From the University of Utah and the “science is not settled” department comes this interesting bit of research.
Stratosphere targets deep sea to shape climate
North Atlantic ‘Achilles heel’ lets upper atmosphere affect the abyss
SALT LAKE CITY, Sept. 23, 2012 – A University of Utah study suggests something amazing: Periodic changes in winds 15 to 30 miles high in the stratosphere influence the seas by striking a vulnerable “Achilles heel” in the North Atlantic and changing mile-deep ocean circulation patterns, which in turn affect Earth’s climate.
“We found evidence that what happens in the stratosphere matters for the ocean circulation and therefore for climate,” says Thomas Reichler, senior author of the study published online Sunday, Sept. 23 in the journal Nature Geoscience.
Scientists already knew that events in the stratosphere, 6 miles to 30 miles above Earth, affect what happens below in the troposphere, the part of the atmosphere from Earth’s surface up to 6 miles or about 32,800 feet. Weather occurs in the troposphere.
Researchers also knew that global circulation patterns in the oceans – patterns caused mostly by variations in water temperature and saltiness – affect global climate.
“It is not new that the stratosphere impacts the troposphere,” says Reichler, an associate professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Utah. “It also is not new that the troposphere impacts the ocean. But now we actually demonstrated an entire link between the stratosphere, the troposphere and the ocean.”
Funded by the University of Utah, Reichler conducted the study with University of Utah atmospheric sciences doctoral student Junsu Kim, and with atmospheric scientist Elisa Manzini and oceanographer Jürgen Kröger, both with the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg, Germany.
Stratospheric Winds and Sea Circulation Show Similar Rhythms
Reichler and colleagues used weather observations and 4,000 years worth of supercomputer simulations of weather to show a surprising association between decade-scale, periodic changes in stratospheric wind patterns known as the polar vortex, and similar rhythmic changes in deep-sea circulation patterns. The changes are:
— “Stratospheric sudden warming” events occur when temperatures rise and 80-mph “polar vortex” winds encircling the Artic suddenly weaken or even change direction. These winds extend from 15 miles elevation in the stratosphere up beyond the top of the stratosphere at 30 miles. The changes last for up to 60 days, allowing time for their effects to propagate down through the atmosphere to the ocean.
— Changes in the speed of the Atlantic circulation pattern – known as Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation – that influences the world’s oceans because it acts like a conveyor belt moving water around the planet.
Sometimes, both events happen several years in a row in one decade, and then none occur in the next decade. So incorporating this decade-scale effect of the stratosphere on the sea into supercomputer climate simulations or “models” is important in forecasting decade-to-decade climate changes that are distinct from global warming, Reichler says.
“If we as humans modify the stratosphere, it may – through the chain of events we demonstrate in this study – also impact the ocean circulation,” he says. “Good examples of how we modify the stratosphere are the ozone hole and also fossil-fuel burning that adds carbon dioxide to the stratosphere. These changes to the stratosphere can alter the ocean, and any change to the ocean is extremely important to global climate.”
A Vulnerable Soft Spot in the North Atlantic
“The North Atlantic is particularly important for global ocean circulation, and therefore for climate worldwide,” Reichler says. “In a region south of Greenland, which is called the downwelling region, water can get cold and salty enough – and thus dense enough – so the water starts sinking.”
It is Earth’s most important region of seawater downwelling, he adds. That sinking of cold, salty water “drives the three-dimensional oceanic conveyor belt circulation. What happens in the Atlantic also affects the other oceans.”
Reichler continues: “This area where downwelling occurs is quite susceptible to cooling or warming from the troposphere. If the water is close to becoming heavy enough to sink, then even small additional amounts of heating or cooling from the atmosphere may be imported to the ocean and either trigger downwelling events or delay them.”
Because of that sensitivity, Reichler calls the sea south of Greenland “the Achilles heel of the North Atlantic.”
From Stratosphere to the Sea
In winter, the stratospheric Arctic polar vortex whirls counterclockwise around the North Pole, with the strongest, 80-mph winds at about 60 degrees north latitude. They are stronger than jet stream winds, which are less than 70 mph in the troposphere below. But every two years on average, the stratospheric air suddenly is disrupted and the vortex gets warmer and weaker, and sometimes even shifts direction to clockwise.
“These are catastrophic rearrangements of circulation in the stratosphere,” and the weaker or reversed polar vortex persists up to two months, Reichler says. “Breakdown of the polar vortex can affect circulation in the troposphere all the way down to the surface.”
Reichler’s study ventured into new territory by asking if changes in stratospheric polar vortex winds impart heat or cold to the sea, and how that affects the sea.
It already was known that that these stratospheric wind changes affect the North Atlantic Oscillation – a pattern of low atmospheric pressure centered over Greenland and high pressure over the Azores to the south. The pattern can reverse or oscillate.
Because the oscillating pressure patterns are located above the ocean downwelling area near Greenland, the question is whether that pattern affects the downwelling and, in turn, the global oceanic circulation conveyor belt.
The study’s computer simulations show a decadal on-off pattern of correlated changes in the polar vortex, atmospheric pressure oscillations over the North Atlantic and changes in sea circulation more than one mile beneath the waves. Observations are consistent with the pattern revealed in computer simulations.
Observations and Simulations of the Stratosphere-to-Sea Link
In the 1980s and 2000s, a series of stratospheric sudden warming events weakened polar vortex winds. During the 1990s, the polar vortex remained strong.
Reichler and colleagues used published worldwide ocean observations from a dozen research groups to reconstruct behavior of the conveyor belt ocean circulation during the same 30-year period.
“The weakening and strengthening of the stratospheric circulation seems to correspond with changes in ocean circulation in the North Atlantic,” Reichler says.
To reduce uncertainties about the observations, the researchers used computers to simulate 4,000 years worth of atmosphere and ocean circulation.
“The computer model showed that when we have a series of these polar vortex changes, the ocean circulation is susceptible to those stratospheric events,” Reichler says.
To further verify the findings, the researchers combined 18 atmosphere and ocean models into one big simulation, and “we see very similar outcomes.”
The study suggests there is “a significant stratospheric impact on the ocean,” the researchers write. “Recurring stratospheric vortex events create long-lived perturbations at the ocean surface, which penetrate into the deeper ocean and trigger multidecadal variability in its circulation. This leads to the remarkable fact that signals that emanate from the stratosphere cross the entire atmosphere-ocean system.”
UPDATE: Although not listed in the official press release from the University of Utah here, I’ve located the title of the paper and abstract, reproduced below from Nature Geoscience
A stratospheric connection to Atlantic climate variability
- Nature Geoscience (2012) doi:10.1038/ngeo1586
The stratosphere is connected to tropospheric weather and climate. In particular, extreme stratospheric circulation events are known to exert a dynamical feedback on the troposphere1. However, it is unclear whether the state of the stratosphere also affects the ocean and its circulation. A co-variability of decadal stratospheric flow variations and conditions in the North Atlantic Ocean has been suggested, but such findings are based on short simulations with only one climate model2. Here we assess ocean reanalysis data and find that, over the previous 30 years, the stratosphere and the Atlantic thermohaline circulation experienced low-frequency variations that were similar to each other. Using climate models, we demonstrate that this similarity is consistent with the hypothesis that variations in the sequence of stratospheric circulation anomalies, combined with the persistence of individual anomalies, significantly affect the North Atlantic Ocean. Our analyses identify a previously unknown source for decadal climate variability and suggest that simulations of deep layers of the atmosphere and the ocean are needed for realistic predictions of climate.
Shown are composite anomalies averaged from day 0 to 60 following the strong vortex events of Fig. 2. Sea-level pressure anomalies are contoured at ±0.5, ±1, ±2, ±3, ±4 hPa; red and blue lines indicate positive and negative values, respectively.
PDF files
Solar variation in the UV part of the spectrum is much greater as a percentage than solar variation in total irradiance. And UV couples non-linearly to the stratosphere through the creation of the the greenhouse gas Ozone. The described mechanism is more likely an explanation of solar coupling to the climate than another anthropogenic coupling to the climate.
Somebody in the CO2 club asked these researchers to provide an anthropogenic link to how CO2 can affect Arctic melt. We know why the melt occurs. Favorable oceanic and atmospheric teleconnections between the AMO/NAO, the polor vortex and its AO, and incoming oceanic currents. Their challange was to connect all this to an anthropogenic agent of change. What they got was correlation without mechanism. Again. Kinda like connecting all that to non-TSI “stuff” from the Sun. Both are ill-conceived and more like a single hair on the end of the elephant’s tail, wagging the entire herd of elephants.
“It is important to dispell the arctic lies as melting of the ice is one area where warming is visible and make good TV press. Unfortunately the skeptics haven’t done this.”
http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/meant80n.uk.php
Well “melting of the ice” wouldn’t appear to be caused by atmospheric temperature. With Danish Meteorological Institute records going back to 1958 Daily Mean Temperatures have remained very consistant during the arctic melt season.
The first thing I thought of from the headline was the “Toilet Bowl” at the Kalihari in Wisconsin Dells, the small amount of water circulating counterclockwise in the bowl then falling from the bowl into the 9 foot deep pool below imparts a wicked counterclockwise whirlpool current in the pool.
http://m.youtube.com/#/watch?v=wUCBe-xb6EA&desktop_uri=%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DwUCBe-xb6EA
Tail wags dog…
Bob Tisdale says:
September 24, 2012 at 6:09 am
Geoff Sharp says: “It seems everything is about your book theses days.”
——————————————
My book is about ENSO, and just about every weather phenomena is impacted by ENSO and by the long-term effects of ENSO on sea surface temperatures. Here’s the post that introduces the book:
http://bobtisdale.wordpress.com/2012/09/03/everything-you-every-wanted-to-know-about-el-nino-and-la-nina-2/
Buy a copy and you’ll understand why it’s so important:
http://transactions.digitaldeliveryapp.com/products/6574/purchase
BTW, thanks for the excuse to include a link on this thread.
Regards
Can’t help yourself it seems. I re posted your links so you’ll get a little more exposure.
Pamela Gray said:
“What they got was correlation without mechanism. Again. Kinda like connecting all that to non-TSI “stuff” from the Sun. Both are ill-conceived”.
I think there is a sound mechanism involving all that non-TSI stuff.
Changes in the mix of solar wavelengths and particles appear to affect the ozone balance differentially at different heights of the atmosphere and ozone amounts control the strength and height of the temperature inversion at the tropopause.
It is the presence of ozone that causes that temperature inversion thereby creating the stratosphere in the first place.
To get circulation shifts in the troposphere all one needs to do is warm or cool the stratosphere by altering the ozone balance.
If that stratospheric warming or cooling occurs differentially at equator and poles then the changes can alter the gradient of tropopause height between equator and poles so that the jets and climate zones can shift latitudinally resulting in cloudiness and albedo changes.
Cloudiness and albedo changes alter the amount of solar shortwave entering the oceans and that is what makes the difference.
ROM says:
September 24, 2012 at 3:02 am
Well said. Also; Rotate it just a little more and you will have a face full of ocean. Not withstanding a few island groups ( wink, wink) scattered about.
“To reduce uncertainties about the observations, the researchers used computers to simulate 4,000 years worth of atmosphere and ocean circulation.”
Yep an Achilles heel alright.
Ill translate – watch my eyebrows – If you are uncertain about observation, you know measurements of the circulation of the ocean basins say 50 years ago – make it up. Hasn’t the climate system always been the same? Hasn’t it?
Geoff Sharp says September 24, 2012 at 3:39 am:
“Cheap pop”
Bob Tisdale says September 24, 2012 at 6:09 amGeoff
“Cheap plug”
😉
I am getting sick of scientific papers that are merely reporting the observation of a heretofore unremarked correlation and they concludes that the coincidence “suggests” an earth shaking conclusion that is nowhere in evidence. It’s especially egregious when they don’t even bother to propose a physical mechnism as the “suggestion’s” basis.
Okay, Utah guys, so you found coincidental similarities in oscillation patterns between two layers, separated by a third layer? How can the one act on the other, through the third? Won’t you at least take a guess? Are you sure it’s not just a temporary and coincidental occurrence that will go away in a year or a decade? If so, why? If not, are you sure the it’s not the ocean acting to guide the behavior of the stratisphere? Is that possiblity ignored because it deflates CAGW and the CO2 problem? And why would anyone’s first guess be that the layer with the least mass and lowest energy density is CAUSING shifts in the layer with hugely higher mass and energy density? That would seem highly unlikely to me, on it’s face. And if all this energy is passing throught the troposphere, wouldn’t that be observable in the troposphere in a similarly systematic way? Or, if it is unaffected, please explain how the troposphere could remain largely unaffected and still allow some transitory force from above on the oceanic convective processes in the North Atlantic?.
And your use of a big blue down arrow suggesting a force that you haven’t named on the chart is highly insulting. Explain this force, or remove your silly arrow or at least make the arrow point both ways, showing how little you actually know.
They don’t have data, so they used models to make up data.
Which is to say, they don’t have any data at all, because the output of a computer model isn’t data.
“Reichler and colleagues used weather observations and 4,000 years worth of supercomputer simulations of weather to show …”
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“Observations are consistent with the pattern revealed in computer simulations.”
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“To reduce uncertainties about the observations, the researchers used computers to simulate 4,000 years worth of atmosphere and ocean circulation.”
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“To further verify the findings, the researchers combined 18 atmosphere and ocean models into one big simulation.”
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BS!
Whenever I encounter some mention of the three-dimensional oceanic conveyor belt circulation, I am reminded of a very interesting collection of data that belies the simplicity of that “conveyor belt”
Back in Jan 26 – Feb 3, 2012, WUWT Decimals of Precision – Trenberth’s Missing Heat (Willis Eschenbach), part of the comment thread went into how variable was the temperature of the oceans in (x, y, z, time of year, time of day, time in oceanic cycle) and Nyquist sampling issues.
At the end of that thread, I found a slide illustrating of how complex ocean currents can be: Interannual atmospheric variability forced by the deep equatorial Atlantic Ocean, Figure 2.
Brandt-2011, Nature 473,497–500(26 May 2011).
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v473/n7348/fig_tab/nature10013_F2.html
These data were collected at only one small part of the ocean: 0 N, 23 W, from 0 to 3500 m water depth, 2006-Jul to 2008-Mar. The slide shows East-West component of current velocity in color, depth in Y, time in x.
What is striking is high variability in velocity as a function of depth. At the surface the current is >20 cm/sec eastward. At 200 m, the current reverses to ~ 10 cm/sec westward. There might be another reversal at 500 m. A gap in data collection. At 1100 m it is weakly westward, at 1200-1400 m it is eastward at ~10 cm/sec. By 1700 m it has reversed to westward again. A 30 cm/sec difference is more than 0.5 knots. This is only one location of data, only one projected velocity direction, only one study. You have to ask, “if the vertical profile is this complicated here, on the Equator, what does the rest of the ocean look like?” A “conveyor belt” as a conceptual analog belies the underlying complexity.
I would think that more physical measurements, not more computer simulations, would be the basis for reducing uncertainties. But hey, I’m just an engineer.
in radiative loss rates — heat transport that cools the tropics and warms the poles net warms the system (even more so by modulating ice-pack albedo) while trapping the heat in the tropics causes them to heat a bit but then re-establish dynamic balance while the poles — and the planet — substantially cools. As Richard Lindzen (MIT physicist) and I independently have pointed out, weather “extremes” are created by the strong temperature differentials of hotter tropics and cooler poles, not the more uniform but warmer temperatures we have recently experienced. If anything, we are in a historic low for violent Atlantic hurricanes to support this assertion.
Sure, and in just a few more decades of direct observation, they’ll actually have the required data. Maybe five or ten. As it is now, they have three or four.
Which isn’t to say that you aren’t right — the reason that climate scientists rely so heavily on models that they cannot be sure are right is that we have only 30 to 50 years of approximately accurate global weather/climate data, with only a bit more than 30 of that satellite data that is truly global, as far as it goes. As it is now, ARGO is only a few years old and so we’ve only had a few years worth of reasonably reliable, reasonably global temperature/current soundings through the oceanic thermocline. We’ve had satellite observation for:
* Some three, working on four solar cycles (two full hale cycles)
* Some three or four ENSO maxima, which are weakly synchronous with the solar cycle but chaotic/erratic.
* One oscillation of the PDO (which recently reversed for the first time in the entire cycle and which appears to be tightly coupled to and modulated by ENSO.
* We have yet to see a change in phase of the NAO, which appears to be chaotic, not periodic, and is weakly coupled to the Arctic Oscillation (AO). The NAO has been in “warm phase” since the mid-70’s, with the 1980-2000 stretch the longest and strongest warm phase cycle visible in the entire record post 1870. It has been mostly neutral for a decade, but with a burst of warming arguably visible around 2007-2008.
* The AO is similarly chaotic with no clear periodicity, and had its strongest positive (US/Europe/Arctic warming) behavior in the entire record in the 1990-2000, was strongly positive in 2007-2009, and isn’t yet registered for 2012 (but I’m betting it’s been strongly positive).
* The Antarctic Oscillation (AAO) is for all intents and purposes unknown. The instrumental record only extends back to 1957 for Antarctica period, and even satellite observations have not (AFAICT) produced a credible picture of the long term/decadal timescale behavior of the AAO. The little that is known suggest that it is tightly coupled to both the PDO and the NAO, and that the relative phases of the latter two cycles create warming or cooling on the Pacific or Atlantic facing shores of Antarctica. What goes on inland seems ill documented even by satellites as far as identifying some dominant circulation pattern and its variation.
The article above seems to link stratospheric changes in the AO to macro-scale changes in the global thermohaline circulation, but this is still only a tiny piece in the huge, coupled, system of atmospheric motions that redistribute tropical heat received via insolation en route to outer space. Heat redistribution is net warming globally because of the
One of several reasons I am a “skeptic” about CAGW is that the Earth is an enormous set of more or less distinct, but coupled, fluid dynamics systems (described by the Navier-Stokes equations). The NS equations are the most fiendish and difficult equations the human race has ever studied and tried to solve, and the set of coupled, chaotic equations that give rise to climate on a spinning, tilted, mostly oceanic planet in a complicated set of orbital resonances with the highly variable Sun and outlying gas giants with drifting continents covered with high mountains and bare deserts as well as rapidly varying vegetation, a strong geomagnetic coupling that affects atmospheric composition and chemistry, and with a significant part of its radiative thermal balance being modulated by set of coupled reservoirs of greenhouse gases and albedo modulations is a hellish implementation of the NS PDEs.
This isn’t just “any old” nonlinear system — it is so nonlinear that 100% of the variability observed in the climate could easily be totally natural, while on the other hand every time I sneeze today (an “anthropogenic” cause of variation) I completely change the weather, and quite possibly the climate, a decade from now. Separating signal from noise, globally meaningful cause from the “random, chaotic” consequence of strongly coupled aperiodic oscillators, is IMO quite impossible, certainly impossible without — as you say — more data!
Data that we cannot just reach out and get. Data that we must wait patiently to accumulate, with modern instrumentation, over decades.
In a century we might understand the weather well enough to make a stab at the climate. By then we might have observed some of the major oscillations change phase. We might have figured out what is happening over Antarctica, what is going on in the deep oceans. We might have worked out the puzzles in the CO_2 cycle, figured out how much ozone matters (and where, and why). We might have a clue or two about solar state and how its magnetic state affects — or doesn’t affect — weather and climate. In the meantime, climate models are attempting the near-impossible — to simulate the entire system in the absence of direct observational data describing the actual coupling of all of these moving parts across a period of time where they did things like change phase, or the current study above that — only now, in 2012 — discovers a yet another strong correlation between the decadal oscillations and climate variations, not just weather.
Until we understand the decadal oscillations and can figure out why the NAO sometimes spends 20-30 years in a state with a consistent cooling effect for the arctic itself and the southeast US and Europe, then spends 30 odd years in a state with a strong and somewhat cumulative warming effect, and why the warming cycle appears to be at least coincident with what might be a comparative solar maximum, and how it in turn is affected by ENSO and the PDO and the AO and the AAO (and vice versa) and how modulation of cloud cover feeds back either warming or cooling (depending on where and how high the clouds are) and… — until we understand nearly everything, we really don’t understand enough to make confident predictions of anthropogenic disaster, not when the NAO could change phase and confound our predictions almost overnight — or not, we just don’t know.
And it will take decades of accumulation of modern-era data with modern instrumentation to find out.
rgb
Am I misunderstanding something fundamental here, how do they separate solar influence on both the atmosphere and the oceans. Would a simple explanation be differences in lag times given the nature and volumes of the two media?
Having trouble with this since, the oceans with 1000x heat capacity of air would be the primary source region for energy in the system, which in then could have an effect on the entire system. would think that the stratosphere would be a lagged reaction to events from sources with much greater energy. In addition, the wild card of particular matter from volcanoes and also solar effects seem to make the stratosphere the driven, not the driver, and the observations that apparently “lead” the weather below may simply be the result of a prolonged series of events outside the stratosphere, which naturally would be ready to turn another way as per cyclical climate theory.
My take is the stratosphere is the driven, not the driver, and it reacts to the influences on it. Its almost like saying arctic ice melt will drive the climate, when its other factors that forced the melt in the first place.
In other words in the search for the unknown mover, the stratosphere is not it.
In the end it all comes back to the sun, but the assumption here is we are talking about the results here on earth of the solar influence.. which starts I think with the oceans, not the stratosphere. I cant think of anything in nature that truly grows top down in a consistent fashion ( economies included)
Then again, will observe and keep an open mind
rgbatduke says:
September 24, 2012 at 9:06 am
==============================
Superb comment, RGB!! It deserves to be a post/article, if nothing else so the rest of us can simply acknowledge and applaud. It does encapsulate some of my own doubts and questions, when I see lots of people claiming more confidence and knowledge in these vast climate matters than seems to be warranted.
Dr. Brown,
So the fight and funding should be over how we are measuring the system, not attempting to understand it yet.
RE: Stephen Rasey says:
September 24, 2012 at 8:52 am
“….A “conveyor belt” as a conceptual analog belies the underlying complexity.”
Exactly. The more I attempt to comprehend Thermohaline Circulation the more baffled and amazed I become. There are a lot of charts which simply don’t add up, and seasonal pulses which are not even considered.
The pity is, Bill Gray was urging NOAA and NASA to study this stuff thirty years ago, but was told, “Stick to hurricanes, Bill.” Instead Al Gore (in power back then) funnelled money to Hansen, and to models. Rather than gathering new data Hansen wasted thirty years basically “adjusting” old data. Only now are we starting to get the data which you refer to. Sigh…
Stupid Question: So, why average 18 models into one?
Researcher: Well, no single model confrmed our results.
Stupid Question: So all 18 models taken one at a time falsify your results?
Researcher: Well, no, by averaging 18 models their errors cancel each other out so we get a more accurate result.
Stupid Question: Don’t errors have the potential to add to each other rather than cancel each other out?
Researcher: Well, uhm, this is climate science, and uhm….
Stupid Question: OK forget the errors. There are 22 models in the IPCC ensemble. How come you used just 18 of them?
Researcher: Well, uhm, that was the combination of models that confirmed our results.
Stupid Question: OK, so ALL OTHER combinations of models falsify your results?
Researcher: Well, uhm, let me explain PCA and tree rings to you. We have this technique that was developed where we sample 345 trees, throw away the data from all except 12 of them, weight the data so that the one tree that confirms our results is 50% of the data, produce a weighted average, and show this as a proof of global warming. This is the exact same technique except we’re using a sub set of model data instead of a sub set of tree ring data. Its all very complicated which is why only us climate scientists understand it.
Stupid Question: Do you actually believe your own bullsh*t?
Researcher: Well, if you’ll unhook this lie detector, I’ll answer that question….
““Good examples of how we modify the stratosphere are the ozone hole and also fossil-fuel burning that adds carbon dioxide to the stratosphere”
And junk science enters the building!
The ozone hole is not ours. The claimed chemistry that showed that we caused it to grow larger was bogus. It is caused by solar radiation interacting with nitrogen molecules which form NO and react with ozone.
And, of course, we are not significantly or even detectably increasing CO2 in the atmosphere, let alone the stratosphere.
It’s all in the attribution and due diligence is lacking here.
So if the AO influences the AMO (which influences the climate )
-What influences the AO??
The ‘He who must not be named’ of the CAGW community:
http://www.iac.ethz.ch/people/stefanbr/workshop2006/Labitzke_Gwatt2006.pdf
What I love is the apparent lack of understanding of the oceanic conveyor belt. The Gulf Stream flows faster during warm periods and slows during cold times. This makes sense as the viscosity of water varies with temperature.
They refer to a signal between the stratosphere and the surface. What would that be? There is simply not enough energy content in the thin stratosphere, that could travel from up there to the surface, to have an effect on the ocean. It is much more likely that the ocean changes alter and affect the stratosphere. Thermodynamics really needs to be considered here.
rgb
A fine summary of the curent situation.
However, I have already proposed a broad conceptual overview that appears to link all those diverse phenomena in a narrative that appears (for the moment at least) to fit observations and basic physics.
I am moderately confident that my narrative is correct.