Original subtitles

Fields of lightning miles wide.

Hail that falls like cough.

Wind that topples skyscrapers.

Could we survive

as monster storms ravage the planet?

One bad day to be on planet Earth.

Leading minds join forces to craft scientifically plausible scenarios of

Armageddon and find the secret

to human salvation in the face of ultimate disaster.

No doubt about it, humans are extremely lucky to live on planet Earth.

Because the climate in Earth's atmosphere, the temperature, humidity,

composition, the weather, is a very nurturing environment for sustaining a

variety of life. And it's been that way for a long time.

But Earth's climate exists thanks to a delicate balance of multiple factors.

And if just one of those is thrown out of whack, Everything we know could

very quickly.

Can you see that?

Hey guys, you feeling this?

Don't touch it, man. Don't touch it.

Authorities are blaming the death of one hiker and the critical injury of two

others on a New Jersey trail last week on an extremely rare weather phenomenon

known as ball lightning.

Until now, these floating orbs of electricity were a scientific mystery.

A lack of data had led some scientists to doubt their existence.

But in the eight days since the fatal hiking accident, there have been dozens

fall lightning sightings across the globe.

Scientists are now struggling to determine why these incidents keep

If we start experiencing bizarre weather phenomenon, we try to figure out what

was causing it.

There are many things that can affect the weather.

But one of the first factors to look at is temperature.

Let us start with the facts.

This map integrates data from all the weather tracking stations that have seen

significant elevations in temperature, 3 ,142 of them to be exact.

The average temperature on the Earth really doesn't change very much. And

it does change by a little bit, it's a big deal.

A sudden spike in global temperature would set off alarm bells.

And people would take a hard look at the chief mechanism of rising temperatures,

greenhouse gases.

A lot of people have heard about greenhouse gases.

But not many appreciate how quickly these gases can change our lives

Greenhouse gas acts similar to the glass in a greenhouse.

Some commonly occurring greenhouse gases are carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, and

even water vapor.

Most of the Earth's heat comes from the sun down to the surface of the Earth.

Some of it tries to go up back through the atmosphere and back into space.

However, on its way out, it encounters these greenhouse gases.

These heat -trapping gases hold on to the heat in the atmosphere, and they

it nice and warm like a blanket.

With just the right amount of greenhouse gases, we're kept at a nice

temperature.

But too much greenhouse is a bad thing.

It's just like putting another blanket on your bed. It makes it warmer down

on the surface.

And that has the potential to put the temperature out of a range that is good

for us.

Most of us are familiar with the concept of man -made global warming.

Factories, farms, car exhaust, even the most dire projections only predict an

increase of temperature of a few degrees over the next hundred years.

We believe we know the primary catalyst of this sudden spike in temperature.

We are convinced that the Earth must have experienced a spike in greenhouse

gases.

This points to one logical culprit.

For the last two years, a Japanese fuel consortium has been harvesting methane

hydrates in the West Pacific.

And six months ago,

they encountered a serious problem.

Existing just under the ocean floor are massive reservoirs of greenhouse gases

called methane hydrates.

Methane hydrates.

essentially a very strange form of ice, a combination of water and methane.

There are tons and tons of methane trapped in these methane hydrates.

They're on the ocean floor, just off the continent.

This is an enormous potential resource of energy.

And there are multiple new efforts to drill into these methane hydrates.

But methane is an extremely powerful greenhouse gas.

It's something like 25 times more efficient at trapping heat than carbon

dioxide.

That means we have a giant bank of heat -trapping gas that is stored in these

methane hydrates. We're not exactly sure how stable they are.

If the pressure on it is somehow released, for example, if we drill into

from an ocean drilling platform.

As soon as that pressure is released, it releases vast amounts of methane

directly as a gas that will bubble up through the ocean into the Earth's

atmosphere.

It appears that during pumping, a mud slide occurred on the seafloor.

releasing nearly a million tons of methane directly into the atmosphere.

If we throw in that additional helping of heat from outgassing of methane

hydrates, then we've got a new distribution of energy in the

could then lead to all kind of ramifications globally.

Heavy rains every afternoon that's just

impounding.

9 -1 -1. Yes, I am on hot road. I am in water and it's taking me away.

The likelihood of this type of methane eruption certainly isn't very high, but

it's definitely possible.

If enough methane were released, it could start a chain reaction known as a

runaway greenhouse effect.

A runaway greenhouse effect is a warming of the Earth that gets out of control

and it's self -propagating.

You start actually boiling away the water, and then that traps a lot more.

And that means as it gets warm, it gets warmer.

And as it gets warmer, it gets warmer and warmer.

And it's impossible to put the brakes on it.

You might think that this would just make it warmer on the surface.

But unfortunately, that's not all.

This could generate monster weather the likes of which we have never seen.

With time, we could have more intense storms, higher magnitude, higher

stronger winds, producing stronger storm surges, producing heavier rains, and

strange weather patterns.

And we simply don't know how quickly it might occur. It would be difficult to

predict what would happen, but it would not be good.

Oh, my God.

Earth's weather is pretty special.

Because weather on other planets can be quite brutal.

Some even have winds of 400 miles an hour that never subside.

If Earth's weather were to head in that direction, it could mean the end of all

human life.

There is no question that we've seen a global warming of surface temperature.

Now we need to know, what does that mean for the future?

The death toll in New York City has skyrocketed to 43 after a hail the size

bowling balls whipped through the city for nearly two hours yesterday

More than a dozen locations across the globe have been pelted with oversized

hail within the last week.

Meteorologists are blaming the devastating hail on something that

in the Northeast, an enormous supercell storm.

So if a large release of greenhouse gases causes a massive spike in global

temperatures, one of the things you might see early on is an increase in a

of storm known as a supercell.

A supercell is a large complex of thunderstorms. 911, can you hold one

second, please? I can't. It's emergency.

Oh, my God.

It can be very violent and suck in the energy.

suck in the moisture from the surrounding areas and develop into this

storm.

There is a plausible scenario that with this injection of greenhouse gases, this

pulse of warming, you could have an assemblage of cold air, warm air,

moist air, and dry air, and you could spawn some wicked super cells.

With these storms comes a tremendous amount of what we call updrafts. That is

rising motion, lifting that moist air, forming ice crystals higher than the

clouds.

Eventually, gravity will take over, and those crystals begin to fall.

When that happens, we experience the most damaging form of precipitation on

Earth.

They can destroy roofs, they can destroy car bodies, and they do millions of

dollars worth of damage every year.

One of the potential things that could happen in our scenario,

updrafts would be much higher velocity.

Supercells don't just cause hail. They also spawn one of the most deadly

phenomena we know today, tornadoes.

So in this scenario, we could see more tornado than ever before.

If a runaway greenhouse effect were to occur on Earth, we would have much

wind velocities, which would lead to a much higher incident of tornadoes.

There's a tornado on the ground!

This is an urgent message from the Kentucky Division of Emergency

Police and firefighters are on the ground and more help is coming.

These supercells are tremendously dynamic.

You get just the right combination of air that's subsiding and rising within

storm to help spin up.

And that spin eventually forms a vortex.

Once it goes down and moves to the ground, it becomes a tornado.

It has a nice debris cloud now. It appears to be hitting something.

I don't know what.

Yes, yes, coming down right now, major tornado.

Coming down, another tornado to the other side of 152.

When these tornadoes rip through a populated area, the devastation is

You can have a half a mile wide swamp, tens of miles long, where there's

left standing.

More than 300 tornadoes have hit Oklahoma City in the past two weeks.

house was completely turned over in my yard.

Dwarfing the previous record and killing thousands.

Tornado on the ground.

Six miles northeast of it.

There are storm systems today that don't just produce a single tornado. They can

produce many of them at the same time.

Just south, just south. It's one quarter mile south.

Which is similar to what you might have in this scenario.

They can be hundreds of storms in a day. And when that happens, it's called a

tornado outbreak.

Tornado on the ground. This is tornado number six or something.

What would be truly devastating in this scenario is not just that we'd get more

tornadoes.

but that we'd see them in greater numbers in places where tornadoes

don't occur.

Areas frequented by tornadoes, like Tornado Alley in the central U .S., are

usually less populated, and the buildings there are built to

help them weather these disasters.

But what about areas that haven't been built for tornadoes and that have higher

population density?

A building needs to have a certain elasticity.

But just as a tree has to bend with the wind, otherwise it breaks, so the same

with a building.

Most high buildings are tested for the design conditions. They're tested at the

wind speeds that are anticipated.

If you were to have an outbreak of tornadoes in the middle of any major

for instance London, the devastation would be immense.

The worst effect of building those right in the CBD.

London is reeling after massive tornadoes ripped through the city

It was very surreal.

Thousands are feared dead and tens of thousands are injured and homeless.

The Prime Minister has called it the worst natural disaster in the nation's

history.

Wild weather and storm systems of all kinds are gaining rapid momentum across

the globe.

The United Nations has dubbed it the global weather crisis, and

are even more distraught because they seem to be unable to predict where the

storms will strike next.

So now enormous storms are occurring virtually everywhere, and they're nearly

impossible to predict.

So the

next question becomes, can we try to stop

them?

In the face of the runaway greenhouse nightmare, a panel of international

scientists and military officials announced Operation Storm Destroyer, a

plan to weaken the superstorms ravaging the globe.

So are we really able to change the weather?

We have tried before, with some success.

For nearly 20 years, the U .S. government ran a program called Project

Theory. Their mission was to weaken supercell storms by feeding them with

chemicals.

In theory, we can weaken a storm by selectively feeding it with silver

iodide. Silver iodide particles are hydroscopic. That means they attract

So when silver iodide particles are dropped into a rain cloud, they draw the

water to them, forming raindrops. As rain falls out of the cloud, the storm

weakens.

So if a quick succession of storms begin to ravage the planet, nations with

experience in feeding may come together to fight back.

We have scheduled about 30 minutes for this press conference.

With the eventual impacts of the current environment yet unclear.

Maintain spacing interval 90 seconds.

And the constant threat of natural disaster.

Approaching minimum.

And America stands ready as a partner to provide stability for all.

Okay, 7 -9 -I.

Fortunately, the concept of seeding storms to weaken them is not as simple

people first believe.

Even for normal -sized storms, it's difficult to prove the effectiveness of

seeding.

In this scenario of a warmed Earth, if storms became larger and if storms

more intense, our ability to modify them would become even less possible.

Today, Congress pulled the plug on Operation Storm Destroyer after the

of 100 storms in six months proved unsuccessful.

Governments around the world are quickly switching strategies to assist those

hit hardest by the storms.

Unfortunately, as these storms grow and spread across the globe, they won't just

kill people, but they'll destroy our ability to produce food.

The destructive powers of these storms could destroy huge amounts of crops,

leaving us vulnerable to large degrees of famine.

With the storms destroying our ability to grow food, we'd be forced to rely on

our stockpiles.

But those stockpiles are limited.

At the present time, we have approximately one month's worth of food

feed approximately one billion people.

And the result of that is obvious. A lot of human beings will die.

overwhelmed by widespread food and water shortages across the nation.

Philadelphia and Los Angeles, massive power outages have further complicated

problem.

Meanwhile, in Port -au -Prince, police are struggling to deal with looting and

chaos as thousands take to the streets in search of food.

Often we think of the developed part of the world as assisting the undeveloped

part of the world during disasters.

But if the developed world was also experiencing disasters, it would be very

difficult for them to assist.

Is there anybody coming?

The problem comes up when it's distribution of resources.

And there you might have an issue as to who deserves the resources, where do

they come from, how much is going to be shared with a third world nation as

opposed to us.

Why don't we keep our own?

One thing that's true of most crises is that there's a big difference between

the haves and the have -nots.

In this case, certainly early on, those with resources might be able to build

some hope for themselves.

This is our three -bedroom, two -and -a -half bath model.

It's got beautiful southern exposure, great light in the afternoon.

Using technological solutions, those with resources might be able to find

of carrying on with some normalcy, at least early on.

We're really interested in, like, the weather protection features.

Of course. You are 100 % safe in one of these.

What's that noise?

I'm so glad you're here for this. This is our most exciting weather feature.

The lower to the ground you can get, the less damage you'll take from these

storms. I can envision a world where if you're under the constant threat of

strong winds and severe storms, designing your buildings and your homes

going into the ground.

The house is equipped with its own Doppler radar system.

When it detects a severe enough storm approaching, the house actually lowers

itself into the ground.

but even these measures would only be able to take into consideration the kind

of extreme weather that we're familiar with today in a world of monster storms

even our strongest measures may not be enough

If Earth were caught up in a runway greenhouse effect, it's possible that

weather phenomena could become much more common.

With an increased number of thunderstorms is going to come a greater

threat.

Lightning is this incredibly strange phenomenon that you think you know how

going to work, and it can have all kinds of surprises.

One exotic form of lightning that exists is what is known as a gamma ray flash.

Gamma ray lightning is a phenomenon at the tops of thunder cells that was

discovered only 20 years or so ago.

Only since we've had satellites in orbit that are designed to sense gamma rays

have we realized that we have copious amount of gamma rays emitted from these

lightning strikes.

Gamma rays are part of the electromagnetic spectrum.

They're really nothing more than a part of the electromagnetic spectrum of

light. It's one that we can't see, but it's real nonetheless.

If a human being is bombarded with enough high -energy gamma rays, The

are often horrific.

Gamma rays can rip right through your body. They can tear apart molecules and

lots of damage.

Typically, gamma ray flashes occur high in the clouds.

But in a weather crisis of this magnitude, all bets are off.

So what if gamma ray lightning began to occur more frequently at the surface of

the Earth?

This month alone, nearly 90 men, women, and children have suffered gruesome

radiation burns from gamma ray lightning blasts.

Of those 90, almost all have died.

The sudden uptick of these horrifying incidents, compounded by the ever

-increasing number of storms, has left many wondering what else is in store.

Hail falling like meteors, super tornadoes tearing apart cities, rare

rendered terrifyingly real. But all of this will pale in comparison to the true

threat in this scenario.

The hurricanes.

We have all kinds of storms that can do unimaginable levels of destruction.

Well, when it comes to storms of incredible magnitude that cover a large

it's hurricanes.

A hurricane is not just a

small storm like a single thunderstorm.

It's a storm that has to scale maybe 100 to 500 miles.

The winds in this system rotate around a center point, and the energy source for

it comes from the surface of the ocean.

The amount of heat in the ocean is enormous.

It's many, many, many thousands of atomic bombs full of energy.

They can be just absolutely devastating.

In the scenario we're talking about, hurricanes would be much more intense.

As the atmosphere gets warmer, evaporation from the oceans increases,

add water vapor to the atmosphere.

Maybe that doesn't sound like a bad thing, but that water vapor actually

contains a lot of energy.

If the temperature of the sea surface rises,

We could have a new class of storm form.

You can have the strongest hurricane become stronger and turn into a

or storm on steroids.

And a hypercane can grow without limits. The storm feeds on itself and

will hypothetically be able to grow unbounded.

This is not good.

This is one bad day to be on planet Earth.

The World Meteorological Organization announced today that they've stopped

naming super hurricanes as there are too many to predict and track.

In the past week alone, at least 11 nations in Africa and South America have

fallen as unrelenting storms have destroyed their struggling economy.

Now, life on Earth in a world of near -constant hurricanes would be almost

unrecognizable.

As storms get more and more intense and more and more frequent, obviously the

destructive power of them becomes cumulative over time, and the storms are

destroying what we consider the planet's habitability for human beings.

our everyday life would be forgotten as is.

Once we got over the shock of all of a sudden the weather being completely

different, we would have to completely readjust the way we exist.

beings function with assumptions that certain things are working.

They're not going to be living in a situation where their home might be

away by a storm, where a loved one will be driving down the street someplace

only to have a huge tree fall on that car and kill that person.

As these things become the norm, people will begin getting

increasingly uncomfortable.

If you look at the whole disaster record of humankind, people survive and

cultures survive a single event quite well.

It is compound events where there's two or more in a row.

We don't seem to be able to handle the combinations, and it's like a one -two

punch. There'll be enormous pressure on the government to do something.

It's the role of the government to protect the lives of its citizens.

That's relatively easy when the threat comes from another human being or

country. It's extremely difficult when it comes from nature itself gone wild.

So we're talking about a total breakdown, not only of global

national communities, state communities, even citywide local communities, into

just small areas of people surviving.

In a fairly short period of time, civilization as we know it will be gone.

I think we would revert to tribalism very rapidly.

At this point, as nations fall and small tribes of people band together to

survive, you can imagine that they would find relief in the brief moments

between these giant storms.

But it's possible that soon there would be no gaps at all.

Earth could be engulfed in one permanent, massive storm.

The worst case scenario is that this weather crisis culminates in a storm

covers maybe half the globe and never subsides.

There are precedents for storms of this severity in our own solar system

already.

We see certain places in our solar system where there are persistent giant

storms.

An excellent example is Jupiter.

The Great Red Spot.

The Great Red Spot is this vast circulating dorm.

The Great Red Spot is massive.

Three planet Earths could fit inside it.

Driven by the energy pumped into the atmosphere by a heating planet.

It's conceivable that there could be a long -term circulating storm with a

fearsome wind and weather front on other planets like the Earth.

It would be a very, very, very, very difficult situation for human beings to

adjust.

We still have to eat. We still have to breathe.

We still have to walk around on this planet. We still have to get by.

In an enormous storm.

With winds of hundreds of miles per hour, we wouldn't be able to find food.

wouldn't even be able to stand up.

It's possible that we simply couldn't survive.

A storm like this on Earth could mean the end for humanity.

There would be nowhere left to run, except maybe for one place.

The eye of a hurricane is the central portion of a hurricane.

Essentially, it's an area of calm, subsiding air.

And because of its proximity to where the winds are moving around it, it

cannot physically have a high wind velocity.

So the wind is always very low in this region.

If you have a strong hurricane, you're going to have a well -defined eye.

And with that, a chance to catch your breath if you're within there.

You could see that eye

be able to sustain itself, trapping the population within that eye and forcing

them to migrate.

as this low -moving eye traverses coastal areas.

Today, most of the storms have an eye radius maybe 10 miles to

40 miles.

We're from the edge, about 30 miles.

Luckily, it's heading inland.

In the situation that we're talking about here, we could probably see eyes

might be more on the scale, of 100 miles it is extremely possible if you could

stay in the eye of the hurricane that you could in fact adjust adapt and

learn to live in that new world we should be in pittsburgh in about five

days

If it's a permanent eye of the storm, then, you know, people can have a quite

interesting existence.

The eye would be constantly moving over areas that the rest of the storm had

already destroyed.

How's it looking down there?

It's done. It's stripped. There's nothing left.

All right. Get out of there.

Of course, this lifestyle would come with great risk.

Because of the eye wall, the innermost ring of the storm.

You have this eye wall where the strongest winds are circulating.

To survive in the eye, you'd have to navigate its movements pretty closely.

Because if you got caught in the eye wall, it's game over.

It's at 20 miles now.

So it's moving faster.

All right, people, you heard him. 10 miles an hour, go!

I think whatever nature throws at us, if it's survivable, people will find

a way to survive it.

If we've learned anything about humans, it is that we are one of the most...

From boiling lava to frigid darkness, Evacuate Earth explores two terrifying

plausible scenarios in the final double bill of the brand new series, tomorrow

from 9.