Do underwater volcanoes have an effect on ENSO?

Henry P
I am more than happy to discuss science, but that requires you be informed of my Variable Fission Energy Theory, prior to dismissing same. Decay of higher order elements creates multiple ‘daughter atoms’ from the remnant neutrons, protrons and electrons as well as substantial heat. Svensmark made big news with his ‘cosmic rays cause clouds’ by nucleation of atmospheric SOx molecules from 3 nm to 50 nm needed for cloud formation. There is no mention of the continuous source, but supporting charts on the “Forbush Decrease” suggest that these “elemental SOx molecules” have a five day lag time between solar events and atmosphereic changes.
Cosmic and solar neutrinos do not leave known proxies, so variations over time are best shown by proven Sunspot corrolation. A drop of cosmic activity causes a drop in fission heat and fission produced SOx cloud seeding. If you lower the heat into the system, it follows that there would then be a drop in RH. I have been an Earth Science student for decades. There is no other possible explaination for the cyclic and well defined two base temperature states for the Glacial and Interglacial conditions. The Milankovitch Cycle is not set by CO2 changes, nor by “forcings or feedbacks”. It may well be that our Sun is a bit player. The Sun’s signal is strongest due to distance, but it is possible that all solar and Earth climate cycles are part of a Galactic or even Universal harmonics. Ignoring reality neither alters nor removes reality.

The “Radiative Balance” is a completely FALSE matrix. Massive amounts of Earth’s variable fission energy are hidden in the liquification of super heated, high pressure gases at the undersea vents AND in the endothermic reaction of elemental atoms forced into elemental molecules and elemental compounds. This is understandable if you read “Motive Force for All Clmate Change” and “Earth’s Missing Geothermal Flux” posted at the Faux Science Slayer website.
There is an ongoing private email exchange currently among the worlds top Earth scientists and
i will produce additional articles adding to this already well documented process in the near future. We will first Free Science from the Imperialist….we will then deliver Honest Science to the Empericalists.

Thermohaline currents:
http://www.pik-potsdam.de/~stefan/thc_fact_sheet.html
“What is the thermohaline circulation (THC)?
As opposed to wind-driven currents and tides (which are due to the gravity of moon and sun), the thermohaline circulation (Fig. 1) is that part of the ocean circulation which is driven by density differences. Sea water density depends on temperature and salinity, hence the name thermo-haline. The salinity and temperature differences arise from heating/cooling at the sea surface and from the surface freshwater fluxes (evaporation and sea ice formation enhance salinity; precipitation, runoff and ice-melt decrease salinity). Heat sources at the ocean bottom play a minor role. ”
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Like the wiki page, this gives some real physics and blows it by fictional fisics memes.
These currents are not wind driven, true, they are driven by density differences, true. The ocean is a fluid liquid medium, these are convection currents arising out of the differences in density between hot water and colder water – this is a huge system. It is inconceivable that the massive amounts of heat being created at the ocean floor by volcanic and divergent ridges isn’t the major player here.
Not a minor role, but the main role in the “thermal” of thermohaline. The heat has to come from somewhere!
Just as in the atmosphere, which is also a heavy fluid medium, (gas is a fluid), heated fluid liquid water in one part of the ocean will rise as it becomes less dense and colder denser water will come in beneath it. This is how we get our winds in the atmosphere – the movement of parcels of air as one hot parcel rises and denser colder air comes in beneath it, volumes of air on the move, convection.
Including water vapour, the fluid gas water is anyway less dense than air, but becomes more so as it takes up heat from the Earth’s surface and rises to the colder heights where it releases it and condenses back into liquid water.
DENSITY differences in both systems. Convection currents in both systems. Both systems are fluid mediums.
One of the links I posted said that divergent ridges take millions of years to cool, the east pacific is a younger system, it is very active with high temperatures: http://eqseis.geosc.psu.edu/~cammon/HTML/Classes/IntroQuakes/Notes/plate_tect01.html
“The region where oceanic lithosphere is manufactured is topographically high because of the high temperatures associated with the thin lithosphere. The thermal expansion of the material beneath the ridge maintains the high elevation and produces a gravitational force that helps slide the two plates apart (this force is called ridge push).
The ridges are regions of earthquake activity. As you should expect, the pulling apart of the two plates is expressed by normal faulting events, which are usually very shall[ow], less than 15 kilometers deep because the high temperature beneath the ridge causes the rocks to deform more easily beneath that depth (and hence you can’t store the strain energy to produce an earthquake).”
High temperatures along all the ridge, “With a little study you can also deduce that the growth rates vary. For example, the east Pacific region is spreading faster than the central Atlantic.”
http://iceagenow.com/Three_Million_Underwater_Volcanoes.htm
http://iceagenow.info/category/volcanoes-leading-us-into-an-ice-age/submarine-volcanoes-more-important-than-we-realize/

Myrrh says: “These currents are not wind driven, true, they are driven by density differences,”
No Myrrh. They ARE driven by wind. If density drove the current upon freezing, then the current would oscillate between the poles each year as ice froze and melted at the alternate poles. But it doesn’t oscillate annually, because it is driven by the wind.
The wikipedia page correctly identifies “thermohaline” as a poor and misleading term.
Willis was wrong, Bill was right.

In other words then, if a machine is expected to be infallible, it cannot also be intelligent. There are several mathematical theorems which say almost exactly that. But these theorems say nothing about how much intelligence may be displayed if a machine makes no pretence at infallibility.
– Alan Turing

Khwarizmi says:
February 20, 2012 at 2:52 pm
Myrrh says: “These currents are not wind driven, true, they are driven by density differences,”
No Myrrh. They ARE driven by wind. If density drove the current upon freezing, then the current would oscillate between the poles each year as ice froze and melted at the alternate poles. But it doesn’t oscillate annually, because it is driven by the wind.
The wikipedia page correctly identifies “thermohaline” as a poor and misleading term.
Willis was wrong, Bill was right.
I don’t know why wiki is saying that – as I said earlier, I’m a newbie to all this and, I think, I am looking at it with my usual degree of bias, I don’t care who is right or wrong, I would like to know what the truth is because it has interested me. To that end, I have spent some considerable hours searching the internet for information on the subject and reading up on it – I’ve already posted some of that which I found particularly relevant – and overwhelmingly, except for wiki, it is described as not wind driven, but density driven. This makes sense to me, because I do know about density differences in liquids. I can only think that some here don’t understand what “density driven” means because they don’t understand density. To that end, I have given information to explain the very simple science of density in this. I’ll have another go.
Our weather system is density driven. The winds arise because of density differences in the gases which arise because of temperature differences. To begin to get the picture here you first have to have a picture of our atmosphere, it is a fluid ocean of gas with volume and weight. It is not empty space.. There is an immense fluid gas mass pressing down on us, you are walking around with a ton weight of this stuff pressing down on your shoulders. There are solids, liquids and gases, however, both liquids and gases are fluids, in other words, the ocean of gas above us is an entirely apt description of the mass of air which is our atmosphere; it moves as fluids do, things happen in it as they do in fluids, heat travels through it as it does through fluids..
Now, with this picture in mind, when there is part of this ocean of gas being heated the molecules of the gas expand and become less dense. This particular volume of heated gas rises because now less heavy than the gas in the ocean around it. The ocean of gas around it is colder relative to our heated volume’s now hotter state and, being colder means being heavier, more dense, and so the colder volume falls down coming beneath the volume of rising heated gas.
That is all wind is, volumes of gas moving from temperature differences because heat makes a volume less dense and therefore lighter and it rises, and the colder denser and heavier volume of gas moves in beneath to take its place.
Look up inshore and offshore winds, this is the process in a nutshell. The temperature differences arising because water and land have different heat capacities and so different speeds of heating up and cooling down, so the volumes of gas above them are heating up and cooling down at different speeds.
These volumes have different densities, and this means they are exerting different pressures, which is another way of describing this, that winds always flow from high pressure to low. High pressure means colder denser heavier gases and low pressure means warmer less dense lighter gases.
That’s the simple basic of our density driven wind system in our fluid gas atmosphere, Air. Winds are currents in the fluid ocean of gas above us, just as currents are currents in the fluid liquid water ocean, volumes of the medium on the move.
The ocean as a huge volume of fluid will be affected similarly when one volume of it is heated, colder volumes will flow beneath.
Having just had a brief exchange with Connolley, I would think the most likely reason wiki is saying something so strange is that he’s playing his usual mind games.. As Willis has just said, if you say the thermohaline system is wind driven, then produce the winds that do this driving of the current deep in the ocean.. That’s a lot of thousand of miles to account for.
The shape of the current as I see it, will be subject to the same sort of things as currents in the atmosphere; the heat sources, the patterns from a spinning Earth and local topography, can you call it topography beneath the surface? Anyway, if you want to understand what density driven means in the ocean, then study our wind systems in the atmosphere, because they are density driven.
As above, so below..

Willis I’ll wait here while you explain how that happens, how the wind drives the water from the surface right down to the bottom of the ocean at both poles …
I am trying to find evidence that the cold “chimneys” actually sink to the bottom in the real world, and not just in words formulated to explain. I am trying to find some quantification of the volume of water displaced downward at the ice boundary each year, and what happens to the flow during the melting phase of the annual cycle. My hasty search parameters are not revealing much, and I have go do some work – so please allow me a day or two (max) to respond in better detail. Cheers.
Happy belated birthday, btw. Every day should be celebrated, so I don’t care if I’m late to the party!

Willis,
The wikipedia page on thermohaline currents begins with wind as the primary factor driving not only water to the poles, but driving most of the density gradient, with evaporation of water causing both (i) cooling and (ii) increased salt concentration at the surface. Salinity increase at the ice growth boundary during winter is just a small seasonal contribution to this bigger thermo-haline picture, apparently, with wind doing most of the thermo-haline work by evaporative cooling. I guess that is why the thawing part of the annual sea-ice cycle doesn’t matter too much in the bigger picture.
At two regions in the North Atlantic to the west and south of Greenland, this cold dense water apparently plunges thousands of meters to the ocean floor without much mixing during transit, arriving at the bottom where it diverted southward in a current that flows morbidly over the wreck of the Titanic (an ideal place to measure the current, according to the maps). But at the next point in this story, where deep cold water is thrust or pulled upward into warmer surface regions, against the apparent gradient, I got lost in what seemed like haline-forced mumbo-jumbo, and returned instead to the pursuit of data supporting the theory.
Apparently there isn’t any.
There is evidence that a trickle of water flows downward from surface regions near the poles, e.g.:
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In May 2005, Peter Wadhams reported to The Times of London about the results of investigations in a submarine under the Arctic ice sheet measuring the giant chimneys of cold dense water, in which the cold dense water normally sinks down to the sea bed and is replaced by warm water, forming one of the engines of the North Atlantic Drift. He and his team found the chimneys to have virtually disappeared. Normally there are seven to twelve giant columns, but Wadhams found only two giant columns, both extremely weak.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shutdown_of_thermohaline_circulation#Measurements_in_2004.2C_2005.2C_2008_and_2010
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But where is the evidence showing that these weak “chimneys” under the Arctic ice “normally sink to the ocean floor”? Again, there isn’t any:
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The actual flows in this model are based on current theories of the thermohaline circulation rather than actual data. The thermohaline circulation is a very slow moving current that can be difficult to distinguish from general ocean circulation. Therefore, it is difficult to measure or simulate.
Author: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center, 14 November 2011
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Thermohaline_Circulation_using_Improved_Flow_Field.ogv
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So all the currents that we know about are driven by the wind.
Bill didn’t say all currents are driven “exclusively” by the wind, incidentally. Bill was totally correct both semantically and technically, not totally false.
Even the so-called “thermohaline circulation”–if it actually exists as theorized—is driven by the wind, almost exclusively.

Willis Eschenbach (February 22, 2012 at 10:13 pm) wrote: “[…] a simple thought experiment. Take the atmosphere away from the earth”
An open ocean not permitting evaporation? Fine example of abstract conception hopelessly divorced from thermodynamic reality. Apply for a teaching job at IPCC modeling school. You’ve proven yourself qualified.

“We beckon so we can make amends,
and with the same flip of the hand we curse our friends.”
— Lights [ http://www.oilandgasinvestments.com/videos/video/GUXGAKg1o-4/Lights-Peace-sign-lyrics.html ]
Tip: Harald Yndestad, Norway (long record tide gauge data exploration…)
http://ansatte.hials.no/hy/bio/defaultEng.htm
cheers

Re my last comment.
I’m wondering if I’ve found Trenberth’s missing heat.
BTW Willis, I’ve made a comment subsequent to the links above making the correction that I’ve probably over-estimated hydrovent heating by a factor of 100 more or less (rather than 2).
I’m in ‘Permanent Moderation’ at Hot Topic so my comments get held up but others go straight through so give it time.