What's it about? Global warming causes large areas of the Greenland and Antarctic ice shelves to break off and melt, diluting the North Atlantic Ocean with large amounts of fresh water. This disrupts the ocean's thermohaline circulation and slows the Gulf Stream, causing a rapid cooling of the northern hemisphere. This triggers a series of anomalies and extreme weather events, eventually leading up to a massive "global superstorm" system consisting of three gigantic hurricane-like superstorms, which result in an ice age for the northern hemisphere within days. One hurricane-like storm is over Canada, one over Scotland, and a third over Siberia. The movie follows Jack (Dennis Quaid), a paleoclimatologist for NOAA, his son Sam (Jake Gyllenhaal), a high school student, and his wife Lucy (Sela Ward), a doctor. The film portrays the "eye" of the superstorms as having such a low pressure that extremely cold air (−150F or −101C) from the upper troposphere is sucked downward, instantly freezing all who are caught in the eye. A woman in NOAA argues that the freezing air would warm up and rise, such as in regular storms, but Jack states that the air is dropping too fast. The storm is headed to New York, where Sam is trapped, and which Jack is trying to reach with Arctic gear and his survival skills. Throughout the movie, a subplot involves the refusal of the Vice President of the United States to accept the threat of global warming--despite increasingly extreme weather conditions occurring throughout the world--insisting that measures to prevent it will do too much damage to the economy.

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