reviewed by Theresa Welsh

Two authors known for their interest in the paranormal have teamed up to write a book that has nothing to do with spirits or aliens. Their topic is much scarier than that.

In The Coming Global Superstorm, Bell and Strieber present yet another doomsday scenario, one that does not depend on any shifting earth crusts or a comet hitting earth. The cause is much more mundane. Civilization is wiped out by a huge global freezing storm that simply buries most of the northern hemisphere in massive amounts of snow. And oddly enough, the trigger for this massive deadly storm is global warming! As the polar ice caps melt, it puts more fresh water in the oceans, reducing their salinity and upsetting the usual pattern of flow. The gulf stream changes course. The temperature at the surface of the earth gets warmer while the air high above the earth gets colder. A collision of warm and cold air forms over the arctic and these conflicting masses of air begin to seek balance.

The storms begin as just bad storms over northern countries, but the storms get worse and form one giant storm that knocks out communications, closes escape routes and finally takes out the power grid. What Bell and Strieber describe as the consequences of such a storm is nothing less than the end of civilization as we know it. They take us on a journey into the past, making a case that such storms have happened before. They say the last such storm was 8000 years ago, and it wiped out the advanced culture that built many of the huge monuments that remain. No, they don’t use the “A” word (Atlantis), but they call on all the usual spokesmen (Hancock, Bauval, West, etc) to build their case. Like Graham Hancock, they speculate that the last victims may have tried to warn us.

This book is a quick and easy read, very well-written with dramatic scenes of people caught in the storm worked in between a narrative explanation of how it would come about. In this well-crafted tale I see the excellent skills of Whitley Strieber, whose writing talents I have always admired. He did not disappoint me with this book, as I had to fight back tears, not to mention a sense of sheer horror, as I read sentences like this one: “Satellites reveal no information about what is happening beneath the cloud cover, but the victims -- some of them frozen so quickly that their dinners are still in their mouths -- will not be found again for thousands of years. Like the mammoths who preceded them in the last storm, their remains will suggest to the future that something strange and terrible happened, but the memory of the cataclysm will have died with them.”

They throw in a lot of other observations, like the surprising theory that life in the universe is NOT common because life on earth is dependent on our having a large moon to slow down wind velocities. I hadn’t heard that one before. They also say we are living through another “extinction event” that has been going on for thousands of years. Although they make pleas for conservation, they do not think that the activities of man, which have contributed to global warming, are the essential problem. They also say we can do something about the danger, but they don’t say what. They end with a vague appeal to science to study the phenomenon of the superstorm and come up with a way to control the weather, even adding an enigmatic reference to Nikola Tesla who, they say, may have known about a new source of energy.

Are Bell and Strieber serious? Yes, I think they are, and they make a strong and very scary case. Buy The Coming Global Superstorm at amazon.com.