Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Two new studies have promoted concerns that anthropogenic global warming could cause abrupt cooling in the Northern Hemisphere – the “Day after Tomorrow” scenario.
According to the Sydney Morning Herald;
Two new studies are adding to concerns about one of the most troubling scenarios for future climate change: the possibility that global warming could slow or shut down the Atlantic’s great ocean circulation systems, with dramatic implications for North America and Europe.
The research, by separate teams of scientists, bolsters predictions of disruptions to global ocean currents – such as the Gulf Stream – that transfer tropical warmth from the equator to northern latitudes, as well as a larger conveyor system that cycles colder water into the ocean’s depths. Both systems help ensure relatively mild conditions in parts of Northern Europe that would otherwise be much colder.
The abstract of the first study, lead author Paul Gierz
Climate change can influence sea surface conditions and the melting rates of ice sheets; resulting in decreased deep water formation rates and ultimately affecting the strength of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC). As such, a detailed study of the interactive role of dynamic ice sheets on the AMOC and therefore on global climate is required. We utilize a climate model in combination with a dynamic ice sheet model to investigate changes to the AMOC and North Atlantic climate in response to Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change scenarios for RCP4.5 and RCP6. It is demonstrated that the inclusion of an ice sheet component results in a drastic freshening of the North Atlantic by up to 2 practical salinity units, enhancing high-latitude haloclines and weakening the AMOC by up to 2 sverdrup (106 m3/s). Incorporating a bidirectionally coupled dynamic ice sheet results in relatively reduced warming over Europe due to the associated decrease in heat transport.
The abstract of the second study, lead author Jud Partin
Proxy records of temperature from the Atlantic clearly show that the Younger Dryas was an abrupt climate change event during the last deglaciation, but records of hydroclimate are underutilized in defining the event. Here we combine a new hydroclimate record from Palawan, Philippines, in the tropical Pacific, with previously published records to highlight a difference between hydroclimate and temperature responses to the Younger Dryas. Although the onset and termination are synchronous across the records, tropical hydroclimate changes are more gradual (>100 years) than the abrupt (10–100 years) temperature changes in the northern Atlantic Ocean. The abrupt recovery of Greenland temperatures likely reflects changes in regional sea ice extent. Proxy data and transient climate model simulations support the hypothesis that freshwater forced a reduction in the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation, thereby causing the Younger Dryas. However, changes in ocean overturning may not produce the same effects globally as in Greenland.
Northern deep freeze studies seem to be fashionable lately, even Michael Mann had a go earlier this year.
Perhaps giant blocks of ice washing up on American beaches is proving difficult to reconcile with the end of snow narrative. Having said that, there has always been a low profile nod towards the possibility of abrupt cooling, which is of course still all our fault. This apparent effort to keep all the options open is beautifully captured by one of my favourite climategate emails.
Climategate email 4141.txt (written in 2004)
In my experience, global warming freezing is already a bit of a public relations problem with the media, which can become public perception. It provides a new story for the old news that is climate change – a story that has been running since 1985/88.
Last Friday, even NERC put-out a press release that opened ‘British scientists set sail today from Glasgow to begin work aimed at discovering if Britain is indeed in danger of entering the next ice age.’
…
Dear Asher, and all,
I think this is a real problem, and I agree with Nick that climate change might be a better labelling than global warming. But somehow I also feel that one needs to add the dimension of the earth system, and the fact that human beings for the first time ever are able to impact on that system.
Let’s not forget folks, that what we are dealing with is “settled science”.
It seems to me that we’re going to have to pay either way.
First we paid for the generation of vast quantities of heavily biased alarmist drivel, all requiring sending overpaid kagool-clad nitwits on missions to drill holes in trees, slice up stalactites and dig up detritus from the bottom of caves.
Then we paid for the subsidy driven astronomically priced market disrupting non-solution.
And now we will have to pay for “experts” to slowly discover that things are not in all cases quite as urgent or alarming as we may have thought.
Whilst we will know, that the official retraction will be basically a rehash of the extensive work of currently sidelined critics, such as Judith Curry, Roger Pielke Snr, John Christy, Lindzen, McIntyre and McKitrick, Lomborg,
Not to mention, yours truly and the hyper-intelligent contributors to this blog.
However we will doubtless have to shell out more money for more boring boring.
Of trees and ice cores, etc.
We’ll probably also be charged for the removal of all the then defunct wind turbines rusting in the sea on Dogger Bank.
We’re even paying for the output of Lewandowsky.
Both in terms of taxes and in terms of corrosion of the soul.
Nor normally if your claims are based on things getting warming , that fact it is getting colder or no getting warming would invalidate your claims . However such is the ‘magic’ of CAGW anything , including that which is in total contrast to your claims , is ‘proof ‘ supporting your claim.
Once again let is remember that one of the great unanswered question that comes out of this whole thing is ,what would disprove CAGW? it is situation like this that tells us why this question remains unanswered.
Europe’s mild climate has little to do with North Atlantic Drift and has far more to with the mild Westerly winds coming from the mid Atlantic. Why does so called climate experts still go along with this myth about the North Atlantic Drift. Do these people ever look at the weather records for europe and see that for climate cooling in europe. You need high pressure blocking off the mild Westerly winds during the winter months followed by a more zonal southern tracking jet stream during the summer months.
The difference between mild European climate now and the ice age one is down to change in movement of the AMOC directly from the Arctic ocean basin. It is wind and density driven and if the sinking is lost the AMOC will slow greatly and be forced South with significant movement of deep cold Arctic ocean water. This causes a deep water polar ocean gyre to form across the North Atlantic to Spain and then move North towards the Nordic seas against the UK. It is prevented from moving any further South by the Gulf stream and wind currents, which instead causes a southern based NAD towards southern Spain.
The main unknown it was causes this to happen? A change in the Arctic ocean basin and/or weakened density flow of the current from the South, enabling this surge of Arctic Ocean basin water much further South.
As have suggested in other posts l feel that the Oceans role in major climate change is overstated.
l believe that the formation of the ice age was largely weather driven. Why! because l can’t see how the ice sheets would have been able to extend to the rate they did if the weather had been as changeable during the ice age as it is now. For the ice sheets to extend as far as they did, would need the weather to be doing more or less the same thing over a large number of years.
All weather over the planet it dictated by ocean/seas. You can’t have a ice age largely weather driven without ocean influence. The post with the description about how ice ages form was based on scientific observations using ocean proxies, not just a educated guess. Snowfall has to come from the oceans to build up the glaciers during ice ages. Currently the ocean in the North Atlantic is by far not cold enough to deliver this, no matter how wind driven they become.
They need a different mechanism like the one described previously. The change in air temperatures from weather have virtually no influence on the North Atlantic Ocean. Quick changes from inter-glacial to ice ages in decades or less can only occur with a ocean circulation change. The circulation change can give deep very cold water in the North Atlantic in just months. This ocean change gives the snowy weather around Europe and USA that leads to huge glaciers.
Soothsayers have always had a good line in peppering their rubbish with the occasional ‘insider’ fact such as an impending eclipse.
In this case its just the AMO turning negative.
I just felt my IQ drop by 10 points. Is that the strategy now?
you know what else could cause arctic cooling?
global cooling.
yet thats never considered.
Here is a little experiment for y’all to try. Ask every non scientist you speak with on a casual basis at an appropriate point in any conversation, particularly if climate change or global warming comes up, what percent they think CO2 is of our atmosphere. I usually get an answer of 20 to 30%. That even includes some who are somewhat scientifically educated, like one friend who has a masters degree in geology!
My point is that the propaganda has been pushed for so long and so hard that it will be very difficult to counter it. The studies referenced here are excellent examples of how this has happened. When I tell folks that CO2 is .04%, four one hundreths of one percent, of our atmosphere it sometimes opens their minds a little to the fact that they are being lied to.
I’ll have to try that.
Your result is surprising to me, since a lot of people seem to know that the O2 content of air is around 20%.
The oxygen released by plants comes from the water they take in, not from the carbon dioxide in the air. Also, O2 stays in the air longer than CO2.
Plus, half of biologically produced oxygen in the atmosphere comes from phytoplankton in the oceans. The concentration of CO2 varies both above and below the supposedly “well-mixed” 400 ppm in the air.
How do plants manage to produce 20% of the atmosphere by putting out
O2 but only taking in 0.04% as CO2? What am I missing?
Sorry. The above was meant to respond to Jon.
The Younger Dryas is a boon for alarmists because it was a real event, it happened very quickly (certainly in less than a century and maybe less than a decade) and it lasted for about 1,000 years and the European climate became very cold and dry for those 1,000 years.. And one of the hypotheses about the cause of the YD involves rapid discharge of fresh water from melting of the North American ice sheet, which had supposedly been impounded in Lake Agassiz until the ice barrier finally melted. This fresh water coming out of the St Lawrence (the theory goes, and it’s quite convincing) spread out across the surface of the North Atlantic, blocking off the warm Gulf Stream waters from keeping western Europe’s climate mild.
This theory relies on the YD being a strictly European event, but it probably wasn’t. Some sources now say that the YD was at least Northern Hemisphere-wide, if not world-wide. Maybe the fresh water influx temporarily halted the worldwide thermohaline circulation, which might have affected global climate? It’s all a bit iffy though.
Anyway, climate models “prove” that the Greenland ice cap will melt, hence (the argument goes) replicating the fresh water influx into the Atlantic and thereby causing another YD. That’s the scare story. It has enough plausibility, because of the real, historical YD, that it could gain more traction than “we’re all going to fry next year”. Last month there was a WUWT article about it and it didn’t fare very well in the discussion.
One problem with the Lake Agassiz theory is that Lake Agassiz probably did its maximum emptying at around 9,500 years BP, according to Geological Survey of Canada estimates, which is about 2,000 years after the end of the YD. After that, it probably became an inland sea without an outlet through the St Lawrence (and maybe without any outlet until it finally discharged to the north).
Other theories for the cause of the YD involve a cosmic event, or a decrease in solar radiation. Trouble is, you can’t blame those on fossil fuels.
Like most natural phenomena, the YD is a complex event without a single, totally convincing explanation, so I’m not losing sleep over it happening again soon.
And what was the cause of the Older Dryas? This is not addressed by the Lake Agassiz theory.
There is no valid evidence for a cosmic event. The YD was no different from the many such events which preceded it, both in the last deglaciation and previous ones.
Lake Agassiz existed in various forms for about 4000 years. It originally drained south, down the Mississippi, then toward the NW, and finally toward the east.
IMO there are plenty of other deglaciation events producing meltwater pulses besides Lake Agassiz to explain the Dryases and the 8200 years ago sudden cold snap. Among these are ice shelf collapse, the separation of the Cordilleran from the Laurentide ice sheets and the separation of the Baffin and Labrador ice domes around Hudson Bay.
What causes repeated Ice Ages is the big mastodon in the house.
taxed
September 8, 2015 at 1:02 pm
Europe’s mild climate has little to do with North Atlantic Drift and has far more to with the mild Westerly winds coming from the mid Atlantic
+1
The Gulf stream is largely wind driven
Heat transfer from the tropics to high latitudes is mostly in the atmosphere.
Eloquently stated by Richard Lindzen in this debunking of a confused Bill Nye on Larry King a few years back.
Lindzent states:
“to shut it down you would have to stop the rotation of the earth” (at 2.01)
Even Real Climate accept this.
Crediting the Peter Wadhams with the start of the ‘scare’
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/05/gulf-stream-slowdown/
Also Back in 2005 Bryden stated the volume of the Thermohaline Circulation had decreased by 30%. But that was questioned by a lot of other scientists at the time. Including Carl Wunsch.
http://www.yaleclimateconnections.org/2007/10/common-climate-misconceptions-why-a-gulf-stream-shut-down-and-a-new-european-ice-age-are-unlikely/
The idea that the Gulf Stream itself warms Europe seems to back quite a long time though.
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/europe-is-warmer-than-canada-because-of-the-gulf-stream-right-not-so-fast-19823546/?no-ist
The idea that the Gulf stream shuts down is wrong as it is still in operation during ice ages. Whether it has been incorrectly worded or not I don’t know. The fact is the Europe is milder than across Canadian side is due to warmer ocean water tracking North towards the Nordic seas. These are wind driven in a westerly movement, but also ocean driven in a northerly movement towards the poles.
The chart below easily shows this below. If the winds just blow westerly with no ocean movement north then temperatures around the Canadian side would be similar on the eastern side. The warmer temperatures go all way up to the Arctic so it defiantly shows a warmer ocean current that wouldn’t be there without a northward push.
http://weather.unisys.com/archive/sst/sst-150906.gif
“the inclusion of an ice sheet component”
What a turgidly opaque phrase! What (if anything) does it mean? (First Paul Gierz’ abstract.)
Someone, somewhere, is getting nervous about the Arctic ice.
Talking of which – has it just hit minimum?
http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/plots/icecover/icecover_current_new.png
(This question gets asked every year around now. The answer’s usually no.)
Phlogiston
Seems a bit early still. We will know when the maximum is past – NOT before it happens, but expect it around Sept 10 – Sept 22. As usual.
Not daily minimum yet, but the first week of Sept. Average is in at 4.6M km2. (MASIE).
https://rclutz.wordpress.com/2015/09/08/arctic-ice-water-today/
Silly Morning Herald.
Sounds arrogant, but ‘I told you so’. Looking back on pre-history is some indication of the cyclical patterns of ice and warm periods, and we don’t know exactly in terms of years how long these lasted. We do know from studies ice has dominated over warm periods in the last 2 million years. Most interstadial or interglacial have lasted for around 15,000k on parts of the planet.. But – the last 10,000 k have seen adaptation from a hunter, gatherer and fisher economy to agriculturalists and advanced industralized civilizations. Population has grown in some parts of the world caused by our ability to drop the hunter and gatherer mentality and build territories.and release some of our populations to become artisans. We exploit natural resources but the most important to us is rain. Without that we lose plants. Ice ages caused less rain. It is strange but the Northern Hemisphere without doubt suffered from more glacial presence than the Southern Hemisphere. Incredible that the Antarctic didn’t do more towards this, it was the Arctic that stopped the Gulf Stream that caused the Northern Hemisphere to freeze although the ice sheets didn’t advance to Africa or some parts of the Southern parts of Asia Minor and Europe. High peaks of course everywhere lost some tree cover, particularly rain forests in Australia. I don’t think we will see a glacial advancement like in the Day after Tomorrow but it may come one day. Our orbit around the sun will definitely play a big part in this too. But don’t throw your Ugg boots out yet. But – this should not stop us thinking about pollution of our cities and landscapes. But – it will help us survive in a better natural environment.
These cretinous ideas are all based upon the fallacy of Arctic Amplification.
Increased forcing of the climate both increases AMOC rates, and cools the Arctic, because positive NAO/AO is increased.
Now that global warming is seen as a busted flush, those with interests in the money tree need to segue it into a new crises in order to keep the fear going and the money flowing.
Lets get this straight. Global warming leads to northern hemisphere cooling, maybe causing an ice age which will cause cooling generally?
1. Is this an explanation to be used if global cooling starts?
2. Will the consequential cooling then restore the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation so the warming cycle can start again?
Too much for my brain:(
Cheers
Roger
http://www.rogerfromnewzealand.wordpress.com
But surely everyone knows that the ice sheets are melting and all our ports and great coastal cities will be underwater?
“Global warming freezing”. Love that!
“Global warming frost”, “Global warming freezing rain”, “Global warming black ice”, “Global warming ice crystals”, “Global warming ice(cream)”.
So the Alfred Wegener Institute releases a ‘Day after Tomorrow’ computer game.
____
MarkW signals end of game in 3 sentences:
The slowdown in ocean currents, if it were to occur, would merely result in the arctic not warming as much as it otherwise would have. If the arctic were to cool as much as these fools predict, the resulting drop in sea temperatures would resurrect the ocean currents.
Sure the AWI should consult MW before typing into keyboards.
In Alfred Wegeners Name.
Regards – Hans
This reminds me of dirt pudding. Dirt pudding has the odd appearance of dirt on the top made up of crushed oreo cookies (with white maggots due some of the creamy center that didn’t get completely scraped off).
Mixing up a model recipe with a cup of this and a cup of that and then saying the ice age cometh is like feeding you dirt pudding while trying to convince you that the crushed oreos are indeed real dirt.
I get this overwhelming feeling of psychics at work. Make one million predictions and surely a few of them will occur, then pounce on it and take full credit. Science has once again become a bunch of “cold callers” who act like superstitious witches cackling around a pot. These people are ruining science.
http://www.bishop-hill.net/blog/2015/9/8/greenpeace-warns-of-ice-age-dangers.html
So will global warming prevent the next ice age, or what???
Global cooling will follow global warming, and vice versa, continually in fractal oscillation as it always has. This includes ice ages from time to time – big changes rarely, small changes frequently, i.e. fractal pattern (signature of chaotic-nonlinear dynamics).
Simon Says Global Warming, Simon Says Global Cooling, now Simon Says Global Cool Up.
My car needs new tires and a tuneup (and an oil change). My pickup needs a massive overhaul or I need a new pickup. House could use some work and new furnace would be nice, since last winter’s climate change was a little short on global warming… Can somebody point to the climate change fixit button? It seems it can do EVERYTHING, so those little things should be no challenge.