Guest post by David Middleton
Just when you thought the Arctic would soon be ice-free…
For thousands of years, parts of northwest Europe have enjoyed a climate about 5C warmer than many other regions on the same latitude. But new scientific analysis suggests that that could change much sooner and much faster than thought possible.
Climatologists who have looked again at the possibility of major climate change in and around the Atlantic Ocean, a persistent puzzle to researchers, now say there is an almost 50% chance that a key area of the North Atlantic could cool suddenly and rapidly, within the space of a decade, before the end of this century.
That is a much starker prospect than even the worst-case scientific scenario proposed so far, which does not see the Atlantic ocean current shutdown happening for several hundred years at least.
A scenario even more drastic (but fortunately fictional) was the subject of the 2004 US movie The Day After Tomorrow, which portrayed the disruption of the North Atlantic’s circulation leading to global cooling and a new Ice Age.
To evaluate the risk of extreme climate change, researchers from the Environnements et Paléoenvironnements Océaniques et Continentaux laboratory (CNRS/University of Bordeaux, France), and the University of Southamptondeveloped an algorithm to analyse the 40 climate models considered by the Fifth Assessment Report.
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Don’t worry…
The original thermohaline circulation catastrophe beast.
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Is that your prediction?
“Climatologists … say there is an almost 50% chance that a key area of the North Atlantic could cool suddenly and rapidly” So that means there is also a 50% chance that it won’t happen. In other words they have no clue what will happen.
Bingo! GIve that man a see-gar.
There you go! You can only get a grant if you haven’t already said what will happen! That’s why all the models are out to lunch. If they get one to work they all have to pack up their crayons and go get real jobs.
“’Climatologists … say there is an almost 50% chance that a key area of the North Atlantic could cool suddenly and rapidly’ . . . In other words they have no clue what will happen.”
Technically, they only say that in an imaginary computer-simulated climate, there is a 50% chance of virtual cooling in a “key area” of a virtual North Atlantic, in a virtual future. How these probabilities translate to the real world is . . ., well it’s . . . .come to think of it there’s nothing at all meaningful in the 50% number.
I just knew before reading that it was those dumbos at the Uni of Southampton again. One day they’ll manage to read this post from Richard Seager….
http://ocp.ldeo.columbia.edu/res/div/ocp/gs/
“A few times a year the British media of all stripes goes into a tizzy of panic when one climate scientist or another states that there is a possibility that the North Atlantic ocean circulation, of which the Gulf Stream is a major part, will slow down in coming years or even stop. Whether the scientists statements are measured or inflammatory the media invariably warns that this will plunge Britain and Europe into a new ice age, pictures of the icy shores of Labrador are shown, created film of English Channel ferries making their way through sea ice are broadcast… And so the circus continues year after year….
The Gulf Stream-European climate myth
The panic is based on a long held belief of the British, other Europeans, Americans and, indeed, much of the world’s population that the northward heat transport by the Gulf Stream is the reason why western Europe enjoys a mild climate, much milder than, say, that of eastern North America. This idea was actually originated by an American military man, Matthew Fontaine Maury, in the mid nineteenth century and has stuck since despite the absence of proof.
We now know this is a myth, the climatological equivalent of an urban legend. In a detailed study published in the Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society in 2002, we demonstrated the limited role that ocean heat transport plays in determining regional climates around the Atlantic Ocean….”
“A few times a year the British media of all stripes goes into a tizzy of panic when one climate scientist or another states that there is a possibility that the North Atlantic ocean circulation, of which the Gulf Stream is a major part, will slow down in coming years or even stop.”
Yes. Stop.
I sense a serious fear in the pro-AGW crowd that they now feel they need to explain a dramatic cooling event and still be able to blame it on CO2. Maybe they know they are wrong and things are about to get very cold?
+1
“For thousands of years, parts of northwest Europe have enjoyed a climate about 5C warmer than many other regions on the same latitude. But new scientific analysis suggests that that could change much sooner and much faster than thought possible.”
For thousands of years? Perhaps about 10k years when we entered the current inter-glacial. So, if this inter-glacial ends then this is human induced while all the previous 20 or so inter-glacials ended naturally?
This study reminds me of the old proverb about a dog returning to taste its own vomit: The climate hypesters seem to have a menu of scary stories they revisit again and again over time. Dangerous warming, coral reef die off, sea level rise, polar bear extinction, Droughts, Floods, storms, blizzards, no winter, heavy winter, intense rains, light rains, more pack ice, less pack ice; all are topics the climate hypesters have profited from by writing scary faux studies. It is long past time to find a way to ridicule and satirize these climate clowns.
“…researchers, now say there is an almost 50% chance that a key area of the North Atlantic could cool suddenly and rapidly, within the space of a decade, before the end of this century.”
“All probabilities are 50/50 – either a thing will happen or it won’t.”
Mark Twain
The whole ‘thermohaline circulation’ idea is rather shaky. Ocean currents are driven by the temperature difference between the tropics and the polar regions. Salt has very little to do with it, or rather, any gradient in saltiness is the result of the circulation, not its cause.
I thought the rotation of the earth was the elephant in the room. No?
I’m worried. There’s ‘almost a 50% chance’ that something that may or may not be bad ‘could’ happen 80 years from now.
But it’s worse than they thought ! .. / sarc/ .. it’s always worse than they thought. I should have been keeping a list. I don’t know how we are still alive !
If I have time tonight maybe I’ll look more carefully at this “study” but at first glance, and particularly reading through pages 5-6, it looks like these guys just mined the ensemble model results to find a metric that was correlated with rapid cooling, found one (lower SS stratification), limited the ensemble to weed out models whose present-day SS stratification was higher than observed, and like magic, found that the remaining models were more likely to predict rapid cooling than the ensemble as a whole.
In other words, they just adopted a procedure that was guaranteed to produce the results they wanted.
The AMO is patient, but it will bury you.
From the scientists that gave us man made globull warming. Science has a long way to go before I believe any of their studies. Good luck stopping world wide circulation on the bottom of the ocean.