Guest post by Steven Goddard
(UK Pic Photo: NASA/GSFC, MODIS Rapid Response)
England, Scotland and Wales completely covered in snow, January, 2010
In my last article, I discussed the current theory that global warming is going to turn England into a tropical paradise. And ten years ago we were told by The Met Office that “Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past.” But five years ago the theory was that global warming will turn England into a frozen wasteland.
THE Gulf Stream currents that give Britain its mild climate have weakened dramatically, offering the first firm scientific evidence of a slowdown that threatens the country with temperatures as cold as Canada’s.
The Atlantic Ocean “conveyor belt” that carries warm water north from the tropics has weakened by 30 per cent in 12 years, scientists have discovered. The findings, from the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton, give the strongest indication yet that Europe’s central heating system is breaking down under the impact of global warming.
Scientists have long predicted that melting ice caps could disrupt the currents that keep Britain at least 5C (40F) warmer than it should be, but the new research suggests that this is already under way. It points to a cooling of 1C over the next decade or two, and an even deeper freeze could follow if the Gulf Stream system were to shut down altogether.
The British Isles lie on the same latitude as Labrador on the East Coast of Canada, and are protected from a similarly icy climate by the Atlantic conveyor belt, which carries a million billion watts of heat. Although oceanographers still think it unlikely that the currents will stop completely, this could reduce average temperatures by between 4C and 6C in as little as 20 years, far outweighing any increase predicted as a result of global warming.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article598464.ece
What the scientists were saying is that the melting Arctic is going to flood the North Atlantic with cold fresh water, and will slow down the Gulf Stream. The BBC explained it like this :
Global Warming will cause the Greenland ice cap to melt which, when combined with increased rainfall at high latitudes, will potentially disrupt the THC by adding freshwater and decreasing sea water salinity in the North Atlantic…. Winters would be much colder than now “along the lines of the winter of 1962-1963” suggests Jenkins, with summers being cooler and shorter. This would have many social implications including (not surprisingly!) transport and agriculture. 3-4°C may not sound much, but the average air temperature difference between the ‘Medieval Warm Period’ when vineyards thrived in southern England and the ‘Little Ice Age’ when the River Thames regularly froze over was only 1-2°C.
Sun photo : English cars buried in global warming
The Guardian explained it like this:
“Based on climate simulations we think that UK winters would be around 5-10C colder on average if the Gulf Stream shut down,” says Michael Vellinga, of the Met Office’s Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research. For those who can remember back that far, this would make the average UK winter feel more like 1963, when February temperatures hovered around -5 C.
So here is the climate cycle timeline:
- 2000 – Snowfalls are a thing of the past in Britain
- 2005 – Britain to turn into a frozen wasteland
- 2010 – Britain to become a tropical paradise like Portugal
Climate science in England shows a statistically significant cycle, alternating between tropical forecasts and ice age forecasts every five years.
What do readers think?
England’s Five Year Climate Forecast Cycle
England, Scotland and Wales completely covered in snow, January, 2010
In my last article, I discussed the current theory that global warming is going to turn England into a tropical paradise. And ten years ago we were told by The Met Office that “Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past.” But five years ago the theory was that global warming will turn England into a frozen wasteland.
THE Gulf Stream currents that give Britain its mild climate have weakened dramatically, offering the first firm scientific evidence of a slowdown that threatens the country with temperatures as cold as Canada’s.
The Atlantic Ocean “conveyor belt” that carries warm water north from the tropics has weakened by 30 per cent in 12 years, scientists have discovered. The findings, from the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton, give the strongest indication yet that Europe’s central heating system is breaking down under the impact of global warming.
Scientists have long predicted that melting ice caps could disrupt the currents that keep Britain at least 5C (40F) warmer than it should be, but the new research suggests that this is already under way. It points to a cooling of 1C over the next decade or two, and an even deeper freeze could follow if the Gulf Stream system were to shut down altogether.
The British Isles lie on the same latitude as Labrador on the East Coast of Canada, and are protected from a similarly icy climate by the Atlantic conveyor belt, which carries a million billion watts of heat. Although oceanographers still think it unlikely that the currents will stop completely, this could reduce average temperatures by between 4C and 6C in as little as 20 years, far outweighing any increase predicted as a result of global warming.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article598464.ece
What the scientists were saying is that the melting Arctic is going to flood the North Atlantic with cold fresh water, and will slow down the Gulf Stream. The BBC explained it like this :
Global Warming will cause the Greenland ice cap to melt which, when combined with increased rainfall at high latitudes, will potentially disrupt the THC by adding freshwater and decreasing sea water salinity in the North Atlantic…. Winters would be much colder than now “along the lines of the winter of 1962-1963” suggests Jenkins, with summers being cooler and shorter. This would have many social implications including (not surprisingly!) transport and agriculture. 3-4°C may not sound much, but the average air temperature difference between the ‘Medieval Warm Period’ when vineyards thrived in southern England and the ‘Little Ice Age’ when the River Thames regularly froze over was only 1-2°C.
Sun photo : English cars buried in global warming
The Guardian explained it like this:
“Based on climate simulations we think that UK winters would be around 5-10C colder on average if the Gulf Stream shut down,” says Michael Vellinga, of the Met Office’s Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research. For those who can remember back that far, this would make the average UK winter feel more like 1963, when February temperatures hovered around -5 C.
So here is the climate cycle timeline:
2000 – Snowfalls are a thing of the past in Britain
2005 – Britain to turn into a frozen wasteland
2010 – Britain to become a tropical paradise like Portugal
Climate science in England shows a statistically significant cycle, alternating between tropical forecasts and ice age forecasts every five years.
What do readers think?
1. Ice age for the UK
2. Tropical paradise for the UK
3. Just the usual cold, rainy mess
On a related note
“Virginia Modeling, Analysis and Simulation Center (VMASC) invites applications for the position of Chief Scientist of a university-wide research center that emphasizes modeling, simulation, and visualization (MS&V) research, development and education.”
http://chronicle.com/jobs/0000630028-01/?sid=ja&utm_source=ja&utm_medium=en
Maybe I’ll apply and say in the cover letter that I will consider my primary responsibility to be to point out when the computer models are “full of it” having “no scientific value”. How far do you think I’ll get?
It strikes me there could be a time-line of catastrophic headlines that match the corresponding weather going back as far as the printing press.
off the top of my head There was that guy fist said something about Co2 causing +4 degrees C temp change because of coal fumes in the 1900’s, the ice age scare of the 60/70’s, because of that real bad winter in 63/64 in UK, then all change back to warming scare after the heatwave in 76. Those old headlines about the N.E. passage etc.
I bet there are corresponding headlines to match the warm/cooler periods Jones admitted to.
Great job as always, Steve. You connected so dots that have been there all along.
Thanks to your research, we have a new five-year teleconnection.
Call it the Anglo-Saxon Quinquennial Oscillation
Or the ASQO for short.
I hope you send your findings to every news organization as a joke, including the BBC!
Pretty damn funny!
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
We have such a twisted sense of size with our world maps. This leads us to believe that little things can affect large areas we “see” on a map in major ways. The scale throws our thinking this way. To wit: the amount of fresh water being dumped into the Arctic is a variable thing and depends on weather pattern variation on a yearly, decadal and century time scale, let alone interglacial time scale. Add a dam here and there and you get a VERY fractionally small change in the normal variation of fresh water sources into the salinity of the Arctic. Damming up the fresh water rivers around the Arctic will not make even a scant difference. So too adding a bit of longwave radiation back towards land will not make a scant difference. The areas we think we know because we have seen them on a map, look quite different if we could actually see them to scale. These tiny changes than humankind has wrought (dammed rivers around the Arctic and CO2 from fossil fuel sources) just do not have the muscle to change such gargantuan areas in any way that can be detected outside the normal variation.
So let’s pause before we say this or that can affect globally large structures. As for the Arctic rivers, there are precious few rivers we could actually see if they were depicted to scale on the maps we usually view. These things are tiny, tiny land features that are exaggerated in scale so that we can locate them on a map. They just are not that big in reality.
Or, to be more specific…the UKMQCFO
U K Met Quinquennial Climate Forecast Oscillation
I voted for an Ice Age for the UK, ’cause I keep looking at that 100,000 year ice age cycle and thinking to myself, “hmm, 11,000 years since the end of the last ice age…”
Wind energy, no use:
http://alfin2100.blogspot.com/2010/03/big-wind-bad-news-all-around.html
Mike Haseler (02:26:09) and Vincent (05:49:35) both touched on what I had read within the past year, that the mild climate of the UK and western Europe is not due to the Gulf Stream, but to the movement of mild air over the Atlantic. It was pointed out that the same phenomenon keeps the west coast of Canada much milder than it “should be” at that latitude.
The article that I archived was at:
http://www.americanscientist.org/template/AssetDetail/assetid/51963?fulltext=true&print=yes
but when I tried just now to open it, it was no longer available.
More attention should be paid to this point of mildness being due to a mediterranean climate than to the Gulf Stream.
IanM
R. de Haan (03:04:48) :
The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, part of the global ocean conveyor belt that helps regulate climate around the North Atlantic, show no significant slowing over the past 15 years
However, the GULF CURRENT….it originates in the gulf, which btw it´s now cold:
http://weather.unisys.com/surface/sst_anom.html
A good future business: A Ice skates´shop near the Thames river.
Anthony,
I think you mean a 5 degrees celsius increase is equivalent to 9 degrees F.
REPLY: actually this is a guest post, but I’ll pass it on. -A
The ghost of Big Jim Cooley (01:39:44) :
I don’t live in the UK any more, but I have seen some years with very nice weather there, particularly 1969-1970 and 1999-2005. My last UK holiday was August, 2008 and it hardly stopped raining for five minutes the entire week!
While Piers Corbyn said:
“….WeatherAction’s offer (link 12 Feb) to advise you on whether and if/when parts of the UK will suffer floods this summer still stands and please note our success rate of long range forecasting of the last seriously abnormal seasons is 5/5 whereas the Met Office-Global warmers success is zero/5.”
http://www.weatheraction.com/docs/WANews10No10.pdf (12 Feb letter to Hilary Benn)
These jokers don’t have a clue about what the climate is going to do. But whatever it does they’re damned sure it’s our fault.
Imran (05:59:30) :
Exactly! Even if the gulf stream theory was correct, the mechanism causing the problem would shut itself down. Negative feedbacks dominate in the real world.
Kate (01:46:35) :
Actually, I’m all for letting them shut down power stations for a while.
Let them shut down the Drax 4Gw station & Ferrybridge 2Gw simultaneously!
Brilliant idea! See how long they survive all those angry Yorkshire people!
DaveE.
3×2 (02:07:51) :
Bingo.
Not only that, the extra energy released from the above 0°C ocean would also contribute to planetary cooling.
DaveE.
This would be a good place to review the world wide historical cycles of fear mongers oscillating between a fiery death and icy death.
It is entertaining.
CAB (08:00:05) :
The 5C 40F is a quote from a Times article. Note the indention and italics.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article598464.ece
A good place to put an end of the global warming nonsense would be to take a look at Sheffield UK Weston Park weather station.
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climate/uk/stationdata/sheffielddata.txt
Its a High Quality location, in a park, not surrounded by buildings and has been in operation since 1883 and is one of the UK’s oldest continuous use, weather stations.
Jan 1883 Temp Max. 6.3C Min 1.7C.
Jan 2010 Temp Max 3.4C Min 0.1C.
(Monthly averages)
Enjoy your global warming.
A Feel a paper coming on relating to those stats. I might also take photos of the weather station to prove how high quality it is !
Its been in the same spot as long as i’ve been alive as well (30 years at least !).
The article talks about “decreasing sea water salinity.” I remember Geophysical Research Letters carrying an article a couple of years ago by Stott of the Met Office. That article was about how AGW was causing increased salinity of sea water.
Having lived in northern Canada, I am laughing at what’s considered a bad winter in England. I used to live Grande Prairie, in the Peace River Region of Alberta, which is about as far north as Stockholm. Yes, it would get down to -40 every winter. So you dress warmly those few weeks. But the summers would be warm and pleasant, with the same long days enjoyed in northern Europe, and the region is one of the most agriculturally productive bits of land in the world. I really don’t see the big deal about the temperature dropping a few degrees in the winter. Can someone enlighten me?
For climate scientists, cycle is a four-letter word.
Al Murray explains our weather better than I could.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0wu6_oXpRHY
RE: AndyS
As Journalists like to say, ” Never let the facts ruin a good story.”
As climate modellers like to say “Never let data get in the way of a good model”.
James Ibbotson (08:45:35) :
I plotted the Sheffield data you linked to. It shows about 1C warming since 1930.
https://spreadsheets.google.com/oimg?key=0AnKz9p_7fMvBdFg2X3dMRzZuX2dhT3VqZUVGUU5WX2c&oid=1&v=1269793381656