Ocean Currents Explain Why Northern Hemisphere Is Soggier

vinces99 writes "A quick glance at a world precipitation map shows that most tropical rain falls in the Northern Hemisphere. The Palmyra Atoll, at 6 degrees north, gets 175 inches of rain a year, while an equal distance on the opposite side of the equator gets only 45 inches. Scientists long believed that this was a quirk of the Earth's geometry – that the ocean basins tilting diagonally while the planet spins pushed tropical rain bands north of the equator. But a new University of Washington study shows that the pattern arises from ocean currents originating from the poles, thousands of miles away. The findings, published (paywalled) Oct. 20 in Nature Geoscience, explain a fundamental feature of the planet's climate, and show that icy waters affect seasonal rains that are crucial for growing crops in such places as Africa's Sahel region and southern India."

Comments

Re:Junk Science

[PPH]

Actually, the real concern here is that we are still building and refining atmospheric and oceanographic models. Models that some people have already tried to use to initiate political and economic changes.

Good science, just too early to use for anything important.

Re:Junk Science

[Immerman]

Actually, the real concern here is that we are still building and refining atmospheric and oceanographic models. Models that some people have already tried to use to initiate political and economic changes.

There are of course flaws in the climate models, just as there are flaws in our models of gravity, subatomic physics, etc,etc,etc - we are imperfect beings and it is the nature of scientific knowledge to evolve as our understanding expands. Those models are still far and away the best guides we have to predicting the future though, and their accuracy and reliability far exceeds the economic and sociological models that are currently driving most of the world's political process.

The point is that all the science for the last many decades has agreed with ever-increasing certainty and detail that we will be facing major human-caused climate problems in the next century, though the exact manner in which those problems will unfold is still being understood. And the longer we put off dealing with those problems the more drastic and expensive the eventual solutions will have to be. Had we headed the scientists in the '60s and started mitigating oil usage, or at least dedicated some noteworthy resources to developing alternative energy sources, then we would now have only a moderate challenge in front of us. Instead fusion research funds have been continuously dwarfed by fossil fuel subsidies (as just one example), solar is only just starting to become economically viable, and we are likely already past the point where it will be possible to maintain the global climate in a state similar to the last several thousand years.

If we wait another 50 years for the climate models to have all the details hammered out we'll be far too late to even start building the infrastructure we'll need to weather the transition and adapt to the new reality. As one example, several years ago an extremely high-resolution regional climate-change simulation was done for California, using the most well accepted global-scale climate change predictions as the input. Even using the most conservative numbers for global climate change, their model predicts the near-total elimination of mountain snow-pack in California by mid-century, and probably considerably sooner. That translates into *much* worse winter flooding and summer droughts, which will be devastating to both agricultural and population centers unless there have been a lot of dams built by then, and to get them built properly in time we need to start planning them now.

Now obviously we can just keep on with life as usual and hope for the best - after all that's what our species has done for the last 100,000 years, but three things are different this time:
1) We can see it coming, so we have the opportunity to start adapting preemptively at a much lower cost.
2) We are the forcing factor - had we reacted sooner we could have prevented the drastic changes from coming at all (or at least delayed it by a few hundred or thousand years), as it is we may still be able to moderate the changes.
3) There's seven-plus billion of us on the planet, and we're already over-utilizing the available ecological resources, and global climate change will drastically reduce those resources, at least for a few centuries until a new equilibrium is reached. The resulting famine and wars will dwarf anything our species has ever seen. If nuclear or bioweapons see much usage (as they may with most nations on Earth struggling for survival) then we may be lucky to survive this change even as well as we did the last ice age, when the global human population was reduced to only a couple thousand people.