The Coming Global Superstorm

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Summary: A Frightening Possibility
Review: The Book "The Coming Global Superstorm" By Art Bell and Whitley Strieber is well thought out, well researched and well written. The book is also easy to understand; and it is also difficult to remain unimpacted by the book's message and what it may mean for mankind if it is true. It is a dire warning that we must not ignore.

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Summary: Look at the Big Picture!
Review: This book has inspired me to radically change my lifestyle! I am a stereotypical American consumer. Today, I ordered 24 solar panels and put a "for sale" sign on my gas-guzzling utility vehicle.... Please buy this book and read it intuitively, not critically. Look at the forest and not the "trees"...as the other reviewers have done glibly. Buy this book and pass it on to everyone you know!

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Summary: Just Another Might Happen Sometime Doomsday
Review: This is a book about 'the most incandescent moment in the history of the species'. Incandescent? Important, maybe, critical perhaps; but "incandescent"? Even if it were, how does that relate to this 'coming global superstorm'?

This very tabloid style, minimal facts, lacking clear causal linkage, is really what this book is about. It shows the characteristic absence of real substance of Mr. Streiber's other books. Some of the evidence the authors refer to is discussed in much greater detail in the infinitely better 'Cataclysm' by D.S. Allan and J.B.Delair, which does show the linkage between geological effect and ancient myth.

But for any kind of proof you need to establish that fact A is reliable, then fact B, that they are related to each other, and then you can infer something else - which is still hypothetical until verified. The authors don't even establish basic facts, and their hypothesis doesn't make any real or verifiable predictions.

Global warming may be a secondary effect, but that doesn't stop Bell or Streiber. Mr. Bell's regular contributor, Linda Moulton Howe, stated on one of his shows that the plant life of North America is soaking up all the greenhouse gas emissions of human activity in North America, but that doesn't deter our authors.

It's a fun theory, all the better for lacking any kind of timeline: Nostradamus went and put a date down, a mistake Bell and Streiber are not going to repeat.

So stock up on the dried foods, short-wave radios and gold that Mr. Bell promotes on his show. You didn't need them for Nostradamus' eclipse, you won't need them for Y2K, but there's always a chance you might need them - sometime in the next ten thousand years.

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Summary: Fact or Fiction This is One Great Read
Review: This book at its least serves as wake up call to pay attention to the enviromental changes happening around us. While the author's never pretend that their hypothesis of a coming global catastrophy is absolute fact, they offer compelling reasons to believe that a sudden global climate change is a possibility. The book is a well written,easy and exciting read. I couldn't put it down.

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Summary: Paranoia cubed
Review: Here we go again: Art being a prophet of doom and gloom. This is no science, excellent thriller though.

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Summary: A Really Thought-Provoking Book
Review: This book describes what will happen if the North Atlantic Current should suddenly shift into the central Atlantic due to the North Atlantic getting too warm. The authors are not scientists, and they make it clear that their ideas are speculative. They tell their story really well. I read it at one sitting, which I never do. They make what I think are some important points that nobody else has made. First, global warming is part of a natural cycle. Second, we are speeding up this cycle, not creating it. Third, the climate works like a slowly stretching rubber band. It changes by degrees and then suddenly--bang. We need to be worrying about this bang, because a lot of lives are at stake. They make some useful suggestions about how to plan for this. I am not given to praise and this is the only book review I have ever done. But this book is very important and very well written. It is an absolute must.

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Summary: Fascinating Read
Review: I have just finished this book and I am sitting here stunned. The authors have written one of the most important books to come along in many years. Not only that, it's riveting. You cannot put it down. They tell a frightening story, but they are so fair about it that you never feel that they are sensationalizing it in any way. I had one of those blinding 'of course' moments toward the end. Sudden climate change is part of the way our plant's climate works. They cite among their sources some of the best climatologists in the world for this conclusion. And when it comes, OF COURSE it will be violent. That's what sudden change is all about. But we just don't dare face it. They face it and they hold your hand. You come away realizing that we CAN prepare intelligently and even control the speed of the change, and it isn't going to wreck the business community or cheat the third world of its right to continue to develop. We have to plan and we have to take personal responsibility. We have to depoliticize the whole issue and start being rational about it. This book is so important. It is an absolute must for anybody who cares about their world or their children or their own lives.

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Summary: Boy, this book blows. From an Art Bell Fan.
Review: I am an avid listener of the Art Bell Program and was looking forward to reading it. BOY WAS I DISSAPOINTED! The writing is dry and sophmoric and lacks any originality or freshness. The plot is so unbelievable and unrealistic (regardless of Art's on air plugging) that you will quickly lose interest and pray for the ending to come. I read the book cover to cover hoping for it to get better but it never did. As a fan of the show I was sorley disappointed by this book. From all the on air plugging I thougt it would be a great read, but it wasn't. I WANT MY MONEY BACK!

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Summary: Most Chilling Book Since WarDay
Review: I've just read The Coming Global Superstorm written by Art Belland Whitley Strieber. I haven't had chills go up my back the way theydid since I first read Whitley's other book, WarDay. Both books had nearly the same style of moving back and forth from science fact to fictional scenarios, WarDay interweaved the two at the same time, while the Coming Global Superstorm had them parallel to each other.

The part of the book that freaked me out the most was the description of the Superstorm dropping ten feet of solid ice on the Great Lakes area. With the creation of "lake effect" snow which dumps several feet of snow on the shorelines due to cold air moving over the great lakes, that effect would be beyond catastrophic in the event of this superstorm. Living here in Jackson, Michigan it's a sobering thought that everything that I know could be buried under tons of ice in a new ice age.

The scenarios describing millions of people attempting to flee to the southern U.S. from the north in massive traffic snarls was haunting. Reading the book I could visualize cars and trucks being blown off the freeways by the over 200 MPH winds, entire cities crumbling, skyscrapers shattering and millions of people being instantly frozen by the sudden downard draft of super cooled air. Aferwards all of the debris and the dead are buried and packed under ten feet of ice as a precursor to a new ice age if the superstorm hits in the middle of winter.

Assuming there was a previous civilization on this planet with nearly the same or higher technological advancemen that suffered the same fate, it's possible to imagine what happened to the cities and people frozen in the ice.

Many of us remember from our childhoods playing in sandboxes or piles of gravel with toy dump trucks, pails or shovels. The sand, gravel or other types of soil we played with as children in the areas of the northern hemisphere consists of many elements; molecule-sized flecks of iron, decayed plants, fossil fragments too small to be recogized by the human eye, perhaps microscopic fragments of a bone or tooth and little specks of shimmering particles that almost look like glass when you hold them just right under the sun. According to many scientific explanations describing the previous ice age, anything trapped under the glaciers was crushed and slowly pulverized over thousands of years by billions of tons of ice pressing down and slowing dragging rocks, plants and other debris southward.

If the previous technologically advanced civilization also had an immediate mass migration toward the south then it's not much of a stretch to see millions fleeing in land vehicles and aircraft only to be wiped out in the previous superstorm. All the frozen people, animals, plants, vehicles, aircraft, cities, highways and other fixtures of the previous civilization would have been pulverized. The metal of their automobiles and airplanes would have stripped away by the pressure and the movement of the glacier over thousands of years to be gradually worn down into rusted and corroded flecks of metal. The concrete and steel framework of the cities, the magnificent works of art and architechure inspired by the intellect of a thriving civilization, wonderous and towering glass skyscrapers, technology allowing instant communication spanning the Earth, the bodies of the people and animals who were instantly frozen and decimated plant life gradually subcum to a fate of becoming molecular fragments under intense pressure resulting from the billions of tons of moving glacial ice.

Time would pass over centries and aeons, the glaciers receding, the climate warming and a new civilization awkwardly advancing, two steps foward and one step backwards. This process would continue up to and past the point in time when you were playing in the backyard sandbox or gravel pile as a child and being totally unaware you were holding the remains of a previous civilization in your hands. Hundreds of thousands of years from now, children playing in their backyard sandbox may one day be holding the remains of our civilization in their hands. Poetically, it would be a fitting and logical end if we ignore and ridicule the warnings of The Coming Global Superstorm.

Rating:
Summary: Interesting thesis
Review: The book makes an interesting read, but as anyone knows who has written research reports, it is easy to emphasize the points in favor of your argument and dismiss or fail to mention the points that rather spoil your story. And as anyone who has visited the Disney Animal Kingdom's dinosaur playground will know, just because you have a bunch of dead mammoths in one place, it doesn't necessary mean that there was an instantaneous global catastrophe, it could have just been a place that mammoths tended to go when they were dying over a long period. Although Art Bell seems a nice enough guy and the short segments of his show in betweeen the adverts (mainly for the book) can be facinating, his association with the book unfortunately makes it hard to take too seriously. How can a man who's show is essentially a long series of adverts for a myriad of questionable products he personally endorses, be taken seriously, and why is he so interested in making money if the worlds about to end? But still the book is worth reading as long as it is read with an open but questioning mind.