Book and movie science

I read “man” books you know the kind were the world might be destroyed through exotic means, but the hero saves the day, and generally gets the girl if he isn’t happily married (like Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan). You know the kind, fairly trashy serials.

I am sick of the bad science they use to destroy the world. I mean I just finished one where a virus was going to consume all the oxygen and cause a vacuum to form. Come on, they keep calling it a toxin too, have some respect...
The movie The Day After Tomorrow, with its upside down hurricanes made me sick too. Remember my favorite movies are Historical SciFi, so I can suspend my disbelief with the best of them.

So here are a few plausible ways to “end life as we know it” (but not be so real that the FBI gets upset.)

Research into repairing the ozone layer yields a catalyst that uses sunlight to make ozone from regular oxygen. To sound “sciency” make the catalyst based on carbon nanotube captured metal ions (I would use Fe, Mo or Ni since they might have a shot at actually doing that, but some the cooler named elements might be well cooler), with the tube used to capture light… Now evil doer can threaten to release the catalyst in massive amounts into the lower atmosphere to poison the planet, etc, etc,

Evil doer fertilizes the ocean with iron and creates a massive toxic plankton bloom which kills all the fish, etc etc famine results. For the creatively minded plankton consumes lots of oxygen and suffocates the planet. (It would only take a few hundred tonnes of iron to do this.)

Similar but slightly different research into a catalyst to use CO2 and sunlight to make oxygen and graphite, to prevent global warming is stolen. If catalyst is mixed with seawater it will destabilize the gas dissolved in the water and cause an oceanic burp or at least a slow “leak”. This with will put hundred of trillions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere and smoother all life either over night or over several years, depending on the authors needs.

Evil doer uses a stolen nuke (and a secret tunneling project) to connect the Great Lakes directly to the Mississippi River, this besides flooding lots of land the huge influx of fresh water would disrupt the ocean current that keeps the north Altantic from freezing over and plunges the world into an ice age.

Given the current times this one is not nice of me but since it is thoroughly impractical I will mention it. Evil doer uses a thin oil slick to steer a hurricane towards a target. The oil prevents the evaporation of water from the surface of the ocean, so used correctly this technology could be used to starve a hurricane, but used improperly the hurricane would be blocked by the lack of energy and turn away from the slick.

I have a couple more that involve a stolen nuke but those are a little too plausible and I don't actually want to end life as we know it... Notice I have stayed away from terrorism, chemical, radiological, and biological weapons as well. These are not a subject for my site, since I don’t wish to give anyone ideas for anything other than trashy save the world novels or movies.

If you are a writer and wish to use my ideas remember me when the royalties start to pour in. Seriously, I am available for science consulting for movies and books, and I will give you plausible but truly fantastic ways to destroy the world. If you want more Tom Clancy realistic action science, I can do that too, but I am weary of that kind of stuff, since that can be inspiration for real bad things...