Word: paleoclimatologist
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...head. New York City is spectacularly swamped by a tidal wave and then snap-frozen at --150°F by a killer blizzard. (That must mean it's officially O.K. to destroy New York City in movies again.) Somewhere in there Dennis Quaid, as an implausibly hunky paleoclimatologist, has to rescue Gyllenhaal, his academic decathlete son, from certain death. By the time it's all over, Earth's blue-green ball is grizzled with the frost...
...some scenarios could lead to a long-term cooling, but nothing so dramatic as this, and certainly not at Hollywood speed: in the movie a killer frost chases a sprinting Gyllenhaal down a hallway. Change that drastic would take decades, if not centuries. Even Dan Schrag, a Harvard paleoclimatologist who spoke at the MoveOn.org press conference, says the plot is largely bunk: "Climate change, global warming, is not going to lead to an Ice Age. And it's not going to happen in a few days...
Thompson is an important figure in part because what he does is unique. While most glaciologists focus on polar regions, he has targeted the long-neglected ice fields of the tropics. "Lonnie went against the grain," says influential paleoclimatologist Wallace Broecker of Columbia University, and in so doing, Thompson has helped overturn the long-standing belief that the planet's so-called Torrid Zone is merely a passive responder to swings of climate, as opposed to an active participant...
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