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Failing Ocean Current Raises Fears of Mini Ice Age
Designadrug writes "This article from Newscientist paints a picture of a major climate control mechanism teetering on the brink:
"The ocean current that gives western Europe its relatively balmy climate is stuttering, raising fears that it might fail entirely and plunge the continent into a mini ice age. The dramatic finding comes from a study of ocean circulation in the North Atlantic, which found a 30% reduction in the warm currents that carry water north from the Gulf Stream.""
But the earth isn't supposed to regulate itself! We're making it hotter! OH NOES!!!1 Seriously, who wouldn't expect something like this to happen. The temperature differential that drives that current has shrunk slightly and therefore as lost some momentum. Then Europe gets cold for a while, things even out, and everyone is happy. Except 50 cent. because his game is stupid.
If the current is pulling all that energy from the warm waters up north and dissipating it in the process, what will happen to all the excess warmth if the current stops? Will it find another way to go? Maybe create a new current or even restart the same current again? That heat has to go somewhere, it is water after all.
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Depending on whom you ask, this could be a global warming issue. This is something I researched back in high school and got weird looks, but the logic goes like this:
1. Temperature warms up. Surface ice in the northern/southern reaches melt. This is something we've been seeing with the shrinking glaciers/nothern ice cap/Antartic icebergs melting.
2. Ocean rises, which causes a lowering of the ocean temperature from the influx of cold water.
3. With ocean levels higher, the ocean is able to absorb more energy, which shuts down the warm ocean currents.
4. Without the warm ocean currents, weather patterns are altered. Cold air that would have been warmed by the ocean currents remain cold. In time, the water that melted is converted into ice.
5. With the altered weather patterns and no warm air, the ice age comes into being. The more ice that forms, that more sunlight redirected back into space.
6. This continues until enough build up of ocean warmth.
Or - something like that. It's been a decade or two since I studied it, and I'm sure a meteorologist would do a better job. But what I do recall is that a good chunk of research shows this process can take place in as little as three years - which means it might be a good time to start buying some land down in Mexico....
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You can't make anything that would work on that massive a scale without spending as much money as would be lost if South America suddenly vanished. Nature is much bigger and more powerful than us and is totally beyond our control through methods like that.
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Actually the movie was based on info and theories from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. They just added a bunch of bad science for plot devices. Take a look at these two links: Little Ice Age and Abrupt Climate Change
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http://www.wunderground.com/education/abruptclimat e.asp
Here is the part I wanted to reference: "Since the Great Ocean Conveyor belt is driven in part by differences in ocean water density, if one can pump enough fresh water into the ocean in the key areas on either side of Greenland where the Gulf Stream waters cool and sink, this will lower the ocean's salinity (and therefore its density) enough so that the waters there no longer sink. The Atlantic conveyor belt and Gulf Stream current will then shut down in just a few years, dramatically altering the climate. "
Also here is a write up specifically dealing with the "science" of "The Day After Tomorrow."
http://www.wunderground.com/education/thedayafter. asp
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Not that Kyoto would do jack anyway.U p.htm
http://www.junkscience.com/MSU_Temps/Kyoto_Count_
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Because obviously, following a treaty designed to economically punish the United States for a few years would have solved all of this.
Regardless of the economical consequences, wasn't the Kyoto protocol designed to prevent global warming?
Oh, but the moment it has any economical consequences, suddenly it's an evil plot to take money away from "our precious and beloved country!"
Sorry to crush you with this, but the world's needs are more important than a few enterprises' economical whims.
why?
who cares why! forget the blame game!
just deal with it!
It's easier to solve a problem if you know what caused the problem. Otherwise you're just applying bandages.
What?
True, ocean currents will still move. They're definitely chaotic system and often behave "counterintuitively".
b s/341318a0.html
But all that warm water goes so far north largely because of (cold) water with high salinity. This water is dense and sinks. This is called North Atlantic Deep Water formation, and possibly drives deep ocean currents around the world.
This salinity gradient is the key energy source that "pulls" warm water so far north, more than the thermal or momentum gradients.
This gradient broke down during "the Younger Dryas cold episode, which chilled the North Atlantic region from 11,000 to 10,000 yr BP." "[This] is postulated to be a turnoff [...] of the North Atlantic's conveyor-belt circulation system which currently supplies an enormous amount of heat to the atmosphere over the North Atlantic region. This turnoff is attributed to a reduction in surface-water salinity, and hence also in density, of the waters in the region where North Atlantic Deep Water (NADW) now forms." Paleoclimate claims are supported by oxygen and carbon isotope studies on plankton.
see http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v341/n6240/a
If the Gulf Stream isn't pushing as much water toward Europe, then the water is lingering longer in the Gulf of Mexico, which goes a long way to explain why so many storms churned up to Category 5 hurricanes as soon as they reached the Gulf all through this autumn. Doesn't sound like fun for North America either.
i've seen that website before and i decided to run a few calculations on it. now while you might think that that is a miniscule mean temperature change in the atmosphere, when one multiplies that 0.001227436 C by the ~725(depends on exact density, doesn't vary much) joules needed to raise the temperature of mixed air by one degree centigrade and the 5.1*10^18 kilograms of air in the lower atmosphere one gets the net energy "loss"(this being entropic and useless energy that we don't want, and can do almost nothing with) of 4538444610000000000 joules
that's 4538444610 gigajoules
for comparison that's about the same as a gigaton nuclear bomb(heat and blast)
As usual there is a better discussion on realclimate.org.
As I understand it the situation is that the mechanism proposed for sudden climate change by Broecker some 15 years ago (and exaggerated beyond recognition in a silly movie lately) shows some signs of actually occuring. New measurement expeditions have reinforced the evidence in this direction. Though the evidence isn't absolutely conclusive, it's starting to weigh in that direction and the new evidence makes the case stronger. There is well-understood physics at work, but it involves delicate small-scale structures that are hard to capture in global scale models.
Though most scientific opinion expects it won't be enough to trigger a European ice age (unlike the YD event some 11KA ago) it could lead to a great deal more climate variability in our lifetimes especially in Europe and the northern reaches of the Atlantic than has been captured in most climate models, and in the extreme it may even cool Europe a bit as the rest of us get hotter.
mt
Generally the argument goes something like this:
Is that conclusive proof? No, but then we don't have conclusive proof of general relativity or evolution either, we've just got a lot of good evidence. There's a lot more evidence that the 3 points laid out above as well, but they provide the solid backbone: atmospheric carbon dioxide traps heat; human activity has produced an unprecedented spike in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels; the beginnings of the acceleration in warming predicted by such a dramatic increase in carbon dioxide has been observed.
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I don't know if the treaty makes any difference, but do you really think the climate change is not going to punish the USA economically?
It's all pointless at this point anyway. Whatever's going to happen is going to happen. Anything any set of countries tries at this point is going to be pathetically too little, too late.
Consider that the third world and much of asia is desperate to ramp up industrial production to help their economies grow. The way they look at it, they can either worry about global warming or the bigger fish they have to fry, i.e. poverty and catching up to the rest of the world. Are they going to spend huge amounts of money trying to clean up their industries? No. They're going to pollute the fuck out of everything while they manufacture all the disposable crap they'll be selling to the rest of us. Crap we ASKED them to produce, of course.
Consider that the first world has already shifted most of its heavy industry to the third world. The only thing most of US can do to reduce global warming is stop driving cars and use clean energy generation methods. Is this going to happen? No. Not while our self-absorbed leaders are so fascinated with the oil economy they're willing to overthrow other countries to increase their supply.
Conclusion: The situation is completely and hopelessly fucked. Everyone is acting in their pathetic selfish self-interest, and nobody is willing to give anything up to change anything. Whatever's going to happen is going to happen.
It'll be an interesting few decades while things settle down. I'm betting on the following:
1. Mini ice age lasting two hundred years or so, sort of like the last one, in all nations bordering the North Atlantic. Actually I don't mind this, I hate hot weather and I've always loved snow. Here in New York, things should be pretty nice, if a bit chilly. And blizzards are fun as long as you don't have to travel. It's an excuse to stay home and play Halo II on XBox Live.
2. Very hot weather and major storms throughout equatorial regions. Florida and the other gulf states, for example, are going to get the shit beaten out of them every year. I expect most people to get fed up and move inland to get away from the hurricanes, and away from the plains states to get away from "Tornado Alley". Lots of migration will produce new ghost towns along the coasts, not due to disasters per se, but to people getting fed up with having their houses knocked down biannually. Actually I'm endlessly surprised this hasn't already started.
3. Ocean levels might rise a bit, but this might be offset by increased ocean ice due to the mini ice age, so the whole "waterworld" thing is going to be a non-starter. Of course we knew that.
4. Everyone is going to completely freak out and run around with their hair on fire for years and years. We on Slashdot will argue about it endlessly, never arriving at any conclusion, but it'll be interesting and take our minds off the fact that none of us have been laid recently.
Farewell! It's been a fine buncha years!
Do you really think it realistic that huge, powerful, and rich environmental organisations would perform evil acts that only employees of sensible and socially responsible oil companies can save us from? Is it reasonable or realistic that environmental scientists, who in the real world are willing to forgo lucrative careers to take low-paid academic positions because they love and care about researching the natural world, would cause massive destruction of the natural world to score political points?
In the real world, who has the most money for public relations and the most political capital? The ex-chief executive officer of the giant energy corporation Halliburtons is the vice president of the USA for goodness sake. Could the head of Greenpeace ever hope to reach such an influential and powerful position?
All the local environmental fund raising events I've been involved with have been in conjuction with people that have very little financial resources but care deeply about recycling, local environment issues, etc. Very different from Crichton's own protagonist, who zips about the world in a Gulfstream Jet.
It's easier to solve a problem if you know what caused the problem.
True enough. Problem is that humanity is a long way off from being mature and intelligent enough to determine exactly what sort of climate change to expect, much less the root cause of that change. Does human activity cause climate change? Absolutely. How much and in what way? We have no friggin clue and we wont in any of out lifetimes. This is for a couple of reasons:
1. Humanity's lack of maturity prevents us from putting aside politics and self-interest. We try but in the end out efforts are nearly futile. Our best effort to date many might say is the Kyoto accord and it is doomed to fail. And no, it isn't the fault of the Americans--even if the US signed on it would never work. Why? Because Kyoto is just another political/economic shell game. Developing nations are pretty much exempt from making an effort at reducing CO2 emissions (including 800-pound-gorilla China). I don't care what reasons are behind such exemptions--if we want to affect global change the whole globe must participate. Second of all, there is "selfishness" involved. It is easy enough for the likes of Germany and France to look down their noses at the US and trumpet their wonderful CO2 reductions: France just throws up more nuclear generation and Germany gets to count all those communist-era east-German soot-belching factories in their starting numbers. Then there are nations like Canada, where the infrastructure is already quite modern and efficient for the most part and the cold climate and sparse population make it more difficult to meet targets legitimately--most of those reductions will be met by playing the shell game and trading pollution credits. In the end it means no meaningful impact on climate change.
2. To paraphrase a favourite sci-fi author: "The universe is mind-bogglingly complex". Scientists know almost nothing about the direction of climate change. They have pretty little computer models that make predictions and they can make vague (and often conflicting) pronouncements about the earth heating up or more hurricanes or ice ages and whatnot. In the meantime the good people at Environment Canada cannot even predict the weather two days in advance with any reliability at all. How can we get the "immature public" to buy into a more climate-friendly lifestyle with that kind of track record? The weatherman tells them it'll snow in two days with the accuracy of a coin toss. Big, smart scientists with expensive supercomputers tell us the world is heating up...no wait we are going into an ice age (which was the prevailing theory in the 1970s)...no wait we are heating up (1980s to now)...no wait...the world will heat up a bit, but some places will be really dry and others really wet...no wait...we ARE going to have a sudden ice age...because of global warming melting ice and cooling the oceans....what the hell? Our smartest people cant quite wrap their brains around it much less the general public (I like most others are pretty much mentally retarded on the subject though most like to think theyknow something about it).
I'm sure someone will argue the merits of Kyoto (maybe there are some--I just don't see how it'll change the world meaningfully). Others will argue that science is proving itself now (gee, look at all the hurricanes we had this year--never mind the fact it was only one or two more than the previous record set many decades previously, before we had the technology to spot those that didn't make landfall near civilisation). Thing is, the pronouncements we make and the justifications for Kyotot-like manoeuvring are so vague it is like proving Nostradamus was right.
In the meantime, bandages and maybe a makeshift torniquet is all we have to keep us from bleeding to death in terms of climate change. I figure we should put more emphasis on more concrete, proven environmental factors--like living sustainably (use less energy--get rid of the big old SUVs. Get your lazy ass out of the captain's
for comparison that's about the same as a gigaton nuclear bomb(heat and blast)
/ maybert.htm
Which is nothing in the grand scheme of things. I quote from this website.
http://coop.co.pinellas.fl.us/TimeTweb/2001/may01
"While a hurricane lives, the transaction of energy within the storm's circulation is immense. The condensation heat energy released by a hurricane in one day can be the equivalent of energy released by fusion of four hundred, 20-megaton hydrogen bombs. One day's release energy, converted to electricity, could supply America's electrical needs for about six months. "
That's eight gigatons of energy released a day by a single hurricane. Now how many did we have this year alone? That's a lotta fucking energy by mother nature alone.
Life is not for the lazy.
By Steve Connor, Science Editor The Independent, 10 February 2003 Generations of schoolchildren have been raised on the belief that the mild British winters and cool summers are due to the moderating influence of the Gulf Stream, a warm ocean current flowing from the Gulf of Mexico to the shores of western Europe. Without the Gulf Stream, our teachers told us, Britain's winters would be as cold and ice-bound as a frozen port in Newfoundland and its summers as hot and stuffy as a Moscow August. But the textbooks have got it wrong, according to scientists who have just finished a study of what makes Western Europe cool in summer and mild in winter. The scientists found that Britain's moderate climate is due not to the Gulf Stream, but to the Rocky Mountains in the western US 4,000 miles away. Using weather data gathered over the past 50 years and powerful computer models to describe how heat is shunted around the globe, they discovered that the contribution of the Gulf Stream was negligible compared with the influence of warm southerly winds originating in the Rockies. These winds, they said, played a big role in explaining why winters in Britain could be anything up to 15C or 20C warmer than the same latitude in eastern North America. "Belief in the benign role of the Gulf Stream is so widespread that is has become folklore," said Richard Seager, the scientist who led the study from the Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University in New York. The belief that the Gulf Stream is responsible for Britain's mild, maritime climate appears to have originated with the publication in 1856 of a book by Maurice Fontaine Maury, a lieutenant in the American Navy. "One of the benign offices of the Gulf Stream is to convey heat from the Gulf of Mexico, where otherwise it would become excessive, and to disperse it in regions beyond the Atlantic for the amelioration of the climates of the British Isles and of all Western Europe," Maury wrote. "This idea is one reason why so much climate research has been focused on the impact of changes in the circulation of the North Atlantic Ocean," Dr Seager said. Several recent studies, for instance, have suggested that global warming might slow down or even stop the Gulf Stream which carries energy equivalent to 27,000 times the total output of all of Britain's power stations so bringing a far more variable continental climate to Western Europe. Dr Seager's study, published in the current issue of the Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society, suggests that the Gulf Stream accounts for no more than 10 per cent of the winter temperature differences between Britain and Newfoundland, Canada. The scientists found that the real reason for Britain's mild weather was twofold. First, there is a genuine maritime effect of being surrounded by a relatively warm body of water, but this has nothing to do with the Gulf Stream. Second, this maritime influence is bolstered by southwesterly winds bringing a warm air mass from the south. These winds would not blow if the Rockies did not exist, the researchers found. Even without the Gulf Stream, Britain would be bathed in prevailing westerly winds that bring in the warmth stored in the Atlantic Ocean. Water retains summer heat far longer than land, which is why the winter-summer difference in temperature is about 5ÂC over the North Atlantic and yet nearer 50ÂC at the same latitude in Siberia. Dr Seager said his study showed that this phenomenon which was independent of the Gulf Stream accounted for about half of the winter temperature difference between Britain and Newfoundland. The other half, he said, was due to the prevailing winds over the maritime regions of Western Europe--not westerlies, but from the southwest. Those south-westerlies brought additional heat to Western Europe. Their origins could be traced to a massive "meander" in the north-south wind patterns over North America, which was generated by the presence of the Rockies. "One such meander occurs east of the Rocky Mountains and brings cold air into eastern N
How was it "designed to economically punish the USA"? By requiring USA to cut down emissions? Guess what Einstein? It required EU (among others) to cut their emissions as well! In fact, the requirements were higher for EU than for USA! And there's few things to consider:
a) In Europe, power is generated relatively cleanly (nuclear etc.). Not so in USA
b) Cars in Europe are relatively environmentally-friendly, when compared to cars in USA
c) Industry in Europe (steel among others) had already spent lots of money modernizing their plants, making the more environmentally friendly.
d) People actually use mass-transportation in Europe, not so in USA.
What does all that mean? It means that USA could easily reach the requirements of the treaty by doing the stuff EU already did. EU could not, they would have to find other ways to cut their emissions, since all the easy things have already been done (not so in the USA).
Even simpler: EU worked hard to cut down emissions. Then they were told to cut their emissions by 9% (IIRC) more. USA did jack-shit to cut down their emissions, and then they were told to cut their emissions by 8% (again, IIRC). So it would be relatively easy for USA to cut their emissions, while it would be considerably harder for EU.
"Punishing the USA" my ass!
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Actually, no. It was not. Kyoto was designed to slow the rate of global warming by a little bit as a first baby step and temporary stop-gap measure to get the ball rolling so that the world community could start talking about what to do as a real solution. Kyoto was never designed to solve the problem (and anyone who claims that is lying, probably trying to smear it with the tired "Kyoto won't fix anything therefore we shouldn't do it" line).
So what we are seeing is the right-wing fuckers and the Bush administration crying like babies over the introductory step towards the problem. It took seven fucking years to get even the first hint of action, something that was only supposed to slow it and give us a little more time while we cleaned up our act for real. At this rate, the real solutions will never come. Many climatologists already believe we have passed the point of no return, the only question is how bad will it get before whatever fixes we do finally adopt take effect. But we know the next hundred years are only going to get worse, there is nothing we can do about that. Right now, we are fighting for the fifth or sixth generation ahead of us, whom we will never see.
Kyoto was not designed to fix anything. It was an introduction to real discussion. And we killed it, and with it any hope for our future for generations to come.
(While I'm at it, China and India both signed Kyoto, and they will both be subjected to the same restrictions that we would have been within ten years, for the restrictions ratchets up on them as their economies ramp up. And going by standard of living, both China and India are still third-world and will be for a while yet. They will be regulated as first-world nations when they will have barely reached second-world status. "Economic catastrophe for the U.S.," my ass!)
In the meantime, China seems to be the only large country that's actually working on decreasing CO2 output. I don't believe the EU countries are going to make their targets, too much rhetoric and too little action.
In a few years, we'll be forced to switch to other energy sources anyway, because peak oil is more or less here. We'll see what happens then.
I believe posters are recognized by their sig. So I made one.
Because they pollute less. Because they take less space, reducing the severity of traffic-jams.
There is no legislation in Europe which mandates people to buy small cars. People just realized that they do not need over 2 tons of metal around to move their ass around the city. and they realized that in small cars are much more convenient than humungous cars. We do have taxation on gasoline that makes small cars more attractive though.
Where exactly have I said that sales of SUV's should be prohibited? They are not prohibited in Europe either. The difference between USA and Europe seems to be that the government is actively pushing people to buy SUV's, by excluding them from fual-consumption and emission-regulations.
In this particular case: because Americans are wasting resources that
a) should not be wasted because it's a finite resource
b) they are harming the globe with their wasteful lifestyle
c) they could manage just fine without wasting those resources
If Americans were wasting their own resources and they only harmed themselves, I wouldn't complain. But they are wasting resources which is shared with others, and they are harming others while doing so. That is why I (and many others) complain.
And this isn't a case of "telling Americans how to live". This was a question of cutting down emissions. EU was willing to do it, USA was not. No-one was telling USA how they should cut their emissions, only that they should cut their emissions.
I grasp them just fine. What you don't seem to grasp is that most Americans don't live in rural areas. Finland's population-density is even lower than USA's is, and yet we seem to manage just fine.
Every single American lives in the "west"? I don't think so.
I don't give a flying fuck how Americans live as such. What I do care is that what they are doing to the globe. And I do get annoyed when they waste finite resources and harm the globe while doing so. If you had a next-door neighour that liked to burn old car-tires in his backyard, and the smoke spread to your yard, would you complain? If you did, wouldn't you be telling him "how he should live"? Same thing here: USA is wasting finite resources and they are harming others while doing so. They also absolutely refuse to do anything about it. And when other complain about it, you start to whine?
Many people perceive USA as being very selfish on this issue, and with good reason.
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