The Coming Global Superstorm

The message is very scary and convincing: humankind has so polluted the environment that the world's weather is about to react by taking a ""ferocious"" turn. But the messengers delivering this news seem a bit flaky: Strieber wrote of his own alien abduction episode in Communion; Bell, a late-night radio talk-show host, regularly covers such topics as UFOs, government conspiracies and near-death experiences. They present an imagined sequence for the catastrophic ""superstorm,"" threatening a possible ""extinction event"" for humans. It's like Orson Welles's The War of the Worlds, only we're fighting the weather instead of Martians. Interspersed with this alarmist scenario are many credible facts about the effects of trapped greenhouse gasses, as well as explanations of how quickly our ecosystem has deteriorated in this century. Reading, the authors are very grave indeed, lending an otherwise dry scientific topic a heightened sense of drama--and making it play as a thriller on tape. Simultaneous release with the Pocket hardcover. (Dec.)