A claim that a “The Day After Tomorrow” style global warming driven ice age is imminent – but we’ve been looking at the wrong ocean.
New Research Sparks Concerns That Ocean Circulation Will Collapse
Scientists have long feared that warming could cause a breakdown of ocean circulation in the North Atlantic. But new research finds the real risk lies in Antarctica’s waters, where melting could disrupt currents in the next few decades, with profound impacts on global climate.
BY FRED PEARCE • APRIL 18, 2023
It is being hailed as a sea change in scientific understanding of the global ocean circulation system and how it will respond as the world heats up. A doomsday scenario involving the collapse of the circulation — previously portrayed in both peer-reviewed research and the climate disaster movie The Day After Tomorrow — came a lot closer in the last month. But rather than playing out in the far North Atlantic, as previously assumed, it now seems much more likely at the opposite end of the planet.
A new analysis by Australian and American researchers, using new and more detailed modeling of the oceans, predicts that the long-feared turn-off of the circulation will likely occur in the Southern Ocean, as billions of tons of ice melt on the land mass of Antarctica. And rather than being more than a century away, as models predict for the North Atlantic, it could happen within the next three decades.
Leading ocean and climate researchers not involved in the study who were contacted for comment praised the findings. “This is a really important paper,” says Stefan Rahmstorf, an oceanographer and head of earth system analysis at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. “I think the method and model are convincing.”
…
Read more: https://e360.yale.edu/features/climate-change-ocean-circulation-collapse-antarctica
The abstract of the paper;
Abyssal ocean overturning slowdown and warming driven by Antarctic meltwater
Qian Li 1, Matthew H England 2, Andrew McC Hogg 3, Stephen R Rintoul 4 5, Adele K Morrison 6
The abyssal ocean circulation is a key component of the global meridional overturning circulation, cycling heat, carbon, oxygen and nutrients throughout the world ocean1,2. The strongest historical trend observed in the abyssal ocean is warming at high southern latitudes2-4, yet it is unclear what processes have driven this warming, and whether this warming is linked to a slowdown in the ocean’s overturning circulation. Furthermore, attributing change to specific drivers is difficult owing to limited measurements, and because coupled climate models exhibit biases in the region5-7. In addition, future change remains uncertain, with the latest coordinated climate model projections not accounting for dynamic ice-sheet melt. Here we use a transient forced high-resolution coupled ocean-sea-ice model to show that under a high-emissions scenario, abyssal warming is set to accelerate over the next 30 years. We find that meltwater input around Antarctica drives a contraction of Antarctic Bottom Water (AABW), opening a pathway that allows warm Circumpolar Deep Water greater access to the continental shelf. The reduction in AABW formation results in warming and ageing of the abyssal ocean, consistent with recent measurements. In contrast, projected wind and thermal forcing has little impact on the properties, age and volume of AABW. These results highlight the critical importance of Antarctic meltwater in setting the abyssal ocean overturning, with implications for global ocean biogeochemistry and climate that could last for centuries.
Read more: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36991191/
Unless you are the kind of person who has a poster of Greta in your bedroom, global warming isn’t actually that scary. For most people, global warming would mean more BBQ weather, more time swimming in the pool, long summer walks.
But an abrupt return to ice age conditions would be truly scary and devastating – which is why “The Day After Tomorrow” was such a successful film. And it actually happened once, though circumstances were very different – today we don’t have a gigantic glacial lake caused by melting of the North American Ice Sheet, which is poised to collapse into the landlocked Arctic ocean, like we did last time.
Nevertheless the ice age claim is a sliver more plausible than most of the tipping point nonsense climate scientists push. Of course for any of this to happen, the Antarctic would need to actually warm. Robust warming has not exactly been a feature of the last century of Antarctic climate observations.
One benefit of making such predictions is that if global temperatures take a dive, scientists have it covered with an each way bet on the future trajectory of the global climate – though I’m not suggesting this is the motivation for such predictions.
Whatever happens, it will still all be our fault of course.
Matthew England and models. 😉
Matt just needs to ride this story to retirement.
Whatever happens, we know that we will have to pay large sums of money for no benefit….
Sooo… We don’t understand what’s happening, but feel the fear anyway .. and give us more funding
Crying wolf yet again nobody believes you anymore bugger off
I wish I could agree that “nobody believes you anymore,” but the sorry fact is that almost everybody believes there is a climate “crisis”, all coming from “emissions” of CO2 in the face of the other notable fact that there is no evidence that CO2 emissions affect the climate in any measurable way whatsoever.
“it could happen within the next three decades. “
Bugger !!
that means I’ll miss it,
Have to continue relying on Hollywood for all my scientific facts.
“under a high-emissions scenario”
That would be another case of RCP8.5 then. Even the ultra-alarmist BBC has discounted the plausibility of that scenario.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-51281986
Even IPCC told, the RCP8.5 isn’t to use for political decisions.
If it’s not to be used for political decisions, and isn’t useful for scientific endeavors, why is it used at all? The reality is, the IPCC is not telling the truth (I’m Jack’s total lack of surprise), politicians the world over will use the RPC8.5 scenarios to make their decisions and justify them while they flood their populations with fear based propaganda to get them to enthusiastically embrace policies that will impoverish the, perhaps fatally (i.e. starvation or exposure).
None of this is a new concept.
Ben Davidson of Suspicious0bservers has covered the effects of this phenomenon for years.
Nor is it driven by gaseous plant food, rather it is an artefact of solar electric current,
plasma streams, and the travelling energy waves from the polar aurora to the equator.
“Mainstream” scientist know f-all about any of this – because money!
Well it continues to be cold here in Central England UK. If April doesn’t warm up soon, it will go into the record books as the coldest ever. Next week is looking like a continuation of lower temps with 10 deg. C suggested as the high for next Wednesday.
That mysterious CO2 induced climate change, just does not know which direction to take us. Thankfully, the Alarmists have it covered either way, run away heat that’s CO2 Climate Change, run away cold that’s CO2 Climate Change too.
We would not want them to lose any credibility would we?
I’ve noticed that the trees are late budding this year. But I do live a 1000ft up.
You still park your car on the surface, though, right?
Actually, it’s parked next to Musk’s Tesla Roadster 😀
The BoM keeps telling me it’s getting warmer and yet I don’t see it, and I don’t feel it and neither do my plants. Some are many weeks behind normal time of maturity due to yet another very late start. Tomatoes this year were basically non existent and have been for several years.
“Well it continues to be cold here in Central England UK. If April doesn’t warm up soon, it will go into the record books as the coldest ever. Next week is looking like a continuation of lower temps with 10 deg. C suggested as the high for next Wednesday.”
Spring is a little cool here in the USA, too. I don’t think my part of the US is near to setting a record yet, though. Northern parts of the US are still getting lots of cold air and ice and snow.
Record snowfall in Utah?
We are in an interglacial and due to enter a new ice age sometime in the next 50,000 years.
Could be the day after tomorrow 🙂
Due for the next glacial period! An ice age is the 12 million years of glacial/interglacial we are 2 million years into now.
And interglacial periods are usually about 10000-12000 years, which means we are due in the next 2000 years. The linear decrease in the peak temperatures of the warm periods from the Holocene Optimum to the Modern Period shows we are on a downward trend with each peak cooler than the last. We just do not know when this pattern will crash into a glacial period.
We had frost here in West Virginia last night and the normally robust ivy has not put out new leaves yet. Yes, an expended cool Spring.
What the warmists do not understand is that warming does not make the planet hot. It only means slightly warmer summers, slightly shorter winters, a longer growing season, and even more rain for that growing season. The contention that warming would disrupt our weather patterns is purely alarmist cow droppings.
We have a frost warning here tonight at my Indiana home about 30 miles NNE of Indianapolis and I’m at 930 ft ASL. Almost all the trees have leaves now and the rest are budding.
The only good thing about this cold snap is that it will reduce the nuisance bug population.
Maybe you should check some facts before making comments like that ?
The oft-quoted “Central England Temperature” is 8.3 degrees up to the 17th April, 0.5 degrees warmer than the 1961-90 reference period. It is, however, 0.5 degrees colder than the 1991-2020 average.
If it fails to warm up (as seems likely from the next week’s forecast), then it is on course to be the coldest April since……2021. (6.43 degrees)
1/2 degree!!! Statistical noise…
Exactly – hardly “coldest ever”.
Absolutely…
I went for a minor explore around my new patch (North Cambs/South Norfolk) last Saturday (15th) afternoon and came upon a farmer type wrestling with some 600kg sacks of fertiliser (4 at a time – I bet he has *that* many Weetabix for brekkie [UK-centric joke]. A True Hero)
I just had to have a craic
Initially what sort of fertiliser? – it was 27-0-0+9S ##
Just Wot?! says I – spreading Sulphur in the spring-time? This is insane.
Yes he says. Never used to need the stuff at all apart from for Oil-Seed (Canola. We have to put on everything now.
He continues: We’re **hoping** to plant sugar-beet into this field but it’s been so cold and wet this last month it’s gonna be a push.
and just look at that 10 day forecast…. you lose the will.
## NB a mix of Nitrogen and Sulphur – not CO2. Me, him and two great big fugg-off tractors did enough of that
😀
I use a sulphur fungicide on my citrus trees, I wonder why the farmer needed all that sulphur? Too cold and wet?
Probably used to get airborne sulphur from the coal-fired power plants.
SO2.
Eric… When I lived in Washington State… the orchard growers would spray lime and sulfur in the spring to control insects in the orchards.
The issue is that further “climate change” is not needed to convert the Brits to a hysterical level of decarbondioxideisation. They are nearly all true believers in the power of CO2 and methane and the Government and the people are near fully supporting a dismantlement of British industry already. Gaia would be wasting its time in the UK. It needs to do more work in the US where temperatures have stubbornly refused to climb as revealed by NOAA’s Climate Reference Network leaving far too many people unconverted to the faith. Look for a warm summer as Gaia turns its eye on us.
Just been watching a podcast from David Dilley. If he is correct, a global cooling phase is beginning, not due to CO2, but a 230 year cycle.
https://youtu.be/D_B10L9bV18
Our planet Earth is now in the fifth Ice Age, the oldest being the Huronian, just over 2 billion years ago. We are now in the Quaternary Ice Age (has other names also), which has been on-going for more than 2 million years. The Ice Age has periods of Glacial Advance and Glacial Retreat. We are currently in a period of Glacial Retreat, and have been for at least 12 thousand years, but the next Glacial Advance event cannot be far off. Antarctic ice melting means the floating ice shelfs around Antarctica melt, but Antarctica itself is accumulating ice. What pushes Earth into a Glacial Advance period, or rescues us with a Glacial Retreat period? Theories are readily available, pick one. Whatever it is the Global Warming meme will come to an end. Wait for it.
“What pushes Earth into a Glacial Advance period, or rescues us with a Glacial Retreat period? Theories are readily available, pick one.”
I think Rick Will is on to something. 🙂
“Whatever it is the Global Warming meme will come to an end. Wait for it.”
‘Global Warming’ has already ended. It’s been replaced by ‘Climate Change”. Henceforth, ALL bad weather events are blamed on CO2 emissions. Nothing can solve this except giving total control of everything to global governance.
That is the end game for the climate change cultists driven by the global elites who continue to fund the con job of CO2 being a bad thing. They continue to pay the propagandists(climate scientists and other nefarious types) to push their dribble to the masses. So far, I’m content to look for words in their pronouncements like “modeling”, “peer review”, etc. to clue me in to the direction of whatever they are pushing. Works for me.
Ron Long: “What pushes Earth into a Glacial Advance period, or rescues us with a Glacial Retreat period? Theories are readily available, pick one. Whatever it is the Global Warming meme will come to an end. Wait for it.”
For the global warming meme to come to an end, the thirty-year running average of global mean temperature must turn down and then stay down continuously for another thirty to fifty years.
Because the global warming meme is a creature of socio-economic politics, it has a life of its own and will last well beyond the life times of most of the people who read this blog.
Suppose for example the thirty-year running average of GMT turns down in the year 2070 and stays down until the year 2100.
Mainstream climate scientists writing papers in the year 2085 would be claiming that the reason the earth had been cooling for fifteen years was because the earth had actually been warming for more than a hundred years.
Yes. Even a few hundred years high quality data is not enough to confirm or deny.
1970s Ice scare
1990s World has a fever scare
Mixed with killer bees, fire ants, AIDS, SARS, Ebola and COVID.
I argued global warming once with someone who asked who Thomas Malthus was. That was a few years ago now – and with news cycles moving so fast she might feel sheepish. Or maybe she’s in the comment section of someone’s disaster-promoting webpage hoping I feel sheepish because I’ve waited too long to prepare for the Martian invasion. I suppose “they” could get sick of red rock caves, get on their flying space motorcycles that look like fossil remains and invade London, New York City and Tokyo through a teleporter/tornado looking thing in the stratosphere. I just hope the checks keep cashing.
Oh no! Will it help if I pay a bit more tax?
From the article: “Leading ocean and climate researchers not involved in the study who were contacted for comment praised the findings. “This is a really important paper,” says Stefan Rahmstorf,”
This caused me to laugh out loud.
stefan rahmstorf – the PT Barnum of climate science
There are so many “scientists” and politicians vying for the position of being the “PT Barnum” of “climate science”. Snake oil salesman each and every one of them.
I was going to say if Stefan Rahmstorf endorses it you know its rubbish but yours is better.
Next thing we know, Michael Mann will be telling us how important this paper is.
my little part of aus in west wimmera Vic has been running at times 2c lower avg for the last yr, heat and cold- and while it was a lovely wet yr between la nina and the volcano growing the usual veg etc has been fiddly
colders more concerning for me, cheap to run a small fan in summer- a lot more expensive to keep warm
Perhaps a pre-emptive tax hike is being contemplated. A Statue of Liberty preservation fund?
Total Cost of the Statue and Pedestal: $650,000.That was in 1885 dollars – it’s tens of millions in todays dollars.
It feels funny to think about money in pre-COVID terms. I used to think “tens of millions” was a big project.
“A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon it begins to add up to real money.”
— Senator Everett Dirksen
The model uses RCP8.5. Not much more to say.
If Rahmsdorf praises that paper it can’t be a good one. He prefers AMOC slow down, but cooling because of warming is his obsession.
Someone should ask him if it cools down because it warmed up, will it then warm up because it cooled down?🐸
I’ve never read a good explanation for the warm/cold evidence, yet evidence for both historical conditions exists.
No problem! We can just burn the massive pile of climate change dooms day “scientific” papers to keep warm. After pumping them out for more than 30 years there is probably enough to go around.
ROFL 🙂
That should raise the temperature about 97%.
Either that or use it for toilet paper, that all they are good for…. and paper mache masks and bird sculptures… and paper airplanes.
According to Bray and Eddy, the earth is still thawing out from the Little Ice Age.
Nobody – except the Scots – wears kilts in cold weather.
You’d be surprised. Wrapping about 9 yards of woolen cloth about your nether regions is really warm.
Well, it didn’t help keep Bill Millin who was Lord Lovat’s “mad piper” warm. On Sword Beach when he jumped off the ramp of a LCI into water up to his arm pits with his kilt floating up around him.
The shock of the cold water helped in a way though. It wiped away the last vestiges of sea sickness and made him more situationally aware after seeing the man in front of him get his brains blown out.
Not that situational awareness would do him much good since Lovat ordered him to march up and down the beach that was under fire playing Highland Laddie and The Road to the Isles, piping the rest of Lovat’s Commandos ashore.
The Story of Bill Millin, Lord Lovat’s Mad Piper of Sword Beach (warfarehistorynetwork.com)
The graph shows that it’s actually cooling down over time. The current warming should probably peak about 150 yrs from now, but at only a slightly warmer temp than now. Hopefully I am wrong and the world gets back to Roman or even Minoan Era levels – then we can all wear kilts.
Correct, and I didn’t even add in the ongoing Milankovitch cooling trend line. Once the Eddy cycle peaks (in about 200 years), things will change. Don’t sell your snow shovel.
Mine broke this year from all the snow! It was one of those expensive back-saver ones with the bent handle made of steel – it developed a kink in the curvature and after that it just bent up on the next hard push.
Forced me to get off my ass to repair the carburetor on my snowblower after 4 years finally.
Models. Oceans. OK.
Held, et al, 2019.Structure and Performance of GFDL’s CM4.0 Climate Model
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2019MS001829
Search this open access paper for “polynya” (a polynya is an area of open ocean surface, no ice.) The no-human-forcing preindustrial control runs for this model showed some pretty wild excursions. See Figures 2 and 3 and the surrounding text.
So there. Can human “forcings” from GHGs be applied using ocean models with any diagnostic or predictive authority in the result?
I say obviously not.
“… a lack of historical warming before 1990 and too rapid warming thereafter due to high climate sensitivity and strong aerosol forcing, in contrast to the observational record.”
In other words, they’re still using made-up aerosols and other tricks to hide the fact that the model runs way too hot, with an unrealistically high ECS. Instead of fixing the model, they choose to continue to lie to us.
“global warming driven ice age”
A touch of the Holdrens, no less.
“But new research finds the real risk lies in…” [add latest scare here]
And so it goes. Did you know, for example, that driving on the left is stopping New Zealand reaching Net Zero?
“Is driving on the left stopping New Zealand reaching its climate goals?
cars come overwhelmingly from Japan
Japan’s auto industry has massively stumbled on EVs
just 2% of all new car sales in Japan were fully electric in the past year, about 10 times smaller than the rate in Europe and China, where cheaper electric cars are exploding in popularity.
unfortunately for New Zealand, folks in China and Europe drive on the right.”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/commentisfree/2023/apr/14/is-driving-on-the-left-stopping-new-zealand-reaching-its-climate-goals
In 2000 the end of snow was predicted. In 2023 there are record snowpacks.
‘…electric cars are exploding in popularity.’
Yes, so I’ve heard.
Nothing to do with government subsidies, I suppose?
“exploding” Some people got it.
“2%”
In their Jan 2022 Commentary the IEA noted that EV sales market share had been below 1% in Japan “over the last three years”
So now, looking on the bright side, there’s been a 100% increase! 🙂
Shows the level of climate expert journalist they hire at the Guardian – all my highly efficient cars have been Japanese brands and my current 2 were actually made in Japan – Hiroshima, no less – and the steering wheel is on the left and I drive on the right.
And my highly efficient 4-bangers have done more for the environment than any electric car ever will… unless they start powering them with nuclear batteries.
Day after Tomorrow is well on its way.
All you have to do is re-imagine the film with sand instead of snow – it’s here already and has been for some time. And Flash Flooding with liquid water instead ice-sheets/glaciers.
Another of the truly heart-rending wrongs of climate science went past recently – did anyone see or even care?
It seems that Lake Tulare is trying to refill itself
Acording to everybody – such an event is a Hideously True Portension of GlobalClimateWarmingChange. .
Every effort must be made forthwith to rescue stuck cars, flooded streets and pump the lake back dry again. sigh
Wrong.
Lake Tulare’s flood is The Very Best Thing that could happen to California and *everything* should be done to make sure it *never* dries out again.
Keep the lake and……
The Walking Dead version of science again
“It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” – Yogi Berra
One wonders when the melting of the great Antarctic ice sheet is to begin. Average coastal temperature of the continent is about -10F and average interior temperature is about -60F.
If you can only grow ice after precipitation, then warm-time melting only has to exceed cold-time freezing.
Average temperature and the duration of warm/cold times doesn’t control growth/decline.
Extreme phony thought experiment: 364.9 days of -100C plus 2 hours of +25C per year would result in lost ice (gained water) if precipitation only happened at +25C.
Clowns used RCP/SSP 8.5 of course, and simply modeled with no physical explanation for what is suddenly going to melt all that land-bound ice.
If warming will cause glaciation, doesn’t that make it self-correcting?
Warming from -40C tp -39C is going to cause mass melting???
Linear curve fit.
What’s a state change?
IMO, the best scene in that movie was when the reporter in LA got taken out by debris from a tornado.
Seems counterintuitive: Heat melts Antarctic, Antarctic land ice melts, **oceans stop circulating cold polar water along the ocean floor toward equator**, cold freezes the Antarctic, land and sea ice overtake Southern hemisphere?
I get stuck where pouring cold water from melting Antarctic land ice around Antarctica’s continental shelf stops hot water rising at the equator from sliding over the top of it.
Yet if one believes there were ice ages, it had to have happened somehow. Is there a good link describing the theoretical steps in that process?
Yawn
The Day After Tomorrow (2004)
From IMDB: “There, they discover that it has been raining non-stop for the past three days, and after a series of weather-related disasters begin to occur all over the world, everybody realizes the world is about to enter a new Ice Age and the world population begins trying to evacuate to the warmer climates of the south. ”
Wait a minute: “the world is about to enter a new Ice Age and the world population begins trying to evacuate to the warmer climates of the south. ”
Umm: “the warmer climates of the south.”
One more time: “warmer … south.”
Hollywood does not understand hemispheres are on opposite sides of the ball? I suppose I’m projecting criticism for an underpaid author onto a region of SW USA, but you get it. No need to think too hard about “everybody realizes“.
Is there a tax that can cool the volcanoes under Antarctica ?
It has gotten to the point where we need a rule, if your study relies on models more than say ten percent you can not be funded.
“global warming driven ice age”
Hmm…. so, by following this “science”, can I put an icecube tray filled with water into the oven, set it to warm, and come back in a few hours and find ice?!
Only if your wife is into playing pranks on you.
Sorry Fred – you lost me at the word Rahmstorf
” Here we use a transient forced high-resolution coupled ocean-sea-ice model to ”show”
that under a high-emissions scenario, abyssal warming is set to accelerate over the next 30 years.”
Show?? (allow or cause (something) to be visible?) Yeah, nah. You are pretending to show. You are showing jack sh*t.
Yeah, they are just making unsubstantiated climate change assertions, like all climate alarmists do. It’s all they have, due to the lack of any evidence that CO2 is anything other than a benign gas, essential for life on Earth, So the climate alarmists make up scary climate change science fiction stories as a substitute for having no evidence.