An alarming claim from from the University of Exeter, based entirely on modeling.
Study finds early warning signals of abrupt climate change
A new study by researchers at the University of Exeter has found early warning signals of a reorganisation of the Atlantic oceans’ circulation which could have a profound impact on the global climate system.
The research, published today in the journal Nature Communications, used a simulation from a highly complex model to analyse the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), an important component of the Earth’s climate system.
It showed that early warning signals are present up to 250 years before it collapses, suggesting that scientists could monitor the real world overturning circulation for the same signals.
The AMOC is like a conveyor belt in the ocean, driven by the salinity and temperature of the water. The system transports heat energy from the tropics and Southern Hemisphere to the North Atlantic, where it is transferred to the atmosphere.
Experiments suggest that if the AMOC is ‘switched off’ by extra freshwater entering the North Atlantic, surface air temperature in the North Atlantic region would cool by around 1-3°C, with enhanced cooling of up to 8°C in the worst affected regions.
The collapse would also encourage drought in the Sahel – the area just south of the Sahara desert – and dynamic changes in sea level of up to 80cm along the coasts of Europe and North America.
“We found that natural fluctuations in the circulation were getting longer-lived as the collapse was approached, a phenomenon known as critical slowing down,” said lead author Chris Boulton.
“We don’t know how close we are to a collapse of the circulation, but a real world early warning could help us prevent it, or at least prepare for the consequences” adds co-author Professor Tim Lenton.
The study is the most realistic simulation of the climate system in which this type of early warning signal has been tested.
“The best early warning signals in the model world are in places where major efforts are going into monitoring the circulation in the real world – so these efforts could have unexpected added value’ adds Professor Lenton.
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‘Early warning signals of Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation collapse in a fully coupled climate model’ by Chris Boulton, Lesley Allison and Timothy Lenton is published today in the journal Nature Communications.
Please no, not the AMOC collapse, please anything but that. There is slight hope, maybe Bruce Willis can nuke the AMOC like he did the meteor in the movie Armageddon (1998).
On a serious note, modern Homo Sapiens have been dealing with any and all climates for at least 100,00 years and surprisingly for some they did it without an iPhone. Many modern races do well in the ice and others seem to get by in the tropics. We can survive weather. Why this constant fear mongering about climate, why this little faith in the human race to deal with weather. Why this bizarre need to have to change the weather.
We are now going to control how ocean currents work and evolve? Really?
Is it really just the fear of change? Yes the climate will change, no amount of caterwauling is gonna stop the climate from changing. So get your boots on and deal with it when it comes, not cry about some unpredictable event that may or may not happen centuries from now.
“[…] modern Homo Sapiens have been dealing with any and all climates for at least 100,00 years and surprisingly for some they did it without an iPhone. […]”
Nooooo!!! Say it ain’t so, Alx!
I’m counting on humanity to tweet its way out of the next glaciation while they follow their iPhone GPS to safety. (If only Moses had an iPhone…)
>>“We don’t know how close we are to a collapse of the circulation, but a real world early warning could help us prevent it, or at least prepare for the consequences” adds co-author Professor Tim Lenton.<<
Prepare why and for what, if it is unsure that/if something is going to happen?
It needs no academic background to see that mankind has always adapted to the environment: Human beings everywhere: from Siberia's -50° C or more(well, more is less in this case) or to the Sahara's +50C. Don't worry, mankind will exist when the IPCC and the public fund addicts have become reminders of ghastly times long gone by…
And in very much associated news…
https://uk.news.yahoo.com/growing-antarctic-ice-sheets-may-sparked-ice-age-133750917.html
“They looked at a different part of the world than is traditionally looked at for the onset of cooling,”
Because you don’t normally look for cooling anywhere near the place with all the ice? (I think the good Doctors comment was truncated.)
This is an interesting article looking at the glaciation at the start of the Pleistocene glacial epoch. They found that it coincided with warming of deep Pacific water (yes – warming not cooling). This is because warmer Atlantic water that normally would go south and melt Antarctic ice, instead was diverted into the deep Pacific. This allowed Antarctic ice to grow, and this was the fore-runner to global glaciation.
Note that there is an element of “zero sum game” to this. For glaciation to begin it is not necessary for there to be any change to the global heat budget. Just some deep ocean rearrangement of heat is all that is needed.
What might make this nice piece of palaeo-oceanography quite relevant to the current interglacial are the following two recent observed trends:
1. Antarctic sea ice is growing
2. Deep ocean OHC is apparently growing fastest in the southern ocean.
Even if we enter truly a new ice age, with 500 meters of glacial material burying Al Gore’s house, there will be scientists and models demonstrating it is a derivative of global warming. There is no winning this one .
Of course if the AMOC is switched off in the absence of “extra fresh water”………
The solution to the problem is to de-fund their work.
Chris Boulton, Lesley Allison and Timothy Lenton Some new names to keep an eye out for in the CAGWosphere
Keywords:- simulation, model, may, up to, suggesting, scientists
“complex model to analyse the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation”
Because they can’t use the ACTUAL AMOC to analyse the AMOC???
A little off topic but I have just finished watching the movie Judgment at Nuremberg. I have seen it a few times before. I highly recommend that everyone interested in global warming watch it. It covers the reasons why men ( judges of high standing in Germany in the mid thirties to the mid forties) became accomplices in the crimes against humanity.
Here is a youtube link to a six min segment. http://youtu.be/N3BwK51YFgQ
I’m not clear on the meaning of the phrase ‘fully coupled climate model’.
Does this mean that the model has a good sex life?
Global warming causes catastrophic cooling.
Notice that this is NOT a negative feedback mechanism. There is no minor cooling that stops the other cooling that if left unattended would be a global heatwave. This is one disaster sparing us from the opposite disaster.
The assumption here is that the Earth’s climate is always on a critical tipping point. The physics is delicately balanced and works as a series of interconnected on-off switches. There is no natural balancing going on.
The principle of Gaia is that the world operates in a way to minimize major disruptions to the habitability of the planet. The referenced work is based on a refutation of this principle: the world has a series of switches, at present fortuitously set to provide a positive environment for living organisms, but which are systemically capable of flipping into a life-endangering way. This goes counter to the history of our planet, ice-ages not withstanding (as there was no great extinction during the ice-ages, large mammals excluding AT THE END OF THE LAST ONE).
Hollywood is writing the IPCC script. There is no profit in life-as-usual. A virus contained in a village is no good, it has to threaten the existence of mankind to get to the big screen.
Wake me up when their prediction comes to pass. Excuse me; that’s projection.
Modelling of ocean circulation is more successful than of the atmosphere. The latter is mostly defeated by chaos. But ocean currents while still influenced by nonlinear dynamics are slower and more constrained. Phenomena such as the bipolar seesaw and the Younger Dryas and run up to the Holocene inception.
Like all human activity modelling fails when it becomes arrogant and over ambitious. Take the current topic for instance – the AMOC. At the heart of the AMOC is a positive feedback linked to salinity which gives the AMOC a fundamental instability. Basically, the gulf stream carries Carribean warm water with elevated salinity across the Atlantic northwards. Once near the Arctic this highly saline water cools to become super-dense, so much so that it sinks all the way to the ocean floor and flows south, forming the North Atlantic bottom water. This cold downwelling further drives the gulf stream via the AMOC.
This positive feedback has an important implication for the AMOC – it becomes an “excitable medium” in chaos terms. This means it is subject to suddenly switching on and off. Discussions of the AMOC such ad the one above that look for a discreet cause of each switching on or off – such as a salinity pulse – miss the point that the system is subject to such switching due to nonlinear instability.
Now a sensible goal of modelling here would be to simulate the AMOC instability that is well known, being the cause for instance of the Younger Dryas. And to tie such modelling as close as possible to palaeo data.
But to go further than this to attempt an all-singing all-dancing simulation of the whole system – that is too inductive and much less safe.
But if it can get a decadal long grant for an AMOC monitoring system from a naive grant-funding committee (or not so naive if they are CAGW believers of catastrophe alarmisms and part of the fraud) … So at this point…what difference does reality make? We are talking about a tenured career’s worth of gub-ment funding for a university!!!
Early warning signal, reminds me of the story of the ‘Channel Trumpet Blower’. Seems the English were worried about an invasion from the short Frenchman Napoleon. Set up an early warning, with some watching the English Channel who would blow a horn when he saw Napoleon’s troops crossing the water there. They then forgot the mission & position and kept it up until the start of WW I. (for those historically challenged – Napoleon died in 1821 and WW I started 1914) Talk about paying for useless warning is nothing new.
Saw paragraph 2 “… used a simulation from a highly complex model…” and stopped reading.
GIGO
More models of doom.
Another good example of:
Special
Climate
High
Intensity
Terrorism
Better know as SCHIT.
It’s worse than we thought, and you’d better send lots of money so we can save you.
Stop paying these idiots!
They used a highly complex computer model. Translation: They put seagull entrails in a blender, poured them on to a hockey stick and a drunk U.N. bureaucrat read it and sounded the alarm.
Borrowed this link from another thread. I repeat: “One takes a look at the vortex’s and flows and one just has to realize that if there is ANYONE who believes they can model and predict based on the number of variables present is this amazing world of ours is either an idiot, has an ego that will not quit or really needs the money and is willing to sell their soul to sell ice to Eskimos.”
http://earth.nullschool.net/
‘The study is the most realistic simulation of the climate system in which this type of early warning signal has been tested.’
But is still like expecting that given enough time 100 monkeys can write Hamlet
models all the way from those with much to lose and nothing to gain should ‘the cause ‘ fall
“We don’t know how close we are to a collapse of the circulation, but a real world early warning could help us prevent it, or at least prepare for the consequences” adds co-author Professor Tim Lenton.
So, how exactly are they going to prevent it?
Draining the oceans maybe? Or damming the rivers? How about stopping the rain?
No, the best bet would be turning off the sun. That should work a treat. Let’s do that.
Our taxes are paying for these idiots?
The study is the most realistic simulation of the climate system in which this type of early warning signal has been tested.
Uh-huh. And that’s supposed to be validation? How many instances of the AMOC switching off did they use to train their models? Aren’t they simply saying they got the models to match the pattern used to train the models. Hardly realistic. Just as unrealistic as expecting all other factors to remain the same over 250 years.
The Youger Dryas is an example of the AMOC switching off and on. It has been modeled reasonably successfully.
Is the “pauze” part of a “critical slowing down”?
“Mosher”, in Esperanto, means ‘move on to the next posting’.
This is just the plot from “The Day After Tomorrow” (2004) isn’t it?