ice ages and short warm periods.
	During this time, all creatures have been put under extreme survival pressure.
	Around 50,000 years ago, old species began dying out faster than new ones emerged.
	During this time, the hominids have continued a process of rapid evolution, challenged by the harsh and ever-changing conditions.
	To survive, we have learned all manner of craft, from chipping flint and sewing hides, to making gasoline and insulation.
	We have become scholars and architects and engineers, developed complex societies, and done it all in response to the pressures of an environment that has betrayed us many times in the past, and will again, many times.
	Our problem right now is that we have been too successful.
	Our intelligence has enabled us to proliferate to the point of imbalance, and imbalances do not last long in nature.
	By the middle of the next century, even if population growth remains at its present moderate rate, the planet will be called upon to feed, clothe, and shelter two people for every one alive today.
	Mankind is the Strothemimus of the present extinction climax, reacting to the extraordinary pressure by evolving intelligence.
	But humankind has been far more successful in this regard than any known species, past or present.
	Brilliant though he was for a dinosaur, Strothemimus was probably about as smart as a fox terrier.
	In its torment, our epoch has evolved something astonishing.
	A creature that is at once genius and monster.
	The first animal ever to find itself in the ironic position of actually worsening the very process of generalized extinction that threatens to destroy it.
	Mankind's great population centers function like the lava flats of the dinosaur era, covering the land with a hard, rocky surface.
	Like the continental fires that followed the impact of the comet that destroyed the dinosaurs, we're emitting vast quantities of combustion products into the atmosphere.
	So far, we have not produced quite as much smoke, or quite as much acid rain, or quite as heavy a load of pollutants, but we have certainly caused every bit as much extinction.
	Humankind is the catastrophe that is bringing on the climax of the present extinction event.
	The logical question is, what can we do to transform ourselves from a natural disaster into a blessing?
	Just as nothing could have interrupted the effect of the comet on the dinosaurs, we cannot end our own effect on ourselves and our fellow creatures.
	However, we can develop strategies that might stave off the disaster long enough to enable us to substitute effective human planning for the automatic natural processes that govern and threaten our world now.
	Despite this, though, we are, along with everything else on Earth, subject to the great cycle that controls the planet.
	Human activity alone has not created the change of climate that is coming.
	This same sort of change has happened at the end of every warming period ever since the Central American land bridge changed the ocean currents and began the cycle of overheating and overcooling in which we are trapped.
	In looking back into the recent geologic past, we find that we are dealing with three separate but almost certainly related climactic events.
	The first took place approximately 17,000 years ago, when Earth's climate started heating up and the glaciers went into a rapid melting phase.
	The second occurred 12,500 years ago, when there was an even more dramatic increase in temperatures.
	4,500 years later, or about 8,000 years ago, a sudden period of cooling took place, followed by 200 years of much colder temperatures.
	If there was a previous human civilization, this may be when it was destroyed.
	Guy Rothwell of the Southampton Oceanography Center reported that a massive landslide took place in the Mediterranean about 22,000 years ago, when the last ice age was at its most severe.
	This underwater landslide caused huge amounts of methane trapped in undersea soils to escape into the atmosphere.
	Over half a billion tons of methane might have been released.
	This would have almost doubled the amount of methane in the atmosphere in just a short time.
	The result?
	Temperatures warmed abruptly, beginning the trend that caused extensive melting of permafrost and the release of even more heat-trapping methane, with the result that the 120,000-year-long grip of the cold was broken.
	But that isn't all that happened.
	About 8,000 years ago, toward the end of the last geologic epoch, the Pleistocene, there was an upheaval.
	Methane levels in the atmosphere suddenly plummeted by 20%.
	Cooling followed.
	During this period, the world appears to have been devastated.
	It is then that we speculate that a superstorm occurred.
	The final wave of extinctions of large animals took place.
	During this period, the last of the mammoths died, killed so suddenly that vegetable content was found in their stomachs, meaning that digestion stopped suddenly.
	What were the fields where they died like?
	They contained grasses, flowering plants, and fruit trees, the remains of all of which have been found in or near the frozen animals.
	The sudden freezing that killed these animals required much more than a bad storm.
	It required a storm that was capable of delivering unprecedented levels of extreme cold to the surface, and doing it so suddenly that the animals, which were caught placidly grazing, did not even have time to look up.
	The most famous of the frozen mammoths, the Berezovka Mammoth, is mounted in the Zoological Museum in St.
	Petersburg, Russia.
	Discovered in 1901, the Berezovka Mammoth is preserved just as it was found.
	It died in the middle of a sudden movement, raising its trunk as if surprised.
	It had been grazing, as is confirmed by its stomach contents.
	As recent climatology has confirmed, the subarctic was substantially warmer 8,000 years ago and had been warm and getting warmer for around 3,000 years.
	The area then underwent radical freezing and has not thawed since.
	At the same time, a powerful freeze caused the human population of Europe to fall.
	200 years later, the interruption of the long-term warming trend was over and flood legends began to be repeated all over the world.
	What appears to have happened is that the post-glacial warming trend was briefly interrupted by a violent period of cooling.
	Warming resumed a few hundred years later, but left the Arctic frozen.
	At present, this area is just now starting to thaw again.
	Whatever sort of catastrophe did happen most certainly included an extremely severe weather event.
	This monstrous event left more than just the one cryptic sign of the deaths of the mammoths.
	It left the footprints of its passing all over the Northern Hemisphere.
	The most telling geological evidence that extreme winds sometimes blow across the Northern Hemisphere can be seen in places like the Hawaiian Islands.
	The Big Island's topography, for example, reveals evidence that massive seas and severe winds sometimes come from the southwest, creating eddies that surge around to the leeward side of the island, where they are so intense that they literally scour away the cliffs that can be seen there.
	If there were superstorms, this particular area would be affected, while islands further south would not.
	The storm would be a truly extraordinary event, not only because of its huge size and extreme wind velocities, but also because its rapid circulation would move super cold air down from high altitudes so fast that episodes of instantaneous freezing would occur on the surface.
	This sort of phenomenon might explain the sudden freezing deaths of the animals that have been found.
	Three questions must be asked.
	What caused this to happen?
	Is there any record of it in human myth, and is it going to happen again?
	Given that billions of human lives may be at stake, these questions need to be answered.
	Legends are strange things.
	Nobody can tell how old they are.
	Modern science, emerging out of the age of reason and with a built-in bias against non-Western ways of thinking, ...dismisses the stories of older cultures as flights of imagination and does little to address their origin.
	But because the Bible is viewed as part of the Western canon, its myths have been treated differently.
	There has been a great deal of interest in connecting biblical stories with actual historical events.
	Noah's flood has been the object of much such study, some of it legitimate and some not.
	Recently, Dr. Walter Pittman and Dr. William Ryan have shown that the Black Sea flooded very suddenly during the time we are discussing.
	They make a case that the ancient flood legends of the Western world must stem from this event.
	The peoples of the world carry with them a number of universal stories, and the most common of them all is the myth of the Great Flood.
	So the Black Sea may well have been one source of the story, but it was not the only one.
	Rather, a picture appears of a world that was fractured by a catastrophe that caused universal rain and universal flooding.
	It is doubtful that the Incas, the Cree, the Algonquin, the Mojave Apache, the Choctaw, and many other North American Indian tribes had ever heard the biblical story of the flood.
	And yet they all have myths of mysteriously rising waters and a hero who saved people in one way or another.
	The Inca myth, like the story of Noah and so many of the others, relates the cause of the flood to a reaction on the part of heavenly powers to a period of extreme human wickedness, a time of ceaseless wars and barbarism.
	The near universality of the inner structure of the flood story, with its hero who rejects a wicked world and his subsequent rescue of the animal kingdom and a few human survivors, may well be a memory of a world social order of some kind that was drowned.
	The sudden methane drop that took place around 8,000 years ago was accompanied by a return to cooling, and it was just as this took place that the past superstorm we have been speculating about probably happened.
	This storm did not trigger another ice age, but if it had happened in the fall or winter, it might have.
	It could well be that man did not go extinct during that time because of the invention of agriculture or the transporting of it from flooded areas to highlands by refugees.
	Judging from the way the ancient stories describe what happened, survival must have been a major achievement.
	The early stories describe not only a flood, but some sort of disaster involving the sun as well.
	The sun is described in many of the North American Indian stories as rolling in the sky, or bouncing across the sky.
	Days and days of darkness followed, as well as torrents of rain, rising water, agonizing cold, decimated whole populations.
	Since then we have enjoyed thousands of years of warmth and our species has grown and prospered until it has reached an unprecedented level of wealth and happiness.
	However, it is possible that we have reached a moment of crisis similar to the one that caused the last episode of extreme weather.
	It could be that the same situation that occurred then is happening now.
	Not since the Germans burst through the Ardennes in 1940 had refugees seen such crowding on the roads of France.
	At first, they had been Germans, and Poles, and Czechs, and Danes, and Belgians, and a pitiful smattering of Norwegians and Swedes.
	There were no Finns.
	There were no Latvians, no Estonians, no Russians.
	They came swarming in, in hordes.
	Hordes of them in trucks, limousines, travans, trains, planes.
	France was in no way prepared to receive what soon became a half million refugees a day.
	Then a million, then an unaccountable horde jamming the snow-blown highways, choking secondary roads, finally marching through the fields, walking through icy rivers, buying, begging, and robbing.
	A desperate French government found itself completely unable to cope.
	The whole northern part of the country was quickly becoming impassable due to the blizzard.
	In one way, this was a relief to the government, because the flow of refugees began to drop.
	All that remained of them now were long ripples in the snow, the buried roads jammed by their buried vehicles.
	Nobody knew how much death was out there.
	In more northern Europe, the scale of disaster was completely beyond imagination.
	Sweden was buried under 70 inches of snow, and it was still falling, in squalls as fast as 3 inches an hour.
	The temperature was far below zero, the wind gusting as high as 180 kilometers per hour.
	France, forewarned by what was happening to the north, decided to defend Paris from the storm.
	Snow removal equipment from all over the country was rushed to the capital.
	Most of it came from the Alpine provinces.
	Most of the plows were followed by long lines of refugees taking advantage of the briefly opened roads.
	These refugees did not follow the equipment to Paris, though.
	They headed south, and soon the cities along the Côte d'Azur were as crowded as if it were mid-August.
	As discreetly as it could, the government moved its major organizational entities south, all the way to Marseilles, but the more visible political institutions remained in Paris.
	And Paris went to war.
	It was an act of lunatic courage.
	Nevertheless, the city set about saving itself.
	The storm, which could now be perceived as a single organized entity only from satellite, seemed on the ground to consist of an endless series of blizzards.
	These cells would race across a thousand miles of territory, then break up like thunderstorms as they blew themselves apart or smashed against conditions that could not support them.
	When the cloud tops reached high enough, a brutal cold air circulation with ultra-high winds would begin, and the land below would be devastated.
	When such cells struck cities, the cities were all but destroyed.
	Paris struggled.
	Paris fought.
	Above ground electrical connections and power stations were manned by dozens of workers armed with gasoline-driven heaters.
	Flying squads and technicians stood ready to reach any point of the breach in the power system.
	One thing was extremely clear.
	If the power failed, then the war against the storm was lost.
	Why was Paris fighting?
	Because it saw itself as the living symbol of Western civilization, the wellspring of the greatest thought, the repository of the greatest art, the ancient center.
	It identified its own survival with the survival of the civilization to which it had, in such great measure, given birth.
	Even as the long darkness of the storm descended, the lights of Paris continued to glow.
	Of course, many thousands of Parisians thought the whole business was lunatic and joined the refugees headed south.
	A supercell was observed moving toward Paris, dropping snow at a rate of three inches an hour, carrying winds in excess of 140 kilometers per hour.
	This storm struck at a time when there were already 40 inches of snow on the ground.
	Smaller streets had already been abandoned to the storm and now the emergency task force began to limit even its clearing activities to the main thoroughfares.
	Paris was cut off from the north.
	But there was still supply lines that were open along the main routes southward.
	However, the breakdown of order was so profound that foodstuffs were not being brought north.
	The city began to see shortages.
	The wind screamed through the girders of the Eiffel Tower.
	Around the dome, roofs began to fail all over the city.
	There were tiles and other materials blowing into the air like so many leaves.
	Aluminum and glass was torn off the skyscrapers.
	The office furniture in buildings cascaded into the storm.
	A lunatic mass of smashed cars, desks, window frames, awnings, roofs, and all manner of debris began roiling through the streets, choking intersections, forming the basis for mounds of snow 40 and 50 feet high.
	The inner city was now completely isolated, as if it were under siege.
	Still though, Paris persisted.
	It did not die, not completely.
	Incredibly, a number of cinemas managed to stay open.
	Why?
	How?
	Nobody could say.
	Despite the general lack of food supplies, many restaurants struggled on, if only because the proprietors were now unable to leave the city, and there was therefore nothing else to do.
	The restaurant Jules Verne, that's a quarter way up the Eiffel Tower, had a tragedy.
	A wall of windows was blown in during dinner, and patrons and staff were forced to evacuate, but not without loss.
	An unknown number of people remained trapped in the rubble and were presumed dead.
	Normal rescue services ceased to operate.
	Bodies all over the city ceased to be counted, then to be moved, then even to be found.
	Still the storm increased.
	The political institutions of the government were trapped in the city.
	France began to appeal for help.
	Spain, Portugal, Italy, Turkey, and Greece were undamaged, but they could not get relief across the Alps and the Pyrenees.
	The United Kingdom was suffering even more terribly than France.
	Areas normally warmed by the Gulf Stream suffered the same fate as the Atlantic coast of France.
	The current was gone, leaving the full force of the Arctic free to spread its killing frost.
	Great Britain had suffered the destruction of perhaps 50% of its population, maybe more.
	These survivors, trapped in freezing, huddled along the south coast, choking desperate towns and cities, starving.
	There were no reports from Ireland, from Iceland, from Greenland.
	A cat fur coat cost 50,000 euros.
	An ounce and a half of gold or a pound of beef, a pair of snowshoes made from tin and old car tires could be had for a thousand euros.
	But snowshoes weren't what mattered.
	If you needed to go out, you had to protect your head and face.
	You could not risk even brief exposure to the cold, which dropped at night to minus 70 degrees Fahrenheit.
	Satellite views showed no ceasing of the storm.
	But nevertheless, things were changing.
	The waters of the North Atlantic were getting colder.
	The conditions that had spawned the superstorm thus were coming to an end.
	Still, though, the winds howled.
	Still, the streets of the city became more choked with snow.
	Power had dropped so far that heating could be continued only in essential environments.
	In the museums, paintings were taken from the walls and moved to basements.
	But still, the lights shone on, flickering now and again, It was true, but not for long.
	Never for long.
	All heat except electrical heat was now turned off.
	Oil and gas supplies had failed.
	Fires began to be added to the problems of the freezing city as makeshift heating systems failed and overtaxed electrical wiring burst into flames.
	And then, the lights failed.
	It happened in the gloom of the luncheon hour.
	First, a flicker, then darkness.
	Everyone waited.
	In the presidential palace, in the metro, in hospitals and apartments, in restaurants and shops, in the cinemas and theaters.
	The lights did not return.
	The evidence from 8,000 years ago is that global warming reached an extreme similar to the one that is occurring now.
	The Arctic is melting now, and it would appear that it will be only a few more years before extensive summer melt takes place and the conditions favorable to a superstorm are present.
	When the storm is over, probably within a month to six weeks, the northern hemisphere will have sustained enormous damage.
	Ultra-cold temperatures will have been reached because the combination of protracted cloud cover and unusually cold stratospheric temperatures will have supercooled the surface.
	A substantial part of the northern half of the northern hemisphere would be covered with snow, much of it packed to ice.
	Depending on the season in which the storm took place, this ice would either form the foundation of another long period of glaciation, or it would melt, resulting in floods of biblical proportions caused by the runoff.
	How far are we from this?
	First, we need to survey the present situation.
	There are a number of things happening that are possible preludes to the superstorm.
	The first of these involves the Antarctic.
	It does not play a direct role in the superstorm, but if vast amounts of fresh water from melting ice pour into the Antarctic Ocean, there will be a subsequent rapid rise in summer water temperatures, making it harder for ocean currents to continue circulating as they do now.
	At the same time that the ozone layer has been thinning above the Antarctic, dramatic changes in the ice mass are being observed.
	As early as 1988, huge icebergs began to calve off the Larsen Ice Shelf on the western side of the Arctic continent, near the tip of South America.
	By 1998, half of the shelf had broken up and the other half was in danger of melting.
	Every square mile of ice that melts reduces the salinity of the surrounding oceans, salinity that is crucial to the all-important circulation of the world's ocean currents.
	The reason that this is all happening could not be more straightforward.
	Both poles are getting warmer and fast.
	Since 1940, the Antarctic's average annual temperature has increased by about 6 degrees Fahrenheit.
	The Arctic increases even greater, 8 degrees.
	The two most important things that preserve our current climate are the continued stability of the North Atlantic Current and the temperature of the stratosphere.
	The greater the difference between stratospheric temperatures and those of the lower atmosphere, the more violent our weather.
	And as we have seen, stratospheric temperatures are dropping rapidly right now because greenhouse gases are trapping more and more heat close to the ground.
	Conditions that will result in a climate shift are building all over the world.
	Let's look now at the Arctic ice pack, where in 1997 and 1998, scientists began to observe unprecedented thinning of the ice.
	Buildings began to topple in Siberia as permafrost melted and shallow foundations disintegrated.
	In Alaska, melting permafrost began killing millions of trees by flooding their roots.
	The year 1998 ended as the hottest one ever recorded, and in 1999, it became clear that temperatures were rising far faster than had been anticipated just a few years before.
	At first, this makes it seem as if we are entering a runaway global warming scenario.
	Under such a scenario, the Earth becomes unable to radiate enough heat, and the atmosphere locks into rapid, unstoppable warming.
	Temperatures in a few years reach a point where there would be a general collapse of the environment as we know it, followed by heat so great that the planet would cease to be able to sustain human life or, in the end, any higher life forms at all.
	Before this happens, however, it would appear that the climate returns to balance.
	The way that the oceans circulate, distributing heat across the planet, is what determines our weather.
	When the great ocean currents change, climate changes with them.
	In 1997, Stefan Ramsdorff of the Potsdam Institutes for Climate Impacts Research reported that the Gulf Stream has already been weakened by increased flows of fresh water into the North Atlantic.
	There is a threshold in the North Atlantic Ocean circulation beyond which the circulation may abruptly collapse.
	As of March of 1999, some scientists are beginning to conclude that much of the Arctic ice cap will be open ocean, at least in the summers, within a very few years.
	It appears that it will lose as much as 70% of its ice mass within another 25 years.
	Dr. George Alley said that the possibility existed that putting more freshwater into the Atlantic would cause things to change in a hurry.
	According to the New York Times of March the 5th, 1999, the suggestion was that the effect would be as if a light switch was being thrown.
	A little pressure may not cause the system to change, but when the pressure reaches a certain point, it flips suddenly.
	This process has been amply demonstrated by the examples from the past we have been discussing, which offer much evidence of sudden change.
	Dr. Alley said that scientists have no clue about how close the switch is to flipping.
	So the following conditions exist for sudden climate shift and the superstorm.
	1.
	Surface air is trapping more and more heat because of the greenhouse effect.
	This is causing the upper atmosphere to get colder.
	The more extreme the difference in temperature, the greater the violence of the weather.
	2.
	The Arctic Ocean is getting less salty and warmer as polar ice melts and iceberg flow increases.
	3.
	The Antarctic ice pack is melting as well, flooding the South Atlantic with fresh water.
	4.
	Ocean currents are weakening.
	What does all of this add up to?
	When will the superstorm take place?
	Frankly, we don't know.
	When the climate switch flips, it's going to be very sudden.
	If a warm snap melts enough Arctic ice fast enough, the stage will be set for the collapse of the North Atlantic Current.
	When this takes place, climactic chaos will occur.
	As things now stand, this situation is inevitable.
	It is going to happen, and nobody knows when.
	Will it be strong enough to trigger another ice age, or just cause a great catastrophe?
	Again, nobody knows.
	Can we do anything about it?
	Fortunately, yes.
	the abyss of destruction we break through into the heights of understanding
	On dozens of different fronts, human knowledge is expanding at a pace that could not have been imagined even in the past few years.
	To look back to the 70s or the 80s is to peer into a strange, ancient world, slower and smaller, with horizons so narrow that they now appear almost laughably constricting.
	In 1985, you went to a library to do research.
	You could not fly on a plane without significant expense.
	A capable computer filled a room.
	There was no internet.
	In fact, our world was far less than it is now.
	Not only that, the environmental situation had a hopeless feel to it.
	There was a sense of gathering doom, although not one of great danger, as is true now.
	Most of the predictions that were in place in 1985 showed massive population overgrowth, the expansion of pollution, and the rapid decline of species.
	And we were entirely responsible.
	Rather than just being one factor in a great and complex extinction event, we were seen as the sole cause.
	As a result, all of our environmental planning was impeded by feelings of guilt.
	We were somehow at fault.
	Nevertheless, man-time did respond to the crisis.
	And this is what we accomplished.
	In 1975, solar energy cost $70 per watt.
	solar energy cost $70 per watt. By 1997, in constant dollars, this had dropped to $4 per
	watt. World military expenditures dropped from a peak of a trillion dollars in 1988 to $700
	In every area, from the production of pollutants to the growth of population, mankind has been an amazingly successful environmentalist, defying all but the most optimistic predictions the population of the Earth has grown far more slowly than anticipated in 1985.
	In short, just as the environment is challenging our very existence, we are responding with a massive, worldwide, and heartfelt effort to survive.
	And this has happened despite the fact that the environmental policy of the most powerful country in the world is hobbled by a false debate about the need for it.
	The same critical mass switch that flips the environment suddenly from one state to another operates in human society.
	Just as the environment is reaching a negative threshold, human civilization is reaching a positive one that may prove to be of equal or even greater power.
	Part of the change is social.
	It is almost as impossible to remember how the geopolitical world actually looked just 15 years ago as it is to recall the state of science and technology then.
	The USSR was an unassailable political reality.
	Within a very few years, Russia was a federation, Eastern Europe was free, and Soviet Communism had collapsed.
	Contrary to every expectation, a threshold had been reached, a switch flipped.
	A gradually bending social situation had suddenly snapped.
	Since then, Eastern Europe has embarked on a program of modernization and self-help that is almost unprecedented in history.
	We hear, for the most part, about the troubles in the Balkans, but the reality of Eastern Europe is that one of the most environmentally troubled areas on Earth is beginning the process of a massive cleanup that will, in the end, result in a complete restructuring of an aged and deeply poisonous industrial infrastructure.
	Still, Eastern Europe is a tiny island in an ocean of irresponsibility.
	Asia is almost totally lacking in environmental consciousness, beginning with China, which is engaged in a process of self-poisoning so profoundly destructive that much of the Chinese countryside could become spoiled for human life within a chillingly short time, climate change notwithstanding.
	Latin America, over the past 15 years, has experienced a massive migration both into its capital cities and its hinterlands.
	In their effort to feed and house their exploding populations, nations such as Brazil have gone to war with their tropical forests, attempting to establish human colonies in places that cannot survive human encroachment intact.
	They have set the stage for a catastrophe almost as great as that which appears to await China.
	So, despite all of the success of the recent past, we'd need to do better.
	We need a scientific breakthrough like viable nuclear fusion, the development of an efficient and environmentally friendly way of storing electricity, or the discovery of a means of removing pollutants such as CO2 from the atmosphere.
	Such a breakthrough would lead to mankind exploding onto the frontier of space in meaningful numbers, reducing the pressure on the earthly environment.
	Science has never offered mankind greater promise than it does right now, nor have we ever been in a better condition to take advantage of it.
	Limitless promise beckons across the frowning gray horizon.
	On the one hand, we have China's average personal income increasing by 400% in real wealth in just 20 years.
	And on the other, we face the problem of what would happen if each Chinese citizen began to consume as much oil in a year as each American does.
	China would, in that case, require 80 million barrels of oil a day, more than the total current world production of 67 million barrels a day.
	So China can't grow, or so it would seem.
	But China is packed with inventive, hopeful, and brilliant human beings, just like the rest of the planet.
	And if their growth is thwarted in one direction, they'll find room in another.
	If history is any measure, the average Chinese citizen will be far better off in another 20 years than now.
	Somehow, he will have a car.
	Somehow, he will have food, television, ice, education, linen, a computer, and all else for which he strives.
	And somehow, his world will be polluting less than it does now.
	But will we manage to step back from the edge of the cliff?
	At the beginning of the 21st century, we appear to be at the edge of an entirely new kind of revolution, an environmental revolution.
	Consumers across the planet, especially in the rising third world, will come to see environmentally supportive modern methods of generating power, providing transportation, and increasing their food production as more wealth-producing than the old ways.
	This vision isn't at all idealistic.
	Who wants to spend hours every day gathering wood and dealing with cooking over a fire, or pay for fuel, when solar cells can accomplish the same thing with less cost and effort?
	The collapsing environment is doing what it has always done to us throughout our history.
	It is challenging us to greater achievements and teaching us unforgettable lessons in survival.
	Seen from this perspective, our unstable environment is the essential wellspring of human evolution and change.
	And the more serious our environmental problems become, the more creatively we are responding to the challenge.
	The future that gazes back at us from across the great environmental divide of our era is a strange and wonderful one.
	A place well worth going.
	In response to the problems we face right now, we are going to find ways to generate and apply ever greater intelligence.
	Just as the development of more and more powerful engines defined the 20th century, the development of ever more powerful minds will define the 21st.
	There will be machines more intelligent than we are.
	Machines which can evaluate our needs and understand our problems better than we ourselves can.
	At that point, many of the mysteries that currently defeat us are going to be solved.
	For example, the inability of science to predict future climate will undoubtedly come to an end, and with it the argument about how to plan usefully for a healthy human future.
	We are going to do, on the eve of the superstorm, every single thing we must do in order to survive.
	We're going to fight, just as we fought a hundred thousand years ago when the ice came back, and eight thousand years ago when, in its death agony, the Ice Age almost drowned us all.
	The last time nature betrayed us, we invented agriculture.
	If there was an old human order, it passed away, leaving behind only enigmatic remains that even now cannot be duplicated, reminding us that along with the gains that the pressure of change brings us, there are also losses.
	One thing we obviously lost was the knowledge that led our forefathers to leave us with the riddle of Hamlet's Mill in the first place.
	Whoever devised the myth of the Mad Miller and his flawed mill, and all the related stories, sent a coded message right to our doorstep.
	Is it a message from the mirror of a too-closely-observing eye, or did a real civilization actually perish when the Miller last went mad?
	What matters is the essence of the message.
	Something happened then that was violent and dangerous and destructive and there is every evidence that it happens frequently in the great cycle that grips us and is shortly going to happen again.
	Just as our freezing ancestors learned to make clothing and organize themselves into social groups in order to survive, we must learn new techniques in order to guide ourselves past the perils of the next few years.
	We need more reliable models of climate and perhaps we need intelligent machines to help us make them.
	There is, however, another frontier we can cross in order to help ourselves, and this one is much more earthbound and practical.
	This is the frontier of awareness.
	There has been a sufficient amount of climactic upheaval, and the changes, especially in the Arctic, are rapid enough now to suggest to us in the strongest terms that social and political policy needs to be changed.
	But policy is being constrained, maybe fatally, by what has become a short-sighted debate.
	So we need to get personal.
	We need each of us to understand what we can do, and do it on our own.
	If each person in the developed world did no more than seal his house against air leakage, insulate his water heater with a cover, and run heating and air conditioning thermostats at 68 degrees or below in the winter, and 74 degrees or above in the summer, carbon dioxide emissions would be reduced significantly enough to measurably slow down global warming.
	Slowly at first, and then with increasing speed as these simple habits spread, weather instability would begin to decrease.
	It wouldn't be enough, of course, to solve the problem, but it would buy us some time.
	In addition, we can make an effort to encourage car manufacturers to build more energy-efficient cars like the Toyota Prius.
	Using a combination of a gasoline engine and an electric motor, this vehicle has virtually zero emissions and gets up to 70 miles per gallon.
	It does not require recharging and has about double the range of the average car.
	It's built on a Corolla body and has more than adequate speed, pickup, and as much room as a normal Corolla.
	In short, this and the other cars in this new class are no compromise vehicles that are not only environmentally friendly, but also more convenient than normal cars.
	At the same time, Ford has just introduced the largest passenger vehicle in history, a massive nine-passenger machine that dwarfs even the Chevy Suburban.
	Built on truck standards, it is a mega-polluter and gas guzzler.
	It joins the ranks of dozens of other sport utility vehicles, all built to meet the lower standards applied to trucks, and all spitting out far more pollution than normal cars.
	To work on behalf of the future, we need to vote with our feet in the showrooms and stop buying these vehicles.
	We need to insist that our legislators change current law and place sport utility vehicles under the same emission standards that govern passenger cars.
	If we start with personal change, then an entirely different future comes into focus on the horizon.
	In this future, our magnificent civilization survives, its prosperity spreading across the world in a sustainable manner.
	By 2050, mankind has broken through into a dimension as yet unguessed, has probably spread into outer space, and is generally healthy, happy, educated, and full of hope for the future.
	We are at the edge, treading on the wire.
	Will we cross or will we fall?
	Our ancestors fell.
	Let's heed their warning.
	This time, let's make it across.
	Meanwhile, the official world is going to remain unable to act.
	No irrefutable scientific warnings are going to be sounded, and yet it is clear that the clock is ticking.
	It is very clear.
	Because science can't produce certainty, propagandists and politicians have effectively stopped any kind of official-level reform that might save our world.
	In 1988, Dr. James Hansen of NASA's Goddard Institute of Space Studies announced that a process of global warming was taking place primarily because approximately one ton of carbon dioxide was being emitted into the atmosphere every year for every human being on Earth.
	Immediately, oil and chemical companies, some oil-producing countries, religious fundamentalists, and American political extremists responded.
	Ever since, these forces have been spreading a consistent message.
	Nothing is proven, so we should wait and see.
	In 1998, the U.S.
	Congress even went so far as to attempt to prevent government officials from speaking publicly about global warming in order to derail American participation in the Kyoto Conference, the most recent worldwide attempt to address the issue.
	The oil industry maintains a propaganda machine called the Global Climate Coalition that spends big money to spread the wait-and-see message.
	The National Coal Association does the same.
	The National Petroleum Institute retains a public relations firm to help defeat taxes on fossil fuels.
	The National Petroleum Institute alone spends nearly as much as all the major environmental funds put together.
	OPEC, the Consortium of Oil-Producing Nations, has joined with big oil companies such as ARCO, Exxon, Sun, Shell, and Unacal to spread the word that fossil fuel emissions should not be controlled.
	One informational film created for this purpose is called The Greening of Planet Earth, a video produced by the highly activist coal company Western Fuels.
	This film claims that increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will actually improve our lives by enabling us to turn current desert areas into grasslands.
	The theory is that more atmospheric carbon dioxide will make plants more robust.
	The flaw in this idea is that deserts are not caused by a lack of plant growth.
	But by geographic conditions such as mountains that deflect moist currents of air, and by soil conditions that prevent growth.
	So increasing carbon dioxide is not going to make the deserts bloom.
	Instead, as any Midwesterner who endured the floods of 1996, or Chinese who suffered through the Yangtze floods of 1998 will tell you, increasing carbon dioxide is going to cause deluges in place where rain already falls normally.
	Worse, carbon dioxide is the primary greenhouse gas at the moment, and its buildup is the center of our current problem.
	Despite the fact that levels are low in terms of geologic history, they are still causing enough heat increase to threaten the kind of polar melt that is potentially so dangerous.
	The fuel industry, backed by foundations with deep pockets, is dismissing all talk of this universally important issue as liberal posturing.
	Of course, it really has nothing to do with political ideology.
	It is perfectly appropriate for people of any political persuasion to take the stance that these problems must be solved, especially those of us with children.
	The American public has been misled into taking a wait-and-see attitude, one which amounts to a gigantic gamble, a test of the ability of nature to tolerate punishment.
	Unfortunately, the situation has not been helped by the inability of our scientific institutions to respond to the problem.
	Science is divided into thousands of very narrow specialties.
	This means that while individual pieces of information may be persuasive, they are rarely integrated into a big picture.
	The result of this is that enormous questions such as whether the planet is moving toward another sudden change in climate don't get the kind of clear and unambiguous answers we need in order to act.
	Without an irrefutable model around which to organize this data, there appears to be plenty of room for debate.
	Unfortunately, this is probably a dangerous illusion, given that the last time a superstorm blew up, animals seemed to have been killed so fast that they were still chewing their food when they froze solid.
	We are playing games with a climactic disturbance whose impact is worse than that of a full-scale nuclear exchange, and in some ways, just as quick.
	Since science hasn't got the ability to be definite, and since there is a large, effective, and well-financed group on the other side of the equation, there is virtually no chance that we are going to act decisively as a society in this matter.
	So the key becomes to recognize when the stage has been set for the superstorm and to act radically at that point.
	To derail it, it would be necessary to radically reduce atmospheric heating in the temperate zones of the Northern Hemisphere.
	This would cause the Arctic Ocean to become cold enough to re-establish the North Atlantic Current earlier in the storm's progress, thus removing the primary engine.
	The difficulty would be to realize in time that we were in a superstorm situation.
	Right now, weather reporting tends to be local and regional, only occasionally transcontinental, never planetary.
	But even if we had warning that the superstorm was beginning to gather, we would not have the means in place to act.
	Worse, the forces that fight any kind of environmental reform, as well-funded and powerful as they are, would interject the same note of caution that they now use to keep us passive and undecided.
	So it is possible that we might not respond to the storm even as it formed.
	We might not do the things that would make a short-term change.
	Stop driving cars, use only minimal electricity, damp all possible fires, reduce the amount of airline activity.
	We might instead increase our use of heating oil and gas as temperatures dropped, then attempt to migrate en masse out from under the storm's path as the wind began to rise, emitting even more CO2 as we did so.
	A large number of major cities, from Vladivostok to Toronto, and including most cities of North and Central Europe and the Northern Tier of American states, would quickly get into serious trouble.
	Sustained winds in excess of a hundred miles an hour would trap people indoors or in their vehicles.
	In the Arctic and Subarctic, ultra-cold microbursts might freeze whatever they struck in a matter of minutes.
	There would be a growing atmosphere of panic as satellite communications were interrupted by the heavy cloud cover and the infrastructure began to falter.
	Power failures would begin to take place early in the progress of the storm, further impeding people's ability to communicate and finally, to survive the extraordinary cold.
	As the storm continued, power stations relying on the delivery of coal would shut down as deliveries would stop.
	Oil and gas transmission would be interrupted as exposed pipeline sections burst or pumps on oil lines burned out due to the increasing viscosity of the cold oil.
	At some point, failure of the power grids of most affected countries would occur.
	Desperate migrations would ensue, but roads would be blocked, snow removal having failed along with gasoline deliveries.
	Food supplies would fail for tens, and finally, hundreds of millions of people.
	In London and Paris and Moscow, in New York and Toronto, the lights of civilization would begin to flicker and dim.
	As the storm's intensity peaked, the number of structures collapsing would reach astronomical levels, as wind pressure and snow weight combined to create stresses never imagined.
	It is possible that the death rate among people trapped inside the main body of the storm would approach 100%.
	Those surviving it until the sun came out, probably sometime in mid-March if the storm started in early February, would face a vast, glaring desert of ice, a slick, cracked, treacherous plain swept by high winds.
	In the United States, the southern border of the storm would lie somewhere south of Kansas City.
	If any part of the federal leadership remained alive, they would probably be headquartered someplace like Atlanta.
	The U.S.
	might have lost a third to half of its population.
	Canada, Russia, Finland, Sweden, Norway, Iceland, and Scotland would essentially be dead.
	The British Isles would be a devastated remnant.
	Of European nations, only Spain, Portugal, and Italy would be likely to remain intact.
	If the storm did not cause permanent freezing, the resultant spring melt would flood every river system in the Northern Hemisphere.
	Not until you reached Mexico in the Americas and North Africa would you begin to find states that were still undamaged.
	Southern nations like Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, and South Africa would become the new focus of the human future.
	Hong Kong and Singapore would be the financial capitals.
	Australia and New Zealand, like Japan, would have received damage, but not from the central process of the storm.
	They would be likely to recover normally, at least in the short term.
	The time of year that the storm took place would determine whether or not its aftermath consisted of massive floods or the beginning of a new ice age.
	If the ice did not remain frozen, the flood that would follow a modern superstorm would be similarly devastating.
	Almost unimaginable destruction would occur south of the already desolated storm line.
	Rivers like the Mississippi would briefly become sheets of water hundreds of miles wide, drowning everything in their path.
	In the event that the ice did not melt, survival in the areas the storm had not touched would at first be more certain.
	The southern tier of American states would probably regain their organization in a reasonable length of time.
	Southern California would be able to draw on its traditional sources of food in the Imperial Valley, and most of the Old South would be able to feed itself, although the shortages of corn and wheat products from the devastated Midwest would mean that seasonal shortages would become commonplace and bread would be in short supply.
	Famine would spread quickly through most of the world that is now dependent on North American grains.
	Starvation would lead to migration, and large numbers of Mexican citizens would begin appearing in the southwestern United States, with a consequent rise in violence as panic-stricken U.S.
	citizens fought to preserve what was left of their communities and their food supplies.
	As the years passed and the ice mass grew steadily larger, human activity would be constantly and increasingly impeded by ever-worsening weather conditions.
	In the end, the climate of places like Louisiana and Spain would be like the climate of southern Siberia is now.
	Mankind would be adrift in a sea of memories and recriminations, struggling desperately for survival in an increasingly hostile environment.
	Unfortunately, ice ages last much longer than warming periods, and human destiny would now change profoundly.
	If the scientific knowledge of the present could be preserved and expanded, we would
	undoubtedly embark upon a plan of understanding and ultimate control of the weather.
	Eventually, if the weather was ever understood well enough, a further plan to improve the
	situation might be launched.
	This would involve the greatest engineering effort in human history, nothing less than
	the separation of two continents now linked by a land bridge.
	A portion of Central America many miles wide might be excavated by a human species armed
	with a clear understanding of how the weather actually works.
	Mankind would then reestablish the ancient equatorial current and attempt to return the weather of the planet to the balance that it had enjoyed through most of its history.
	The new current would flow, much as currents did in archaic times, around the equator, bringing even heating in regular seasons to the planet once again.
	The ice would melt, and a much diminished but wiser human population would gradually reclaim the world lost beneath it, the myths and the memories, the glory that was our present age.
	It was so white, the land, and the sky so very blue, the air had purity to it, unlike anything Bob Martin had ever known.
	At minus 63 degrees, care had to be taken to breathe, but he was well equipped, feeling something like the astronauts must have felt on the moon.
	As a leader of the three-man emergency damage assessment team, he was assigned to locate survivors in Manhattan Quadrant 4A2, an area that included 40th to 45th streets between 5th and 7th avenues.
	His job was to find heat sources lurking in the ruined landscape, possible signs of life.
	The plan was to use infrared scopes of a type Bob was familiar with from his days in military.
	He'd taken the job because it was important.
	He'd been a ranger, after all, and done long-range reconnaissance during the Gulf War.
	Last time he'd used one of these things, it had to pinpoint Iraqi sentries, and he knew how to get the maximum response out of the notoriously touchy equipment.
	He'd also come here for another reason.
	He'd lived through the storm in comfort.
	Marty and the kids were safe in Austin, where he'd been able to buy a condo ten days before prices went through the roof.
	He was also here because he and his family had survived.
	Not untouched, of course.
	Nobody in the world was untouched.
	Marnie kept a paper copy of the last email from her brother in England.
	Would always keep it close to her.
	He died at his desk, no doubt of it.
	Assembling satellite data for the British Meteorological Office.
	As Bob saw it, any survivor with rescue skills was morally obligated to use them.
	As he and his two teammates moved slowly down 40th Street on their snowshoes, they peered into the fifth and sixth story windows they were passing.
	The glass was gone.
	All of it.
	Inside, the rooms were choked with snow.
	New York's power grid had failed in the first few hours of the storm.
	The city had tried to pull together, but then the central steam system had also failed.
	More than two million New Yorkers had escaped down the system of turnpikes and interstate
	highways that wound south through Washington and Richmond where the worst of the weather
	ended.
	The roads had been kept open eleven days into the storm by incredibly brave, incredibly
	determined work crews.
	They had saved millions of lives, these people often at the cost of their own.
	Nevertheless, it was thought that as many as a million people might be entombed on the
	island of Manhattan alone, maybe all of them were dead.
	There were six emergency teams like the one on Manhattan, five more working in the rest
	of the city.
	Thousands were needed all over the country.
	Cities like Philadelphia, St.
	Louis, Kansas City, Salt Lake, all of them could conceivably contain survivors whose time was now running out.
	In the absence of any central authority, the governors of the surviving states had formed a temporary governing council.
	The U.S.
	Fifth Army in San Antonio had been re-designated as the Continental Army Command.
	It had deployed most of its available resources along the Mexican border because of fear that looters would invade the part of the U.S.
	that was still intact.
	Nevertheless, it was anticipated that a substantial rescue force could be assembled within a month.
	National Guard units would join volunteers to comb the whole middle tier of states.
	Farther north, there was thought to be no point.
	Teammate Mike Garr called out from nearby.
	Heat, over here!
	Slowly, Bob turned, his snowshoes making him ungainly.
	He dared not slip because the snow in this street was 50 feet deep, and there was no way to tell what kind of debris might be hiding in it, ready to slice a hand open.
	With antibiotics now reserved for only life-threatening infections, that was a serious problem.
	To get cured nowadays, you had to be dying.
	Hurrying as best he could, Bob moved closer to the young pilot.
	In there!
	They climbed through the window, finding themselves in what seemed to be a clothing business of some sort.
	All three men had their instruments now, and all three of them were watching heat come from a canvas hamper full of rags.
	Could somebody be living there a child, maybe?
	Gingerly, Bob pulled at the hard, frozen top layer of rags.
	It came away easily, like a lid.
	And suddenly, the room was filled with shrill noises and racing movement.
	Mike yelled as Bill fell back against him, and then they all saw it.
	A very thin, very outraged squirrel was sitting on the shoulder of one of the suits.
	Must be from Bryant Park.
	Mike would know.
	He'd grown up in Manhattan.
	The rest went back out and Bob radioed the finding to their base camp, which had been established on the hard snow that packed Central Park's sheep meadow.
	The teams had spread out from one of the two choppers that had landed there.
	Right now, Mary Travis and the other helicopter pilot would be deploying the tents, setting up the field kitchen, and getting things ready for the return of the teams.
	It's two o'clock now.
	At 4, they would start back up 6th Avenue, past the shells of the skyscrapers, toward Warmth and Rest.
	Right now, however, they had other work to do.
	They were responsible for some large buildings, one of which was the main branch of the New York Public Library.
	They went on, moving toward the library, not really expecting to find much.
	They didn't go fast, because you couldn't.
	They each had four power bars, their only food until they returned to camp.
	Reaching 5th Avenue, they turned north.
	Using a grid of the city on the readout, they kept to the center of the streets.
	Huge snowdrifts leaned against many buildings and covered others, creating the appearance of a hilly area scattered with improbable clusters of tall buildings.
	It would obviously be dangerous to walk those drifts, lest you fall through into the rubble of the structures they had crushed.
	The library was a disappointment.
	Except for some parts of the roof.
	And the upper ten feet of the protico.
	It was swamped with snow.
	They got no heat readings from inside it.
	Inside there was nothing but millions of dead books.
	Bob tried not to think about them.
	He got on the horn.
	No joy.
	42nd and 5th.
	Library's a ruin.
	He took a deep breath and stopped.
	He took another.
	Guys, do I smell smoke?
	The other two began inhaling.
	Bill pulled off his face mask.
	His eyes closed.
	He sniffed.
	Then his dark eyes met Bob's.
	There was no need to say anything.
	The three of them stared toward the library.
	As soon as they did, they all saw the same thing, a wisp of white smoke curling up against the blue.
	They began to hurry, lifting their snowshoes high.
	As they came closer to the massive front of the library, they found a well-worn path that went down under the tops of the columns and disappeared into the dark interior.
	The area was blackened by smoke.
	There were steps carved in the hard-packed snow.
	They were all excited.
	Bob could feel his heart racing.
	He started into the space.
	Wait, guys.
	Hold off.
	Bob's military training came back to him.
	He unsnapped his parka and made the butt of his pistol accessible.
	Okay, back me up, Bill.
	Mike, hold the position until I call you in.
	With Mike waiting behind them, he and Bill moved into the dark.
	It was smoky under the enormous stone eaves and dark enough that they had to pull back their snow goggles and use their flashlights.
	Listen!
	Voices, lots of them, shrill, excited.
	Jesus!
	They continued on.
	Ahead of them was a broken skylight.
	Beyond it, the interior of the library itself.
	Bob went to the opening.
	Flickering lights could be seen from within the light of a fire.
	When Bob looked down, he saw what was without question the most amazing sight that he'd beheld during the storm or at any other time in his life.
	Sitting on the wide marble floor below were about 20 children.
	With them, a young woman, all filthy.
	They were cooking around a fire made of books.
	Instantly, their chatter stopped.
	Faces turned.
	Faces looked up.
	A young voice cried out, Daddy!
	All 20 children came running toward the ladder that connected their lair to the outside world.
	Children, stay back.
	They stopped instantly.
	The girl had taught them to obey her with the precision of a drill team.
	Line up.
	Go to the reading room.
	It's cold in the reading room, sister!
	Do it now.
	Bob had reached the floor.
	The woman came hesitantly forward, her eyes huge in the gloom, her face narrow, her left hand lost in a mass of rags.
	Can I help you?
	We can help you.
	She burst into tears.
	Slowly seeing her being held in Bob's embrace, the children came forward.
	There were 19 of them.
	The entire fourth grade class of St.
	Peter and Paul Elementary School, far Rockaway.
	They'd come to Manhattan on a library field trip.
	When the snow had gotten bad, the bus hadn't shown up, she'd called the school and been told to wait.
	The driver had said he was on his way.
	The bus never came.
	The library emptied out.
	The telephones failed.
	The electricity failed.
	At first, she'd gone across the street to a restaurant and hold up there.
	But the gas had gone off, and she'd decided to move back to where they could use books for heat.
	She was Sister Rita O'Connor of the Sisters of Divine Providence.
	None of her kids had been in touch with their families since the storm began.
	They were tired.
	They were homesick, scared, and cold.
	She had one case of walking pneumonia, two cases of frostbite, and her own hand, which was frostbitten, and she suspected gangress.
	Bill took a look at it.
	It was not gangress, but it was a mess.
	They radioed the camp about the situation.
	It seemed that New York wasn't dead after all.
	The other teams were all reporting pockets like this, pockets here, And there.
	Quantico decided that the refugees, who triaged as in need of medical attention but recoverable, should be moved to the Sheep Meadow.
	A C-130 would pass over with a pallet before 6.
	It was en route from a similar drop in Washington.
	The pallet would contain tents and food supplies for 50 people for three days.
	Tomorrow, a field dressing station, Arctic issue, would be dropped in.
	So, Sister Rita and her Saints Peter and Paul fourth grade started off on their last hike.
	She cried as she moved along beside Bob.
	She hadn't thought help would come.
	She didn't understand what had happened.
	In her mind, the blizzard was isolated in New York.
	When she heard how much of the world was involved, she was quiet for a long time.
	The kids were extremely well disciplined.
	They helped each other.
	They helped Sister Rita.
	When they got back to camp, darkness was falling.
	Manhattan was without light, so the stars were coming out.
	The moon was a sliver of purest silver, following the sun into the orange west.
	Mary had a tent up, and the air smelled of hot rations.
	Wieners, Bob thought, the kids were excited, eager to get at the food.
	When they entered one tent they had erected, they had a surprise.
	There were at least thirty people already there, jamming the space.
	There were people from every sort of situation and background.
	Apartment dwellers, people who'd been caught in the city unaware, like Sister Rita and her class, people who had sheltered in the subways and buildings wherever they happened to be able to find enough warmth and supplies to stay alive.
	Most of them were starving.
	All of them had respiratory complaints as well as frostbite.
	But there was about them something that Bob read about that had never actually seen.
	The grace and determination of the survivor.
	Even the children revealed a gentle, persistent strength and a sense of compassion for those about them.
	Bob saw what it was that enables human beings to survive in terrible situations.
	What it was that had made Sister Rita somehow manage to keep 19 children alive on a journey through hell.
	What had enabled all these others to endure?
	The huddled backs, the sallow faces, the quick eyes.
	He could see the strength.
	He could see the rock-hard determination in every one of them.
	There was a sudden roar, and then the sound of a plane's engines dwindling quickly away.
	Everyone who could bolted for the doors of the tent.
	Night had brought brutal, unimaginable cold.
	It was probably minus 90 degrees by now.
	But it was still and absolutely clear.
	There were no pollutants in the air.
	The stars almost seemed to sing in the sky.
	There were so many.
	They were so bright.
	And then Mike cried out, cried out and pointed all around Central Park, there are buildings.
	It is surrounded by cliffs of apartments and everywhere, in one window and then another, candles were being lit.
	People had heard the helicopters.
	They had seen the tents, the lights down there, and they were responding.
	The candles were so many that it looked as if the stars had come down.
	There wasn't a sound, but the candles could not have spoken louder.
	We're here, they said.
	More of us than you thought.
	More than you thought possible.
	Many more.
	We're still here.
	The Coming Global Superstorm was written and read by Whitley Streber and Art Bell.
	It was abridged for audio by George Truitt.
	The recording engineer was Mark Velasco at WOAI in San Antonio, Texas.
	Editing and post-production by Michael Jones.
	The associate producer was Sally Hearst.
	The Coming Global Superstorm was produced and directed by Karen Frillman.

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