By P Gosselin
By Fritz Vahrenholt und Frank Bosse
A look back at an article about the imminent “tipping point” of the Atlantic overturning circulation:
At the end of July 2023 we had reported on an essay that thought to have identified the “tipping point” of the Atlantic overturning circulation (AMOC): Supposedly (most likely) it will be already in 2057. The author stirred up a lot of dust, we described it. Our summary at the time:
DD23 is a statistical exercise, very remote from any evidence of physical significance to AMOC itself. The conclusions therein are not supported by the content of the paper.”
In the meantime (mid-September 2023), another unreviewed (preprint) paper appeared and finds very similar things. It uses several sea surface temperature (SST) data series and another AMOC “fingerprint,” a dipole that avoids including warming itself in the result of the AMOC decrease it is looking for.
And lo and behold, it comes to quite different conclusions. Depending on which series one uses – especially in the early years up to about 1950, they are very patchy in direct observation and what is missing is filled in by various “infill methods” which have a strong impact on the statistics as they underlie the paper in question – one comes to completely divergent results. For example, the AMOC “collapse” is delayed by nearly a hundred years if one uses the same “fingerprint”, only a different SST series (Instead of HadISST1 ERSSTv5).
The other “fingerprint”, also based on SST, pushes the “collapse” determined by the methods in the paper to between 2100 to the year 3300 and beyond! At the end, the authors, who interestingly include Niklas Boers of the Potsdam Institute (PIK), who is probably concerned about the scientific reputation of the institution, write:
We emphasize that these uncertainties, originating from underlying modelling or mechanistic assumptions as well as from the employed empirical data, need to be taken into account and propagated thoroughly before attempting to estimate a future tipping time of any potential Earth system tipping element.”
ANY estimate of the timing of a “tipping point” must take the uncertainties into account, which are so substantial that they are all unsound when made.
Bet you won’t read that in the media? They had their hands full, with the active assistance of Prof. Rahmstorf, also from the PIK, to propagate the near end of the AMOC.
For this, attentive readers has this blog.
Yet another case where the figures plugged into a model yield the result the investigator thinks are “right”. As if it means anything in the real world?
No matter what the result, they hate humanity.
And we thank you for your diligence.
If I was one of the directors of Pik I would be incredibly concerned about the scientific reputation of the institution as well as it’s currently in the gutter and circling the drain.
If you were you’d have parted company with it in 2010
“”But one must say clearly that we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy … One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy any more.”” —Ottmar Edenhofer, Co-chair of IPCC WG III, New American, Nov. 19, 2010
Have any other IPCC honchos ever said anything like that? No doubt they all think similarly, but do they dare say it?
Ottmar Edenhofer is not exactly poverty stricken. I’m wondering how much of his wealth he has redistributed.
Or is he like most socialists, and it’s only other people’s wealth that he wants “redistributed”.
Anyone trying to predict 3D behavior based only on surface measurements is engaged in a fool’s errand.
It’s a neat demonstration of how to select statistical methods and assumptions to support your vision of the future, with 95% confidence, regardless of any underlying physical mechanisms. Crafty.
95% confidence, yuh, right- like how in dictatorships, when they have an “election”- the dictator always gets 99% of the vote
Well, to be fair, fixing it at 99% is fairly easy to do. What takes the time and effort is getting the fix in to just over 50-60% in just over half the areas so, to the casual observer, it looks legit.
Really sophisticated dictatorships make it 51%
These days even a light breeze gets a name and causes climate carnage – unless you happen to be drying your laundry.
The overhyped the hyperbole
“….infill methods….” is new to me as was “…..masked assembly….” on another statistical but totally unrelated subject. Fill in the blanks? If I ever got to review such a paper I would ask if they had ever been on an oceanographic vessel that actually measured these phenomena. Doesn’t even have to be on the AMOC, but also requires significant older homework. “Formulae for toy models” ?? “AMOC Fingerprints–For each of the four employed SST datasets we compute three different SST-based fingerprints of the AMOC. First, the index introduced by DD, which is obtained by averaging SST over the SPG region and then subtracting twice the global mean SSTs….” Some of these currents are actually like (rather large sloppy) “fingers.” From “Uncertainties too large to predict tipping times of major Earth system components” Older physical oceanographers “turning in their graves?”
Infill….
Make it up; extrapolate etc
fill it in 🙂
infill sounds more sciency
haha, good things come to those who wait…
To do with: Me and my ravings about muddy water in the ocean, why Arctic ice is melting, why oceans (seem to be getting) hot and not very least, how Atlantic hurricanes form, where they form and where they subsequently go…
A long time ago I bookmarked this (its 5 yrs old now)
To do with seaweed – BBC
Then just a few days ago, Wunderground had one of their little 30second videos about the exact same stuff.
Attached is a screenshot from the video
In this video they were concerned about its nutrient content = that it had a lot of Nitrogen and Phosphorus in it #
Just look where it goes, crossing the Atlantic = the exact same path hurricanes follow.
And it starts, varying across the year, around where dust off the Sahara gets into the water (Iron compounds = The Liebig Limiter in the water environment)
Also where immense amounts of ‘human waste/excrement’ gets into the water from the burgeoning population of Nigeria, such stuff being very strong in Nitrogen and Phosphorus while Nigeria being infamous for its near total lack of sanitation infrastructure
Ads all that lovely brown coloured weed will absorb immense amounts of sunlight, it will be magnetic for hurricanes, it will drive ‘ocean thermometers’ off their scales and when it’s crossed the pond, will continue along the route of the Trade Winds, swing North and East along the line of the Conveyor, soak up more heat and ultimately deposit that warmth under the ice of Arctica. Which will melt.
Hooda thunk, you can fix a vast chunk of Climate Change just by installing some functioning toilets and a sewage system in Nigeria (maybe a lot of West Africa too)
on a related note, some have noticed that eutrophication of coastal waters increases emission of trace gas.
Eutrophication has been well known since 1970s when inland lakes became like green slime sludge. Countries with resources to do so, and a will for genuine environmental protection, have upgraded water treatment plants and sewage infrastructure. It’s not fashionable but it’s highly effective and a common sense thing to do. Rich places now have beautiful clean waters. In Chicago Illinois swimming in the river is anticipated to be authorized within a decade from now. Unthinkable not long ago.
Extremely unfashionable and minimally funded agencies now endeavor to minimize soil erosion and the associated excess (non point) nutrient loadings. This has multiple co-benefits for hydrologies and climate stability, which climate pundits strongly resist. They fear it undermines their efforts for trace gas programs, and borrows political capital. If such efforts can be linked to trace gases they may be inclined to take interest because it fits into their view of things. https://eartharxiv.org/repository/view/6151/
Along time ago… back in the early70’s I had the idea that the fastest way to clean up rivers was to have cities that drew their drinking water from a river had to have their sewage plant’s discharge to be up stream of the drinking water intake….polluted river problem solved very rapidly
Great minds and all that
I had the exact same idea but in the 90s
Force major cities to put sewage outflow upstream and fresh water intake downstream.
Focuses the mind
G’Day Gilbert,
“…up stream of the drinking water intake…”
The idea was expressed in the book “Who’s That Lady In The President’s Bed”, by B. K. Ripley, 1972, Dodd, Mead and Company NY.
(If anyone wants some ideas on how to reform the US Government, I strongly recommend this book, if you can find a copy. I misplaced my original paperback [from the 70’s] and it cost about $30 to get a secondhand hardcover copy. Along with several Heinlein books, it’s one I that re-read about every three years.)
Just FYI… anytime you have trouble finding older books try Thriftbooks. They get their stock from the nonprofit Goodwill stores.
In every river, the water intake of every town that gets its water from the river is downstream of the city that is upstream. Only the first city on the river avoids that.
You know what triggers me, JCM? The idea that government has any right to “authorize” me to swim or not swim in a river. The idea that I need a nanny state to order me around for my own good. I’d rather get sick learning that my judgment was poor than live out my life waiting for instructions on how to wipe my arse.
“Depending on which series one uses – especially in the early years up to about 1950, they are very patchy in direct observation and what is missing is filled in by various “infill methods” which have a strong impact on the statistics as they underlie the paper in question – one comes to completely divergent results”
I’m sure there may be some place where “infill methods” may be appropriate but I put no stock in a study that uses infills. I would rather be informed that we don’t have data for those areas. In my town there is a canyon on the east side. Especially in winter it is really cold there. I grew up on the south side of town it is much warmer there. They are about three miles apart if that.
I could see where a substantially cooler climate in the Northern hemisphere could stifle or mitigate a warm current from going far to the North but warmer climate?
It seems to me that if CO2 is gonig to cause the Earth to warm it will be the farther North and South lattitudes that will get warmer. In fact, currents arising in the more equatorial regions would seem to go furher North or South, no?
Confession: I used no SST data to arrive at my theory.
The equator currently rotates around the planetary axis with a velocity of 1670 kph. When that daily rotation slows down, AMOC may be reduced. Due to longer nights, more high latitude water will sink in the high latitudes, somewhat countering the effect of the slower rotation.
Don’t worry, Potsdam is looking into it.
/s?
Either Mother Nature is negotiating tipping points every day or she never encounters them because there is no such thing in her vocabulary. Things that may seem similar to humans, much like twins, may be subjected to expert analysis and so determined as identical, but Mother Nature is little concerned with what we may understand as a likeness, a pattern, a cycle. Her bottom line is that nothing can ever occur twice since at least one thing will always be different than before (even if that is just the time).
Weather up close and personal proves Mother’s ability to us when you walk through rain and sun and thunder and lightning all in almost the same moment. Or what of the moments when temperature around us changes suddenly are they predictable within an understandable resolution – no they are not although we may attempt to explain them in hindsight.
Nothing is certain until weather happens, and whether stormy or calm the only thing we know for certain Is Mother will change it when she pleases.
What we seem to forget is that our imaginary climate is an attempt to splice together these random readings we take as we once did manually with the isobars. We may roughly get stuff right but resolution is low and it’ll take a massive technological achievement to invent a new kind of computer which can operate at speeds we have no way of reaching right now.
Those ‘computers’ will need some very sharp and highly intelligent programmers to deal with the range of options, the detail, the speed, and the complexity, and so that eliminates Apple, Microsoft, and so on and so forth, straight away. We will need to reappraise randomness and infinity and how we can incorporate them in what our new technology is capable of – in short we need to do what is impossible with our technology right now.
It also eliminates most of academia in its current state since none of this stuff can be taught or nurtured in a ‘woke’ environment and so it is not penetrating grey matter at this time although many of us are concerned that it is more precious than teaching stuff about CAGW, wind, solar, EVs, or other highly questionnable areas of learning. We have nuclear energy and so why are we not using it ti bring peace and reconciliation to planet Earth?
We need to stop making mistakes before we accidentally or deliberately walk into another world war. There is so much more positive stuff we can do than wreck our social and economic structures for a prize that isn’t even on offer as we are doing right now. We need to Stop Being Stupid.
Important discussion. But how can we discuss these things when there are no references.
Sorry. My fault
For this, attentive readers
hashave this blog.Negative North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) conditions cause slowing of the overturning, which rules out rising CO2 forcing as that is expected to increase positive NAO conditions. I would expect the overturning to speed up again after this short centennial solar minimum, when stronger solar wind states drive more positive NAO regimes.
Not quite sure what you mean with solar influence on the NAO:
See the post 1995 negative NAO?