COULD Dennis Quaid have been right after all?

He played the maverick climatologist who warns the world’s governments of a sudden ice age in the disaster movie The Day After Tomorrow.

Now his character’s claims have been put to the test by a scientist from the University of Southampton.

In the 2004 film, climate warming caused the collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) – referred to as the thermohaline conveyor in the film – leading to tornadoes destroying Los Angeles, New York being flooded and the northern hemisphere freezing.

The film’s main thesis received a mauling from experts but it seems it was not complete science fantasy.

The professor says the shutdown of the AMOC would not have the immediate catastrophic effects depicted in the movie but could lead to a Little Ice Age as witnessed in the late middle ages.

Using a climate model at the Max-Planck Institute in Hamburg, Professor Sybren Drijfhout, of the Department of Ocean and Earth Science at Southampton, found that, for a period of 20 years, the earth will cool dramatically if global warming and a collapse of the AMOC occur simultaneously.

Thereafter global warming will continue as if the collapse had never happened but some parts of the northern hemisphere will be colder by 12 degrees celsius.

Professor Drijfhout said: “The planet earth recovers from the AMOC collapse in about 40 years when global warming continues at present-day rates, but near the eastern boundary of the North Atlantic – including the British Isles – it takes more than a century before temperature is back to normal.”

The AMOC is a major two-way current in the Atlantic. It carries warm water northwards close to the surface while colder water from the Arctic flows southwards at deeper level .

The warm current flowing north, the Gulf Stream, is responsible for Britain’s relatively warm climate for its latitude and mild winters.

Dennis Quaid’s character Jack Hall claims that melting ice sheets at the pole have added so much cold freshwater to the Atlantic that the currents will shut down.

In the film the shut down coincides with the arrival of a super storm which causes an almost instant ice age in which humans venturing outside are frozen to death within seconds and a military helicopter sent to rescue the Royal Family from Balmoral plunges to the ground when its fuel suddenly freezes.

Professor Drijfhout, pictured below, explained that most scientists believe the AMOC will not shutdown but will decrease by between 30 and 50 per cent. However, he does not rule out a more dramatic event.

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He says: “A minority projects a total collapse. Because we believe that current generation climate models are too stablein this respect, we have little confidence in likelihood estimates for such a collapse."

“Recent observations with the AMOC-Rapid array have shown temporary downturns in AMOC-strength that are far outside the range of variability simulated by models, underscoring that model estimates are still not realistic enough.”

Professor Drijfhout’s study appears in Nature Scientific Reports. To read it visit nature.com/articles/srep14877.