Gulf Stream slowdown to spare Europe from worst of climate change
From the UNIVERSITY OF SUSSEX and Dr. Richard Tol.
Europe will be spared the worst economic impacts of climate change by a slowing down of the Gulf Stream, new research predicts.
Scientists have long suggested that global warming could lead to a slowdown – or even shutdown – of the vast system of ocean currents, including the Gulf Stream, that keeps Europe warm.
Known as the Thermohaline Circulation, this system operates like a conveyor belt, transporting warm water from the tropics to Europe, where evaporation decreases salinity and density so that the water sinks.
As the world warms, melting icecaps and increased rainfall are widely predicted to slow this process down by flooding oceans with cold freshwater.
Some experts even fear that the process could shut down altogether, plunging Europe into a new ice age.
However, a new study by the University of Sussex, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and the University of California, Berkeley finds that, rather than cooling Europe, a slowdown of the Thermohaline Circulation would mean the continent still warms, but less quickly than other parts of the world.
This would lead to a rise in welfare standards in Europe, concludes the research, which is published in the leading economics journal the American Economic Review.
Professor Tol, Professor of Economics in the School of Business, Management and Economics at the University of Sussex, said: “Cooling is probably a good bit more harmful than warming, particularly in Europe. People rightly fear that climate change would cause a new ice age.
“Fortunately, our study finds no cooling at all. Instead, we find slower warming: a boon for Europeans.”
Of course, as ocean currents redistribute rather than create heat, slower warming for Europe means slightly accelerated warming elsewhere.
The study, therefore, adds to a growing body of evidence predicting a rich/poor divide in the climate change stakes. Developing countries will be less able to cope with rising sea levels, for example, and – as this research suggests – may warm faster than other, more developed parts of the world.
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If I replace the term climate change with global warming, I get this statement from Tol:
“People rightly fear that global warming would cause a new ice age.”
Global warming causes ice age? I love it. Statements like this restore my interest in climate change blogosphere! We need more batshit crazy *studies*! I want more nuts!
Rightly? Bah, humbug, Richard. Show me the ‘rightly’.
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“…Of course, as ocean currents redistribute rather than create heat, slower warming for Europe means slightly accelerated warming elsewhere.
The study, therefore, adds to a growing body of evidence predicting a rich/poor divide in the climate change stakes. Developing countries will be less able to cope with rising sea levels, for example, and – as this research suggests – may warm faster than other, more developed parts of the world…”
Pffffffffffffffft
There will be victims aplenty, as there has always been, but not the ones predicted by these morons. Their pretended confidence is harmful. Regional predictions have utterly no skills.
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‘Some experts even fear that the process could shut down altogether, plunging Europe into a new ice age.’
Fear? Really?
This is silly. The ocean currents take heat from the warmer parts of the oceans and move it to the poles. The warmest part of the oceans is near the equator. As the Solar output is reduced as per the solar minimum, the ocean currents will decrease.
Europe will get colder due to lack of energy from the Sun, AND will also suffer from the reduction in heat from the slow down of the Gulf Stream.
That’s not what I am seeing. In the 1970’s when the solar wind was strong, the AMO turned cold, and from the mid 1990’s from when it has weakened, the AMO turned warm.
Your data was at the end of the peak cycle of solar input to Earth’s oceans. Since 1650 the oceans have warmed. Now the Solar output is reducing. The Gulf Stream is over a 350 year cycle. You aren’t seeing it because your time period is only 40 years. From 1600 to 1650 there was a Solar collapse in energy output {virtually no sunspots for 50 years}. The Gulf Stream shut down as indicated by the English parties on the frozen Thames River.
” From 1600 to 1650 there was a Solar collapse in energy output {virtually no sunspots for 50 years}. The Gulf Stream shut down as indicated by the English parties on the frozen Thames River.”
I think you mean 1650-1700, and Frost Fairs and other cold winters don’t tell you anything about the AMO phase.
Our Study? Research? What study? What research?
Martin Mayer at July 11, 2016 at 2:33 pm provided a link to the study.
Why wasn’t the links to the press release and the study provided in the lead post?
https://www.sussex.ac.uk/webteam/gateway/file.php?name=wps–85-2016.pdf&site=24
“This would lead to a rise in welfare standards ”
Do you mean they will be paying out more in welfare ?
“The study, therefore, adds to a growing body of evidence predicting a rich/poor divide in the climate change stakes.”
Yes, there is a lot of evidence that there is a growing body of studies making the same unsubstantiated claims about CAGW. They are a source of much merriment every day on this website.
I have been working in tropical Ltin America, Africa and Asia for 45 years and have come to the opinion that living standards are rising rapidly.
Worldwide, the gäp between rich and poor countries is closing, except where there is warfare and except where governments suppress the private sector,by deliberate policies or runaway corruption, and in a very few cases by the unintended consequences of misguided good intentions.
Bloke down the pub
July 11, 2016 at 1:36 pm
Climate change won’t be noticeable here, but it will be far worse elsewhere. Strange how many places on the Earth that seems to apply to.
Climate change will hit “Everywhere” harder than “rest of world”
This is slightly more (but not fully) accurate diagram
http://www.grida.no/climate/ipcc_tar/slides/large/04.18.jpg
“where evaporation decreases salinity and density so that the water sinks.”
Nope !
When warm saline surface current reaches the Northern latitudes, cold Arctic and sub-Arctic winds strip warm current of its heat content (see shaded circles in vicinity of Greenland on the diagram above) at rate of several hundred W/m2.
Losing its warmth saline water’s density rises and the currents sink to depths of up to two km.
Rising warm air’s heat is absorbed by the higher altitude polar jet-stream increasing its energy, which is subsequently dissipated by the jet-stream’s swing from shorter zonal to much longer meridional path. This effect is often referred to ‘Icelandic low’ blocking, affecting the weather across the Euro-Asian continental mass.
Jet-streams meridional swing drags the cold winds further south, stripping even more heat and pumping the extra energy into the jet stream (positive feedback) often locking the jet stream into the meridional flow for a prolong periods of time.
Whatever the reason the North Atlantic is said to be some of the saltiest ocean waters.
http://www.climate4you.com/images/ArgoTimeSeriesTemp59N.GIF
The saltiest waters are getting much colder.
To me this would seem to indicate the deep ocean is cooling and provide a driver for circulation (saltiest and coldest = densest).
The great ocean conveyer belt is STILL passing through Florida.
it is a greatly simplified schematic representation. If you look at any particular detail you will find it is not accurate. Zooming in on the Atlantic Ocean, this map gives slightly improved accuracy of currents, not all are parts of the conveyor belt
http://www.bigmarinefish.com/map_currents_atlantic.jpg
Enter the new excuse for lack of warming in coming years. This is the new aerosols.
Of course there is 0 evidence any slowdown in the Atlantic is because of man made emissions, the leap will be made, here is another plausible but un-falsifiable excuse for the lack of attribution
Studies of sediment between Florida and Cuba had indicated that the Gulf Stream slows down with cooling and speeds up with warming, the opposite of what is expected using the assumption of more melting and rain to dilute the northern seas. It is an issue of viscosity, colder fluid flows more slowly thus delivering les warmth to New England and Europe, so slower with cooling waters means cooler lands. Warming, the Gulf Stream flows more easily and more heat is delivered.
THIS ARTICLE IS MORE BS.
If wishes were currents, tolriders would warm.
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With or without the Gulf stream shouldn’t temperatures rise Anyway? Are they just hedging their bets in case it gets cold? Why would they think it would get Cold? I remember a report not to long ago that CAGW was predicting orange trees growing in England. CAGW is all over the place with their projections.
Prior to 1835….there were orange groves in South Carolina
“People rightly fear that climate change would cause a new ice age.”
So which “climate change” would this be? Natural climate change or the human induced variety? I’m guessing it’s the human induced variety because the only “climate change” people “fear” is of that stripe.
So if it warms, it’s climate change (AKA global warming). If it cools, it’s climate change (AKA global warming). Presumably if nothing happens, that’ll also be climate change (AKA global warming).
Nothing like covering all the bases, huh.
Not impressed.
Deliberate obfuscation, or innocent error; its always the same question, the same question.
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I gave up on innocent error a long time ago.
The question I ask is: What does NO climate change/global warming look like? I’m not the only one getting fed up with everything counting as as positive signal.
““People rightly FEAR that climate change would cause a new ice age.””
Well, it would make an almighty mess of the CAGW meme..
and hence probably have a big effect on FUNDING…
No wonder they are worried.
That’s why they are covering their rear ends. They’ve been skating on thin ice for a long time now, but it’s getting a whole lot thinner – excuse the terminology, please.
Cold much more harmful than warmth
How do you grow wheat in Canada or Germany or corn in Iowa or when they are covered by a glacier?
How can we get enough global warming to prevent the next glaciation?
Lack of food causes starvation which kills!
Heh, I remember trying to convince Richard Tol that the science wasn’t settled over at Tom Fuller’s old place.
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On this schematic of ocean currents, cold water heading north to offshore Alaska reverses direction becomes classed as hot and heads South against an unfavourable thermal gradient.
This puzzling feature is on most circulation maps.
No doubt the maps are simplified, but are they not wrong if they have this seeming error?
Geoff.
Geoff,
As best I can tell, they took the bits and pieces of the surface circulations they needed to close the loop, neglecting the hydrological effect of cold water redistributing itself below the thermocline in response to sinking cold water at the poles, pushing tropical waters up to offset the latitudinal difference between precipitation and evaporation. Of course, much of the loop is hypothetical, very slow and hard to measure.
To conceptualize how it works at a more perceptible scale, consider a pool of mercury with a layer of water floating above it. If you add drops of mercury in one corner, does that corner accumulate the new mercury or does it redistribute along the entire boundary between the mercury and water? Gravity works on the ocean is the same, except that the relative density differences are far smaller and the scale is far larger.
Eddies, turbulence, chaos…..yeah, its settled.
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Yes, Goeff, the maps of ocean currents produced by “climate scientists” are almost invariably wrong in vital respects, despite efforts by expert oceanographers such as Carl Wunsch to expose the errors and debunk the specious speculations. But skeptics here seem no less inclined to miscomprehend both the kinematics and the dynamics, with origins of the Gulf Stream imagined off the west coast of Africa and the Coriolis force misattributed as the driver. No one seems lietrate in dynamical oceanography, yet everyone has an ill-founded opinion of its workings.
Of course cooling is more harmful than warming. I’ve also been trying to convince Richard Tol for years that there is no upper limit to the benefits of warming that man can do by breaking the hydrocarbon bonds in fossil fuels. The uses of fossil fuels have been, are and will continue to be of massive net benefit to humanity, its society and culture, to the whole biome, and, by Gaia, probably to the Earth itself..
Add to that the fact that we are in the ebbing stages of the Holocene, and we’ve just recovered from the coldest depths of this interglacial. We had better hope that the recovery has been primarily natural, for if man is responsible for the bulk of the warming, then we are running out of fuel.
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That is absolute crap science.
Europe will be spared the worst economic impacts of climate change by a slowing down of the Gulf Stream, new research predicts.
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How about nuclear war NATO is preparing?
The paper says on page 3, “In this set-up, the THC shutdown is not caused by internally consistent physical processes in the model. Instead, additional fresh water is added to the North Atlantic, like a Death Star suddenly appearing in the sky and hosing down water. … Three of the models consider a freshwater input of 0.1 Sv [0.1 SV = 100,000 m3/s] near Greenland … This implies a slowdown of the THC of 27 ± 14%”. Then, “Note that the models agree on the sign of the temperature change for only 70 out of 155 countries.”
This THC slowdown is not caused by GHG warming melting the Greenland ice cap, but by a Death Star. So, how is this useful? Don’t the models already include ice cap melting, so why is a Death Star required?
Next!
So cooling is caused by warming, just as the Warmists said. I knew it! We’re doomed.
Somehow heat will stop flowing from warm places to colder places. A New Thermodynamics is being developed. Genius! Absolute Genius!
Oh, wait ….
The thermohaline circulation shut down during the Younger Dryas only because a huge flood of cold, fresh water was dumped into the Atlantic. At least that’s the most promising hypothesis. The Laurentide ice sheet was far, far larger than Greenland’s potential contribution. No way is Greenland threatening to do the same thing. It simply does not have enough ice. Perhaps if you set off several nukes and melted Greenland’s ice cover in one moment, that might be enough to do some real damage.
But change is inevitable. We have to get our heads out of the ice and realize that cold is far worse than warming. We either have to prepare for the next glacial period of the current Ice Age, or end the Ice Age altogether. We currently already live in an Ice Age. How is that possible? Because those 2 little white things at the poles persist throughout the year. Let’s not be sloppy with our terms. Calling our current interglacial the “Holocene” did not magically make the Ice Age disappear. The Holocene is merely the latest in a long series of interglacials separating the glacial periods of the CURRENT Ice Age. Golly! Why is this so hard for people to understand. We live in an ongoing Ice Age. Global Warming is the SOLUTION!
All changes will cause some problems. But cold will cause far greater problems. Fearing warmth because it might melt some ice is like a hungry man fearing food.