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Not that the movie was correct, but it wasn’t totally wrong — and we could soon face the consequences.
At 2:30 a.m. on June 6, 1998, Whitley Strieber awoke to a knock on his hotel door. Strieber, a UFOologist — that is, a scholar of unidentified flying objects and other paranormal phenomena — was in Toronto that night on tour, promoting his latest book, and he groggily got up to let his visitor in, assuming it was room service. It wasn’t.
According to Strieber, he and his nocturnal visitor proceeded to speak on a wide range of topics in his room over the next half hour. Although he never heard from the man again after that night, Strieber took notes during their meeting, during which the visitor tipped him off about “what was then rather obscure climatology,” Strieber told me. Specifically — according to Strieber — the visitor told him about the pending collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC, the system sometimes described as the oceanic conveyor belt responsible for influencing the climate of the Northern Hemisphere.
The late-night conversation became the premise of Strieber’s next book, 1999’s The Coming Global Superstorm, which he co-wrote with the paranormal radio show host Art Bell. The scientific community was not exactly impressed by the work: “I think they’d rather forget I even exist,” Strieber told me. (Bell died in 2018.)
But Strieber got the last laugh: The Coming Global Superstorm not only became the premise for The Day After Tomorrow, the 2004 disaster movie in which Dennis Quaid plays an NOAA paleoclimatologist, and New York freezes over and is beset by wolves, but recent modeling also indicates that the AMOC actually is slowing down. In some of the latest worst case scenario models, researchers say it could reach the point of no return, sending it into collapse as soon as this year. Once that happens, researchers predict that “the ice age pattern of a cooling north and warming south would play out again,” and while Northern Europe would bear the brunt of the effects, the Arctic temperatures experienced across North America this week — from a dangerously cold Inauguration Day to a blizzard warning for the Gulf Coast — could become a norm rather than an anomaly.
“I have watched [The Day After Tomorrow] a couple of times over the last few years, and I’m surprised at how the general premise isn’t that bad,” David Thornalley, a paleoceanographer at University College London, told me.
Of course, there is more wrong in The Day After Tomorrow (and The Coming Global Superstorm, for that matter) than there is right: Thornalley added that following an actual AMOC collapse, weather-related changes would take place on a “multi-decadal time scale” rather than in the mere weeks of exaggerated calamity depicted in the film.
Still, The Day After Tomorrow — which predated Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth by two years and was many Americans’ first introduction to the idea of anthropogenic extreme weather — can seem, in retrospect, to have been eerily prescient. It anticipated global warming-caused fresh water runoff from Greenland, which is upsetting the salinity of the ocean — essentially making it less dense — and breaking down the warm-and-cold water circulation across the globe that currently keeps our climate stable. With enough fresh water, the planet’s circulatory system could shut down for the first time since the Neanderthals went extinct.
And while Los Angeles isn’t going to be leveled by tornadoes and wolves won’t roam the tundra of Midtown Manhattan, Europe could cool by as much as 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit), which would have disastrous consequences for the continent’s agriculture. Additionally, the sharp temperature disparities between Northern Europe and the Mediterranean region could result in expansive (albeit not global) storms. While the U.S. would likely dodge the worst of an AMOC-induced cooldown, an ensuing sea level rise would impact many of the nation’s populous and iconic seaboard cities.
As shrewd as Day After Tomorrow and its source material might seem now, research into the possibility of an AMOC collapse dates back to the work of oceanographer Henry Stommel, who made the ocean salinity-conveyor belt connection in 1961. “That wasn’t taken very seriously because it wasn’t really an ocean model but just a sort of conceptual view on salt and heat interaction on the density,” Henk Dijkstra, a professor of physical oceanography at Utrecht University and one of the authors of the recent modeling that points toward an impending AMOC collapse, told me.
By 1986, however, the field of paleoclimatology was expanding rapidly. Researchers sampled ice cores collected from places like Greenland, and learned that there had been “very abrupt changes in climate” in the past, Thornalley told me. The Northern Hemisphere “would appear to be switching from a warm climate to a cold climate — flickering back and forth. And [scientists] put two and two together.”
The news was something of a revelation. “We started to develop this paradigm that, yes, we’ve had abrupt climate change in the past, and we think we can relate it to these changes in the Atlantic circulation, and the climate models suggest that, if possible, it could happen in the future,” said Thornalley, who began his PhD the year that Day After Tomorrow was released. The precedent wasn’t exactly reassuring news — the last time the AMOC collapsed, after all, “there were massive ice sheets and wooly mammoths,” Thornalley added. “It’s not a nice world for humans to try and live in.”
Despite the dire warning in the ice cores, an AMOC collapse wasn’t on the public’s radar before its introduction via Quaid and Jake Gyllenhaal. That isn’t to say it wasn’t a buzzy topic of discussion in the scientific community (not to mention that of beings who make a habit of dropping in on UFOlogists in the wee hours of the night). “It was really a hot topic” in climate circles, Thornalley confirmed. The film was “very much of its time.”
The Day After Tomorrow’s scientific resonance today, then, is due more to the fact that AMOC modeling has continued to hone in on the theory of a pending collapse with precision than because of any stunning predictive qualities of the movie itself. The scientific community is still in deep debate over the possibilities and potential outcomes and timelines of the process — a new paper out last week even argues that the AMOC hasn’t been declining — but for all the messiness and caveats, Thornalley ultimately lands in a place not so far from Strieber’s own position. “I don’t think we should be happy to wait until we’re really confident because, by then, it’d be too late,” Thornalley told me. “It’d be rubbish if in 30 to 40 years time, [the AMOC has collapsed] and people go, ‘Well why didn’t you warn us about it?’ ‘Oh, because we wanted to make sure we were really, really, really sure.’
Modern modeling of an AMOC collapse circles back to its speculative offshoots in other ways. Dijkstra told me he’s been working recently on models that consider how to encourage AMOC’s recovery, including via the rapid reduction of emissions. But his team has also run experiments that consider climate geoengineering, including “putting aerosols in the stratosphere” and “closing the Bering Straight,” both of which have the potential to limit freshwater from pouring into the Atlantic. “It’s a bit science fiction, but in models you can do everything,” Dijkstra said.
UFOlogists and mainstream scientists don’t often find themselves on the same side. But while many would dismiss Strieber as an environmental conspiracy theorist, the epigraph to The Coming Global Superstorm reads as urgently and poignantly today as it did umpteen AMOC models ago: “May the children of tomorrow look back on our era as the one where the healing of the earth began.”
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Current conditions: The remnants of Tropical Storm Chantal will bring heavy rain and potential flash floods to the Carolinas, southeastern Virginia, and southern Delaware through Monday night • Two people are dead and 300 injured after Typhoon Danas hit Taiwan • Life-threatening rainfall is expected to last through Monday in Central Texas.
Jim Vondruska/Getty Images
The flash floods in Central Texas are expected to become one of the deadliest such events in the past 100 years, with authorities updating the death toll to 82 people on Sunday night. Another 41 people are still missing after the storms, which began Thursday night and raised the Guadalupe River some 26 feet in less than an hour, providing little chance for holiday weekend campers and RVers to escape.
Although it’s far too soon to definitively attribute the disaster to climate change, a warmer atmosphere is capable of holding more moisture and producing heavy bursts of life-threatening rainfall. Disasters like the one in Texas are one of the “hardest things to predict that’s becoming worse faster than almost anything else in a warming climate, and it’s at a moment where we’re defunding the ability of meteorologists and emergency managers to coordinate,” Daniel Swain of the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources told the Los Angeles Times. Meteorologists who spoke to Wired argued that the National Weather Service “accurately predicted the risk of flooding in Texas and could not have foreseen the extreme severity of the storm” ahead of the event, while The New York Times noted that staffing shortages at the agency following President Trump’s layoffs potentially resulted in “the loss of experienced people who would typically have helped communicate with local authorities in the hours after flash flood warnings were issued overnight.”
President Trump announced this weekend that his administration plans to send up to 15 letters on Monday to important trade partners detailing their tariff rates. Though Trump didn’t specify which countries would receive such letters or what the rates could be, he said the tariffs would go into effect on August 1 — an extension from the administration’s 90-day pause through July 9 — and range “from maybe 60% or 70% tariffs to 10% and 20% tariffs.” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent added on CNN on Sunday that the administration would subsequently send an additional round of letters to 100 less significant trade partners, warning them that “if you don’t move things along” with trade negotiations, “then on August 1, you will boomerang back to your April 2 tariff level.” Trump’s proposed tariffs have already rattled industries as diverse as steel and aluminum, oil, plastics, agriculture, and bicycles, as we’ve covered extensively here at Heatmap. Trump’s weekend announcement also sent jitters through global markets on Monday morning.
President Trump’s gutting of the Inflation Reduction Act with the signing of the budget reconciliation bill last week will add an extra 7 billion tons of emissions to the atmosphere by 2030, a new analysis by Climate Brief has found. The rollback on renewable energy credits and policy means that “U.S. emissions are now set to drop to just 3% below current levels by 2030 — effectively flatlining — rather than falling 40% as required to hit the now-defunct [Paris Agreement] target,” Carbon Brief notes. As a result, the U.S. will be about 2 billion tons short of its emissions goal by 2030, adding an emissions equivalent of “roughly the annual output of Indonesia, the world’s sixth-largest emitter.”
To reach its conclusions, Carbon Brief utilized modeling by Princeton University’s REPEAT Project, which examined how the current obstacles facing U.S. wind and solar energy will impact U.S. emissions targets, as well as the likely slowdown in electric vehicle sales and energy efficiency upgrades due to the removal of subsidies. “Under this new set of U.S. policies, emissions are only expected to be 20% lower than 2005 levels by 2030,” Carbon Brief writes.
Engineering giant SKF announced late last week that it had set a new world record for tidal turbine reliability, with its systems in northern Scotland having operated continuously for over six years at 1.5 megawatts “without the need for unplanned or disruptive maintenance.” The news represents a significant milestone for the technology since “harsh conditions, high maintenance, and technical challenges” have traditionally made tidal systems difficult to implement in the real world, Interesting Engineering notes. The pilot program, MayGen, is operated by SAE Renewables and aims, as its next step, to begin deploying 3-megawatt powertrains for 30 turbines across Scotland, France, and Japan starting next year.
Satellites monitoring the Southern Ocean have detected for the first time a collapse and reversal of a major current in the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation. “This is an unprecedented observation and a potential game-changer,” said physicist Marilena Oltmanns, the lead author of a paper on the finding, adding that the changes could “alter the Southern Ocean’s capacity to sequester heat and carbon.”
A breakthrough in satellite ocean observation technology enabled scientists to recognize that, since 2016, the Southern Ocean has become saltier, even as Antarctic sea ice has melted at a rate comparable to the loss of Greenland’s ice. The two factors have altered the Southern Ocean’s properties like “we’ve never seen before,” Antonio Turiel, a co-author of the study, explained. “While the world is debating the potential collapse of the AMOC in the North Atlantic, we’re seeing that the Southern Ocean is drastically changing, as sea ice coverage declines and the upper ocean is becoming saltier,” he went on. “This could have unprecedented global climate impacts.” Read more about the oceanic feedback loop and its potential global consequences at Science Daily, here.
The French public research university Sciences Po will open the Paris Climate School in September 2026, making it the first school in Europe to offer a “degree in humanities and social sciences dedicated to ecological transition.” The first cohort will comprise 100 master’s students in an English-language program. “Faced with the ecological emergency, it is essential to train a new generation of leaders who can think and act differently,” said Laurence Tubiana, the dean of the Paris Climate School.
A fifth of U.S. counties now restrict renewables development, according to exclusive data gathered by Heatmap Pro.
A solar farm 40 minutes south of Columbus, Ohio.
A grid-scale battery near the coast of Nassau County, Long Island.
A sprawling wind farm — capable of generating enough electricity to power 100,000 homes — at the northern edge of Nebraska.
These projects — and hundreds of others — will never get built in the United States. They were blocked and ultimately killed by a regulatory sea-change that has reshaped how local governments consider and approve energy projects. One by one, counties and municipalities across the country are passing laws that heavily curtail the construction of new renewable power plants.
These laws are slowing the energy transition and raising costs for utility ratepayers. And the problem is getting worse.
The development of new wind and solar power plants is now heavily restricted or outright banned in about one in five counties across the country, according to a new and extensive survey of public records and local ordinances conducted by Heatmap News.
“That’s a lot,” Nicholas Bagley, a professor at the University of Michigan Law School, told us. Bagley said the “rash of new land use restrictions” owes partly to the increasing politicization of renewable energy.
Across the country, separate rules restrict renewables construction in 605 counties. In some cases, the rules greatly constrain where renewables can be built, such as by requiring that wind turbines must be placed miles from homes, or that solar farms may not take up more than 1% of a county’s agricultural land. In hundreds of other cases, the rules simply forbid new wind or solar construction at all.
Even in the liberal Northeast, where climate concern is high and municipalities broadly control the land use process, the number of restrictions is rising. At least 59 townships and municipalities have curtailed or outright banned new wind and solar farms across the Northeast, according to Heatmap’s survey.
Even though America has built new wind and solar projects for decades, the number of counties restricting renewable development has nearly doubled since 2022.
When the various state, county, and municipality-level ordinances are combined, roughly 17% of the total land mass of the continental United States has been marked as off limits to renewables construction.
These figures have not been previously reported. Over the past 12 months, our energy intelligence platform Heatmap Pro has conducted what it believes to be the most comprehensive survey of county and municipality-level renewables restrictions in the United States. In part, that research included surveys of existing databases of local news and county laws, including those prepared by the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University.
But our research team has also called thousands of counties, many of whose laws were not in existing public databases, and we have updated our data in real time as counties passed ordinances and opposed projects progress (or not) through the zoning process. This data is normally available to companies and individuals who subscribe to Heatmap Pro. In this story, we are making a high-level summary of this data available to the public for the first time.
Restrictions have proliferated in all regions of the country.
Forty counties in Virginia alone now have an anti-renewable law on the books, effectively halting solar development in large portions of the state, even as the region experiences blistering electricity load growth.
These anti-solar laws have even begun to slow down energy development across the sunny Southwest. Counties in Nevada and Arizona have rejected new solar development in the same parts of the state that have already seen a high number of solar projects, our data show. Since President Trump took office in January, the effect of these local rules have become more acute — while solar developers could previously avoid the rules by proposing projects on federal land, a permitting slowdown at the Bureau of Land Management is now styming solar projects of all types in the region, as our colleague Jael Holzman has reported.
In the Northeast and on the West Coast, where Democrats control most state governments, towns and counties are still successfully fighting and cancelling dozens of new energy projects. Battery electricity storage systems, or BESS projects, now draw particular ire. The high-profile case of the battery fire in Moss Landing, California, in January has led to a surge of local opposition to BESS projects, our data shows. So far in 2025, residents have cited the Moss Landing case when fighting at least six different BESS projects nationwide.
That’s what happened with Jupiter Power, the battery project proposed in Nassau County, Long Island. The 275-megawatt project was first proposed in 2022 for the Town of Oyster Bay, New York. It would have replaced a petroleum terminal and improved the resilience of the local power grid.
But opposed residents began attending public meetings to agitate about perceived fire and environmental risks, and in spring 2024 successfully lobbied the town to pass a six-month moratorium on battery storage systems. The developer of the battery storage system, Jupiter Power, announced it would withdraw after the town passed two consecutive extensions to the moratorium and residents continued agitating for tighter restrictions.
That pattern — a town passes a temporary moratorium that it repeatedly extends — is how many projects now die in the United States.
The Nebraska wind project, North Fork Wind, was effectively shuttered when Knox County passed a permanent wind-energy ban. And the solar project south of Columbus, Ohio? It died when the Ohio Power Siting Board ruled that “that any benefits to the local community are outweighed by public opposition” to the project, which would have generated 70 megawatts, enough to power about 9,000 homes.
The developers of both of these projects are now waging lengthy and expensive legal appeals to save them; neither has won yet. Even in cases where the developer ultimately prevails against a local law, opposition can waste years and raise the final cost of a project by millions of dollars.
Our Heatmap Pro platform models opposition history alongside demographic, employment, voting, and exclusive polling data to quantify the risk a project will face in every county in the country, allowing developers to avoid places where they are likely to be unsuccessful and strategize for those where they have a chance.
Access to the full project- and county-level data and associated risk assessments is available via Heatmap Pro.
And more on the week’s biggest conflicts around renewable energy projects.
1. Jackson County, Kansas – A judge has rejected a Hail Mary lawsuit to kill a single solar farm over it benefiting from the Inflation Reduction Act, siding with arguments from a somewhat unexpected source — the Trump administration’s Justice Department — which argued that projects qualifying for tax credits do not require federal environmental reviews.
2. Portage County, Wisconsin – The largest solar project in the Badger State is now one step closer to construction after settling with environmentalists concerned about impacts to the Greater Prairie Chicken, an imperiled bird species beloved in wildlife conservation circles.
3. Imperial County, California – The board of directors for the agriculture-saturated Imperial Irrigation District in southern California has approved a resolution opposing solar projects on farmland.
4. New England – Offshore wind opponents are starting to win big in state negotiations with developers, as officials once committed to the energy sources delay final decisions on maintaining contracts.
5. Barren County, Kentucky – Remember the National Park fighting the solar farm? We may see a resolution to that conflict later this month.
6. Washington County, Arkansas – It seems that RES’ efforts to build a wind farm here are leading the county to face calls for a blanket moratorium.
7. Westchester County, New York – Yet another resort town in New York may be saying “no” to battery storage over fire risks.