The Gulf Stream does not appear to be slowing down, say US scientists who have used satellites to monitor tell-tale changes in the height of the sea.
Confirming work by other scientists using different methodologies, they found dramatic short-term variability but no longer-term trend.
A slow-down – dramatised in the movie The Day After Tomorrow – is projected by some models of climate change.
The research is published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
The stream is a key process in the climate of western Europe, bringing heat northwards from the tropics and keeping countries such as the UK 4-6C warmer than they would otherwise be.
It forms part of a larger movement of water, the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, which is itself one component of the global thermohaline system of currents.
Between 2002 and 2009, the team says, there was no trend discernible – just a lot of variability on short timescales.
The satellite record going back to 1993 did suggest a small increase in flow, although the researchers cannot be sure it is significant.
“The changes we’re seeing in overturning strength are probably part of a natural cycle,” said Josh Willis from Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California.
“The slight increase in overturning since 1993 coincides with a decades-long natural pattern of Atlantic heating and cooling.”
Short measures
The first observations suggesting the circulation was slowing down emerged in 2005, in research from the UK’s National Oceanography Centre (NOC).
Using an array of detectors across the Atlantic and comparing its readings against historical records, scientists suggested the volume of cold water returning southwards could have fallen by as much as 30% in half a century – a significant decline.
The surface water sinks in the Arctic and flows back southwards at the bottom of the ocean, driving the circulation.
However, later observations by the same team showed that the strength of the flow varied hugely on short timescales – from one season to the next, or even shorter.
But they have not found any clear trend since 2004.
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Read the rest of the story at the BBC here
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Holy crap – now I understand it all. I’ll be damned – it’s nature – this marble is both our savior and our executioner. I think I’ll finish this beer and see if the sun rises tomorrow.
Somehow, I suspect the dreaded CO2 is the villain here – or is it? Bwhaaa
Poor Tom’s a-cold.
Greenies watch a movie like “The Day After Tomorrow”, then afterwards have difficulty separating fact from fantasy, and science from science fiction.
I think toyotawhizguy is on to something.
All stimuli impress the young mind. Including silly movies.
These must not be post-modern scientists. They don’t know how to hide the lack of a trend or “the trick” to show one eists.
That trailer for the Day after Tomorrow was 2 minutes taken from my timespan that I will never recover. Fantasy, pure fantasy, and not even with the excuse of being amusing fantasy or a good action movie. No wonder the AGW crowd preach unremitting doom if this is a sample.
Oh, yes, I do happen to be a Geologist.
Ever since Channel 4 UK has been told by the gov that they should accept some taxpayer funding (don’t ask why when they are doing fine) they have gone AGW on us. Before they showed us Matt Durkin’s documentary, then were forced to put a disclaimer before the programme. Afterwards they ran a double bill of Al Gore’s scifi comedy horror lecture WITHOUT a disclaimer despite a UK High Court ruling and topped it off with this scifi comedy horror Day After Tomorrow.
I note that the IJIS arctic extent has taken a major climb upwards and is in reach of being the highest since 2002 (as far back as is graphed). Interestingly all the other plots had long since peaked and were on the way down by now. Not bad given that the zero thermometers up there have been extrapolated as running several degrees warmer than the past in the last few months.
Shouldn’t there be a collective sigh of relief and wide spread celebration with sailors kissing nurses like on V-E Day?
The Gulf Stream part is well covered in the Telegraph;
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/7536760/Gulf-Stream-is-not-slowing-down-scientists-claim.html
Dr Josh Willis, from Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California, said:
“The changes we’re seeing in overturning strength are probably part of a natural cycle.
The slight increase in overturning since 1993 coincides with a decades-long natural pattern of Atlantic heating and cooling.”
Natural cycles. A very dull but honest conclusion. It must be so tempting for some scientists to “detect” an exciting trend – which will demand further funding.
Think again…
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/09/090910-sea-levels-rise.html
heat released into the atmosphere between Greenland and Canada…..didn’t we just see that in an illustration a few days ago?
THE BLOB—-ahhhhhhhhhhh
http://pielkeclimatesci.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/0210.jpg?w=500&h=339&h=339
from here:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/03/19/its-the-blob-anomaly/
OT, but I have to know:
can the science minds here explain why Arctic ice just hit its maximum today, march 29?? Or is it an optical illusion? Even if it isn’t maximum why is it going up this much this late in March?
JAXA
http://www.ijis.iarc.uaf.edu/en/home/seaice_extent.htm
DMi
http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/icecover.uk.php
Not as frightening as it would be with drowning puppies and kittens.
That’s where I live. Whomever might have written that sentence is a Climate illiterate.
It would be an ‘easy job’ if it was as simple as that. The Arctic Ocean has one of the more complex current systems, which is greatly affected by the inflow of fresh waters mainly from the great rivers of Siberia. In addition it has an ‘intriguing’ variation in the Geomagnetic field, which ‘as it happens’ matches closely changes in the North Atlantic temperature anomaly.
I have done sweep of the GMF along the route of the crucial Transpolar current confirming the ‘ temperature correlation’.
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/LFC16.htm
I’m sitting here watching the totally unseasonal snow blizzard outside, still waiting for the first daffodil of spring, remembering what my mum said when I joked: “I blame global warming”.
She said: “Of course climate change can cause colder weather as well!”
The fact is that the myth of the “gulf stream” ending has meant even well educated normally quite sensible people have been able to reconcile the exceptionally cold winter in the UK with “global warming”: the CRU claims that “in a few years kids won’t know what snow is”.
It will now be obvious to everyone that the failure of the CRU to predict climate related weather (snow) in the UK has nothing to do with the slowing of the North Atlantic drift and everything to do with the utter abysmal failure of the science underpinning these climate forecasters.
Well at least there is one conveyor in the world that goes to the top.
“The stream is a key process in the climate of western Europe, bringing heat northwards from the tropics and keeping countries such as the UK 4-6C warmer than they would otherwise be.”
Utter nonsense. It is the southwesterlies from the atlantic that keep the winters relatively mild. Ocean temperatures will always be a few degrees above freezing at those latitudes regardless of the gulf stream.
The two captions on the diagram which state, “Heat released to atmosphere” at the beginning of the the blue “Deep cold current” are wrong. These two places are where cold saline water sinks to the sea floor, not where heat is released in significant amounts. The area where heat is released to the atmosphere is in the north-west Atlantic at the end of the red “Shallow warm current”, as correctly shown there.
What this evidence does not address is whether the reports that in summer 2009, “for reasons unknown, the Gulf Stream slowed down,” (see mysearchfortruth’s link above) had anything to do with this winter’s unusual cold in Europe and eastern USA.
The evidence is of “fluctuations in conveyor flow in the space of a year” that are large relative to any longer-term trend. But that longer-term trend has only been measured for a couple of decades at most – that is not very long. We really do not know what the long-term trend (if any) is, nor do we appear to know much about the effects of short-term variations the Gulf Stream on short-term variations in weather around the North Atlantic.
I’ve been unsure about the role of the Atlantic Gulf Stream in keeping Europe warm ever since I saw a reference to Seager’s paper on Junkscience. What do people think of Seager’s paper in the Royal Meteorological Society Journal..”Is the Gulf Stream Responsible for Europe’s Mild Winters?” -a paper that strongly challenges the global warming claim that global warming could trigger a collapse in temperatures across western Europe due to collapse of the Gulf Stream .
http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/res/div/ocp/gs/pubs/Seager_etal_QJ_2002.pdf
A more popular/reader friendly version here:
http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/res/div/ocp/gs/pubs/Seager_AmSci_2006.pdf
It says that the main source of Europe’s mild climate is not the Gulf Stream as previously thought. The Pacific Ocean’s version of the gulf stream, the “Kuroshio current” does not reach as far as the northern latitiudes of Washington and British Columbia in north-west America. Yet the climate there is mild compared to similar latitudes in east asia on the west side of the Pacific such as Vladivostok. So something other than the Pacific Gulf Stream is keeping these latitidues in North America milder. It turns out the warmer climates on the east side of the Atlantic and Pacific could be due to heat transfer from prevailing winds off the ocean, rather than the ocean currents themselves bringing in warm water ..This means we are not going to crash into an ice-age due to any potential breakdown of the atlantic conveyor …
The only thing I noticed wasn’t mentioned in the Seagar paper is the Jet Stream – a significant factor? After all, wasn’t this winter’s cold snap in the UK in part due to the Jet Stream moving south?
Maybe ‘prevailing winds’ (as discussed by Seager) and ‘jet stream’ could be treated as the same.
Any thoughts?
I enjoyed the film “The day after tomorrow” but had to suspend my disbelief from start to finish. I mean how likely is it that Mexico would accept several tens of millions of refugees from the USA? 🙂
A post from October last year showed that in the Barents sea, at 100-150 m depth, the sea temperature fluctuated by up to 4 deg C over the last century in a wave-like manner, in close correlation with the AMO (Atlantic multi-decadal oscillation).
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/10/08/new-paper-barents-sea-temperature-correlated-to-the-amo-as-much-as-4%C2%B0c/#more-11592
The Barents sea is at the tail end of the North Atlantic Drift.
The large magnitude (4 deg c) of the measured Barents sub-surface (100-150m) temperature variation – and the energy exchange required to cause this – is unlikely to have come from surface heat exchange – it is more consistent with an ocean current phenomenon.
The most likely explanation – as I have posted here before – is that the AMO is characterised by an oscillation in the strength of the North Atlantic Drift.
In the context of the Meridional Overturning circulation that links the N Atlantic Drift to the Southstream deep current, variations in the volume of downwelling in the Norwegian Sea – one of the drivers of thermohaline global circulation – would reflexively cause corresponding variation in the North Atlantic Drift.
This variation, as indicated in the Barents Sea subsurface measurements, might also be a major factor in the decrease in Arctic ice cover up to 2007 and the current recovery of the Arctic ice, which could thus be expected to continue for a few decades.
The climate change bureaucracy grows like Topsy, reaching its tentacles into our everyday lives.
In the People’s Republic of Islington, the council advertised for a ‘Carbon Reduction Adviser’ for £30,000 a year. The advert read: “Islington Council is leading the way in tackling climate change”. You could have fooled me. Islington may be leading the way in vindictive parking enforcement, stabbings, street crime, graffiti and child molestation in council care homes. But saving the planet?
Meanwhile, in Tower Hamlets, the poorest borough in London and arguably the most deprived in Britain, 58 employees have job titles which contain the words “climate change” or “global warming”. When Bedford Borough Council advertised for a “Climate Change Officer” the perks included an “essential car user allowance”. You couldn’t make it up. Yet when floods swept many parts of the country a couple of summers ago, all these climate champions proved to be utterly, hopelessly, bloody useless. When the heavens opened, it was the same old story, just as it is when it snows in the winter. No evacuation plans, no flood defences, simply the usual headless-chicken-like incompetence.
This is the latest shot from the government, in their “fight against climate change” from the Telegraph:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/climatechange/7535304/Climate-change-is-the-new-health-and-safety.html
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Climate change is the new health and safety
All public bodies should have a legal duty to protect their workers from climate change in the same way as institutions currently carry out health and safety checks, according to the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution.
Louise Gray
30 Mar 2010
The body set up to warn Government about the risk of environmental disasters said climate change will cause floods, droughts and heatwaves in future.
In a key report on “Adapting Institutions to Climate Change” the committee of experts recommended that every school, hospital and business should have a legal duty to adapt to climate change. For example by putting in place flood defences and plans for water shortages.
Sir John Lawton, Chairman of the Royal Commission, said global warming is a real risk and could cause huge problems for Britain. He said all businesses and public bodies should have to carry out a “climate change adaptation test” in the same way as they currently conduct health and safety checks. “The planet is already slightly above the worse case scenario so if we do nothing we could be looking at a temperature rise of 4C (7.3F) by 2100,” he said. “Any society confronted with those kind of dramatic changes to their climate would be very wise to take due attention to the risk that poses to society, infrastructure and people’s lives and begin to plan accordingly. That should become central because just like health and safety scenarios – where people are going to get killed or injured – people are going to get killed or injured by climate change and that is why it is important.”
But Sir John said that adapting to climate change will not cost organisations extra money or add bureaucracy. Instead, he insisted that it could be done by simply ensuring that things are done differently. “We have to accept that there is a real risk of [climate change] devastating people’s lives so it is a sensible thing to think about, rather than another layer of bureaucracy for bureaucracy’s state,” he said.
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Meanwhile, in the same paper, is a report that in spite of a commitment to eradicate fuel poverty the number of people affected by fuel poverty has DOUBLED. Fuel povery is defined as spending more than 10% of your income on heating bills.
“Millions struggle to heat homes as Government misses fuel poverty target”
“Millions of vulnerable people remain in fuel poverty despite a multi-billion spending scheme to help elderly people heat their homes, MPs have warned.”
Read the whole article here
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthnews/7535263/Millions-struggle-to-heat-homes-as-Government-misses-fuel-poverty-target.html
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The Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution is part of the British government’s global warming lying propaganda machine which treats the public as gullible fools, so please feel free to correct their perception.
The RCEP website is http://www.rcep.org.uk/index.htm
Anyone wishing to contact them can do so here: enquiries@rcep.org.uk
@Evan Jones (21:52:24) :
… God Almighty bless thy wit.