Gulf Stream and Europe's Climate

[philh 0]

It is commonly believed that the gulf stream is responnsible for the mild climate of Western Europe.
However I have found a paper debunking this claim . read here:

http://www.americanscientist.org/template/AssetDetail/assetid/51963?fulltext=true&print=yes

IS anyone on these forums familair with the climate science? IS Seager's view accepted of challegened? If it has been challenged in peer reviewed papers can anyone provide a reference?

[azdiver 0]

Quote

It is commonly believed that the gulf stream is responnsible for the mild climate of Western Europe.
However I have found a paper debunking this claim . read here:



IS anyone on these forums familair with the climate science? IS Seager's view accepted of challegened? If it has been challenged in peer reviewed papers can anyone provide a reference?[/replyhttp://www.americanscientist.org/template/AssetDetail/assetid/51963?fulltext=true&print=yes

very informative more evidence to combat gw kooks

light travels faster than sound, that's why some people appear to be bright until you hear them speak

• Quote

[billvon 3,119]

>However I have found a paper debunking this claim.

Actually it supports the ideas that:

1) the Gulf Stream warms the area
2) melting ice may cause a slowdown in circulation
3) the slowdown may result in cooling of the area.

These are some of the potential effects of the sort of rapid climate change we are seeing now. Not the end of the world, but also something that should not be ignored.

On the plus side, the warming caused by greenhouse gas may partly ameliorate that cooling. This may cause a problem for some deniers, though, who think global warming is all a bunch of hooey.

From the article:

"But from what specialists have long known, I would expect that any slowdown in thermohaline circulation would have a noticeable but not catastrophic effect on climate. The temperature difference between Europe and Labrador should remain . . . A slowdown in thermohaline circulation should bring on a cooling tendency of at most a few degrees across the North Atlantic—one that would most likely be overwhelmed by the warming caused by rising concentrations of greenhouse gases."

[philh 0]

"very informative more evidence to combat gw kooks "
Yes and no.
It certainly does combat the idea that Western Europe will be plunged into a new ice age because of global warming. But it does not contradict the idea that the Earth is warming and humans are to blame.

[philh 0]

"On the plus side, the warming caused by greenhouse gas may partly ameliorate that cooling. This may cause a problem for some deniers, though, who think global warming is all a bunch of hooey. "

I think the material here has some interesting implication for the GW debate. What the conclusion as you rightly point out appears to me to imply that there may be some slight decline in European temps as a result of the thermohaline circulation but this will mostly likely offset by rising global tempartures. Implication: European climates are not likely to see dramatic changes as a result of GW. That does not of course mean that GW is not happening and that we have no cause for concern. But it does mean that some of the scare stories we hear in England that we could be plunged into a new icea age as the gulf stream shuts down are probably untrue. Would you agree with that Bilvon? Anyone else care to comment?

[rushmc 23]

Quote

"very informative more evidence to combat gw kooks "
Yes and no.
It certainly does combat the idea that Western Europe will be plunged into a new ice age because of global warming. But it does not contradict the idea that the Earth is warming and humans are to blame.

To have to debunk the highlighted part of this statement, one would first have to surmise that it is true to begin with. There is no evidence to support this position.

"America will never be destroyed from the outside,
if we falter and lose our freedoms,
it will be because we destroyed ourselves."
Abraham Lincoln

[azdiver 0]

Quote

>However I have found a paper debunking this claim.

Actually it supports the ideas that:

1) the Gulf Stream warms the area
2) melting ice may cause a slowdown in circulation
3) the slowdown may result in cooling of the area.

These are some of the potential effects of the sort of rapid climate change we are seeing now. Not the end of the world, but also something that should not be ignored.

On the plus side, the warming caused by greenhouse gas may partly ameliorate that cooling. This may cause a problem for some deniers, though, who think global warming is all a bunch of hooey.

From the article:

"But from what specialists have long known, I would expect that any slowdown in thermohaline circulation would have a noticeable but not catastrophic effect on climate. The temperature difference between Europe and Labrador should remain . . . A slowdown in thermohaline circulation should bring on a cooling tendency of at most a few degrees across the North Atlantic—one that would most likely be overwhelmed by the warming caused by rising concentrations of greenhouse gases."

he does say that there is some effect but if you take this and compare it to what the gw alarmist( al gore for ex) say, any slow down in the thermo flow would have extreme effects causing a ice age, if you watch his movie he says that as a fact. this theory is rebutting that statement which goes to show that science in gw area is still not really anything proven on either side. the link i posted for you in another gw thread addresses that issue. i am not saying the world is not getting warmer or colder just saying the science behind man made global warming is only theory and not factual. science says man is responsible for 4 percent of the green houses gases in the atmosphere nature is responsible for the rest, plankton in the ocean create more green house gases than man.

light travels faster than sound, that's why some people appear to be bright until you hear them speak

[billvon 3,119]

>But it does mean that some of the scare stories we hear in England
>that we could be plunged into a new icea age as the gulf stream
>shuts down are probably untrue.

I would be willing to go further and say MOST of the scare stories you hear are untrue. Global warming is happening, but the result is not likely to be a 30 foot rise in sea level or a sudden new ice age - at least not in the next 100 years or so.

Indeed, I would say that the biggest threat we will face are the unknowns. If the Gulf Stream does shut down, what will happen to the Atlantic fishing industry that currently supplies a lot of this hemisphere's food? We don't know. What will it do to the climate of Europe? We're not sure. What will happen to the weather on the eastern seaboard of the US? Again, not 100% sure, although we can guess.

The question then becomes - how much are we willing to gamble?

[billvon 3,119]

>There is no evidence to support this position.

So you are opposed to the core ideas in this article?

[rushmc 23]

Quote

>There is no evidence to support this position.

So you are opposed to the core ideas in this article?

No, just the interpitation you have

"America will never be destroyed from the outside,
if we falter and lose our freedoms,
it will be because we destroyed ourselves."
Abraham Lincoln

[billvon 3,119]

So you agree with the following statement:

"But from what specialists have long known, I would expect that any slowdown in thermohaline circulation would have a noticeable but not catastrophic effect on climate. The temperature difference between Europe and Labrador should remain . . . A slowdown in thermohaline circulation should bring on a cooling tendency of at most a few degrees across the North Atlantic—one that would most likely be overwhelmed by the warming caused by rising concentrations of greenhouse gases."

Fair enough. I will note your agreement with a) the slight cooling thermohaline shutdown might cause and b) the warming caused by rising concentrations of greenhouse gases.

[kallend 2,150]

Quote

So you agree with the following statement:

"But from what specialists have long known, I would expect that any slowdown in thermohaline circulation would have a noticeable but not catastrophic effect on climate. The temperature difference between Europe and Labrador should remain . . . A slowdown in thermohaline circulation should bring on a cooling tendency of at most a few degrees across the North Atlantic—one that would most likely be overwhelmed by the warming caused by rising concentrations of greenhouse gases."

Fair enough. I will note your agreement with a) the slight cooling thermohaline shutdown might cause and b) the warming caused by rising concentrations of greenhouse gases.

Oooooh

...

The only sure way to survive a canopy collision is not to have one.

[rushmc 23]

Quote

So you agree with the following statement:

"But from what specialists have long known, I would expect that any slowdown in thermohaline circulation would have a noticeable but not catastrophic effect on climate. The temperature difference between Europe and Labrador should remain . . . A slowdown in thermohaline circulation should bring on a cooling tendency of at most a few degrees across the North Atlantic—one that would most likely be overwhelmed by the warming caused by rising concentrations of greenhouse gases."

Fair enough. I will note your agreement with a) the slight cooling thermohaline shutdown might cause and b) the warming caused by rising concentrations of greenhouse gases.

Ah, and where in this post does it say that MAN IS CAUSING ALL OF THIS?????????

Cause, water vapor is a green house gas now isint it?

"America will never be destroyed from the outside,
if we falter and lose our freedoms,
it will be because we destroyed ourselves."
Abraham Lincoln

[rushmc 23]

Quote

Quote

So you agree with the following statement:

"But from what specialists have long known, I would expect that any slowdown in thermohaline circulation would have a noticeable but not catastrophic effect on climate. The temperature difference between Europe and Labrador should remain . . . A slowdown in thermohaline circulation should bring on a cooling tendency of at most a few degrees across the North Atlantic—one that would most likely be overwhelmed by the warming caused by rising concentrations of greenhouse gases."

Fair enough. I will note your agreement with a) the slight cooling thermohaline shutdown might cause and b) the warming caused by rising concentrations of greenhouse gases.

Oooooh

You know, water vapor? The green house gas that the total effect of is not yet understood?

OOooooohhhhhhhhhhh.

Or, does that gas not count

"America will never be destroyed from the outside,
if we falter and lose our freedoms,
it will be because we destroyed ourselves."
Abraham Lincoln

[billvon 3,119]

>Cause, water vapor is a green house gas now isint it?

Yep, but it's not the one that we're expecting to rise. From the article:

"The germ of truth on which such hype is based is that most atmosphere-ocean models show a slowdown of thermohaline circulation in simulations of the 21st century with the expected rise in greenhouse gases."

A dilemma for sure. You saw an article which you believed to be anti-global-warming, and you supported it without reading it, since it agreed with your suppositions. As it turns out, it agrees with the mainstream science, which states that manmade greenhouse gases are causing a rise in temperature that may affect many parts of our world (like shutting down the Gulf Stream.) That's causing a conflict in your thinking, since you trusted in a source that turns out to say the opposite of what you expected. I expect that to be causing you a bit of trouble now, because you can either a) flip-flop on your support of the article or b) accept that most scientists think the increase in CO2 is driving most of the climate change. I expect you'll choose a).

Or I suppose you could try to claim that they are talking about some OTHER as-yet-unproposed water-vapor-mediated global warming scheme. For all I know, you may actually try that. If so, you will have abandoned rationality in your attempt to support your politics.

[rushmc 23]

Quote

>Cause, water vapor is a green house gas now isint it?

Yep, but it's not the one that we're expecting to rise. From the article:

"The germ of truth on which such hype is based is that most atmosphere-ocean models show a slowdown of thermohaline circulation in simulations of the 21st century with the expected rise in greenhouse gases."

A dilemma for sure. You saw an article which you believed to be anti-global-warming, and you supported it without reading it, since it agreed with your suppositions. As it turns out, it agrees with the mainstream science, which states that manmade greenhouse gases are causing a rise in temperature that may affect many parts of our world (like shutting down the Gulf Stream.) That's causing a conflict in your thinking, since you trusted in a source that turns out to say the opposite of what you expected. I expect that to be causing you a bit of trouble now, because you can either a) flip-flop on your support of the article or b) accept that most scientists think the increase in CO2 is driving most of the climate change. I expect you'll choose a).

Or I suppose you could try to claim that they are talking about some OTHER as-yet-unproposed water-vapor-mediated global warming scheme. For all I know, you may actually try that. If so, you will have abandoned rationality in your attempt to support your politics.

No, I did not see an article I believed to anti-global-warming. (You really have to stop trying to put words in my mouth in a vain attempt to silence those that do not agree with your false assesments) And besides, I am not "anti-global-warming as the climate cycle is presently warming. I AM however very skeptical that man is causing or signicantly speeding the change up. I may change my mind when the scientice "experimental" results start to support your position. (and loosly linking the CO2 warming, man is causing it is not an experiment) When results (of which those tryed so far suggest your conclusions to be incorrect) show otherwise I will begin to rethink my position. Especially when it appears that the majority of the link between CO2 and temps show temps leading CO2 changes, not the other way around. This in and of itself does great damage to the man made theory the alarmists use.

You have yet to explain away the fact that the majority of ice samples research show temp leading CO2 changes (as well as other types of historical investigations)

"America will never be destroyed from the outside,
if we falter and lose our freedoms,
it will be because we destroyed ourselves."
Abraham Lincoln

[billvon 3,119]

> I may change my mind when the scientice "experimental" results start
>to support your position.

Well, let's see. One way to obtain such data is to predict an outcome and see how your prediction matches reality.

In 1995, the IPCC predicted that CO2 would cause a rise in temperature between .1 to .35 C/decade. depending on future emissions/mitigations. This was, of course, a prediction; it was not factual. Deniers poo-pooed this.

Needless to say, CO2 concentrations did increase and temperatures did rise, on the order of .15C per decade. So you have a prediction, and it turned out to be accurate.

What else would you propose? We could call a halt (worldwide) to CO2 releases and wait for a few years until CO2 levels stabilize and then begin to drop. If temperatures level off and start to drop as well, we'd have a very strong likelihood that CO2 was the cause. You willing to do that? I didn't think so.

Another way, of course, is to run experiments on the basic physics; these have been done. A chamber with 380ppm CO2 absorbs more IR energy than a chamber with 260ppm CO2. Thus, we have proven that CO2 is a greenhouse gas.

We can analyze the output of a coal fired power plant, multiply by the number of coal power plants in the world, and divide by the volume of the atmosphere. This gives us the percentage of CO2 added by coal power plants. If we add up all sources of human carbon additions, and do the same, and it equals the amount of increase we see in the atmosphere, we have demonstrated where the additional CO2 is coming from. We have done that, and the numbers are very, very close to what is happening.

>You have yet to explain away the fact that the majority of ice samples
>research show temp leading CO2 changes . . .

Well, there were no SUV's 60 million years ago. That's the main reason CO2 didn't lead in many of the temperature excursions.

[NCclimber 0]

Quote

In 1995, the IPCC predicted that CO2 would cause a rise in temperature between .1 to .35 C/decade. depending on future emissions/mitigations. This was, of course, a prediction; it was not factual. Deniers poo-pooed this.

Last week you said they denied it. So poo-poo means the same as deny?

[rushmc 23]

Well, there were no SUV's 60 million years ago. That's the main reason CO2 didn't lead in many of the temperature excursions.

[philh 0]

"To have to debunk the highlighted part of this statement, one would first have to surmise that it is true to begin with. There is no evidence to support this position"

i have to agree with Bilvon here, anthropogencis global warming is based on very well understood physics and it makes predictions which are verified by experiment. We certainly do know that green house gasses are causing the Earth to heat although we dont know by exactly how much. I would suggest you go to Borders or BArnes and Noble and get the current issue of The Skeptical Inquirer they have a very good article examiming some of the other possible causes of global warming such as variations in solar radiation, urban heat island etc and they conclude along with most other serious scientists "to date, no convincing case can be made that global warming is caused by natural processes over which we have no control in the forseeable future". All of this from the SKEPTICAL Inquirer.
I would ask whihc of the following you dispute:
1)the physics of green house gas effect
2)the observation of incresed green house gas emmisions
3) the observation of rising global temperatures
4) the debunking of rival theories such as urban heat island effect.

[rushmc 23]

Reid A. Bryson holds the 30th PhD in Meteorology granted in the history of American education. Emeritus Professor and founding chairman of the University of Wisconsin Department of Meteorology—now the Department of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences—in the 1970s he became the first director of what’s now the UW’s Gaylord Nelson Institute of Environmental Studies. He’s a member of the United Nations Global 500 Roll of Honor—created, the U.N. says, to recognize “outstanding achievements in the protection and improvement of the environment.” He has authored five books and more than 230 other publications and was identified by the British Institute of Geographers as the most frequently cited climatologist in the world.

Long ago in the Army Air Corps, Bryson and a colleague prepared the aviation weather forecast that predicted discovery of the jet stream by a group of B-29s flying to and from Tokyo. Their warning to expect westerly winds at 168 knots earned Bryson and his friend a chewing out from a general—and the general’s apology the next day when he learned they were right. Bryson flew into a couple of typhoons in 1944, three years before the Weather Service officially did such things, and he prepared the forecast for the homeward flight of the Enola Gay. Back in Wisconsin, he built a program at the UW that’s trained some of the nation’s leading climatologists.

How Little We Know

Bryson is a believer in climate change, in that he’s as quick as anyone to acknowledge that Earth’s climate has done nothing but change throughout the planet’s existence. In fact, he took that knowledge a big step further, earlier than probably anyone else. Almost 40 years ago, Bryson stood before the American Association for the Advancement of Science and presented a paper saying human activity could alter climate.

“I was laughed off the platform for saying that,” he told Wisconsin Energy Cooperative News.

In the 1960s, Bryson’s idea was widely considered a radical proposition. But nowadays things have turned almost in the opposite direction: Hardly a day passes without some authority figure claiming that whatever the climate happens to be doing, human activity must be part of the explanation. And once again, Bryson is challenging the conventional wisdom.

“Climate’s always been changing and it’s been changing rapidly at various times, and so something was making it change in the past,” he told us in an interview this past winter. “Before there were enough people to make any difference at all, two million years ago, nobody was changing the climate, yet the climate was changing, okay?”

“All this argument is the temperature going up or not, it’s absurd,” Bryson continues. “Of course it’s going up. It has gone up since the early 1800s, before the Industrial Revolution, because we’re coming out of the Little Ice Age, not because we’re putting more carbon dioxide into the air.”

Little Ice Age? That’s what chased the Vikings out of Greenland after they’d farmed there for a few hundred years during the Mediaeval Warm Period, an earlier run of a few centuries when the planet was very likely warmer than it is now, without any help from industrial activity in making it that way. What’s called “proxy evidence”—assorted clues extrapolated from marine sediment cores, pollen specimens, and tree-ring data—helps reconstruct the climate in those times before instrumental temperature records existed.

We ask about that evidence, but Bryson says it’s second-tier stuff. “Don’t talk about proxies,” he says. “We have written evidence, eyeball evidence. When Eric the Red went to Greenland, how did he get there? It’s all written down.”

Bryson describes the navigational instructions provided for Norse mariners making their way from Europe to their settlements in Greenland. The place was named for a reason: The Norse farmed there from the 10th century to the 13th, a somewhat longer period than the United States has existed. But around 1200 the mariners’ instructions changed in a big way. Ice became a major navigational reference. Today, old Viking farmsteads are covered by glaciers.

Bryson mentions the retreat of Alpine glaciers, common grist for current headlines. “What do they find when the ice sheets retreat, in the Alps?”

We recall the two-year-old report saying a mature forest and agricultural water-management structures had been discovered emerging from the ice, seeing sunlight for the first time in thousands of years. Bryson interrupts excitedly.

“A silver mine! The guys had stacked up their tools because they were going to be back the next spring to mine more silver, only the snow never went,” he says. “There used to be less ice than now. It’s just getting back to normal.”

What Leads, What Follows?

What is normal? Maybe continuous change is the only thing that qualifies. There’s been warming over the past 150 years and even though it’s less than one degree, Celsius, something had to cause it. The usual suspect is the “greenhouse effect,” various atmospheric gases trapping solar energy, preventing it being reflected back into space.

We ask Bryson what could be making the key difference:

Q: Could you rank the things that have the most significant impact and where would you put carbon dioxide on the list?

A: Well let me give you one fact first. In the first 30 feet of the atmosphere, on the average, outward radiation from the Earth, which is what CO2 is supposed to affect, how much [of the reflected energy] is absorbed by water vapor? In the first 30 feet, 80 percent, okay?

Q: Eighty percent of the heat radiated back from the surface is absorbed in the first 30 feet by water vapor…

A: And how much is absorbed by carbon dioxide? Eight hundredths of one percent. One one-thousandth as important as water vapor. You can go outside and spit and have the same effect as doubling carbon dioxide.

This begs questions about the widely publicized mathematical models researchers run through supercomputers to generate climate scenarios 50 or 100 years in the future. Bryson says the data fed into the computers overemphasizes carbon dioxide and accounts poorly for the effects of clouds—water vapor. Asked to evaluate the models’ long-range predictive ability, he answers with another question: “Do you believe a five-day forecast?”

Bryson says he looks in the opposite direction, at past climate conditions, for clues to future climate behavior. Trying that approach in the weeks following our interview, Wisconsin Energy Cooperative News soon found six separate papers about Antarctic ice core studies, published in peer-reviewed scientific journals between 1999 and 2006. The ice core data allowed researchers to examine multiple climate changes reaching back over the past 650,000 years. All six studies found atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations tracking closely with temperatures, but with CO2 lagging behind changes in temperature, rather than leading them. The time lag between temperatures moving up—or down—and carbon dioxide following ranged from a few hundred to a few thousand years.

Renaissance Man, Marathon Man

When others were laughing at the concept, Reid Bryson was laying the ground floor for scientific investigation of human impacts on climate. We asked UW Professor Ed Hopkins, the assistant state climatologist, about the significance of Bryson’s work in advancing the science he’s now practiced for six decades.

“His contributions are manifold,” Hopkins said. “He wrote Climates of Hunger back in the 1970s looking at how climate changes over the last several thousand years have affected human activity and human cultures.”

This, he suggests, is traceable to Bryson’s high-school interest in archaeology, followed by college degrees in geology, then meteorology, and studies in oceanography, limnology, and other disciplines. “He’s looked at the interconnections of all these things and their impact on human societies,” Hopkins says. “He’s one of those people I would say is a Renaissance person.”

The Renaissance, of course, produced its share of heretics, and 21 years after he supposedly retired, one could ponder whether Bryson’s work today is a tale of continuing heresy, or of conventional wisdom being outpaced by an octogenarian.

Without addressing—or being asked—that question, UW Green Bay Emeritus Professor Joseph Moran agrees that Bryson qualifies as “the father of the science of modern climatology.”

“In his lifetime, in his career, he has shaped the future as well as the present state of climatology,” Moran says, adding, “We’re going to see his legacy with us for many generations to come.”

Holding bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Boston College, Moran became a doctoral candidate under Bryson in the late 1960s and early ’70s. “I came to Wisconsin because he was there,” Moran told us.

With Hopkins, Moran co-authored Wisconsin’s Weather and Climate, a book aimed at teachers, students, outdoor enthusiasts, and workers with a need to understand what the weather does and why. Bryson wrote a preface for the book but Hopkins told us the editors “couldn’t fathom” certain comments, thinking he was being too flippant with the remark that “Wisconsin is not for wimps when it comes to weather.”

Clearly what those editors couldn’t fathom was that Bryson simply enjoys mulling over the reasons weather and climate behave as they do and what might make them—and consequently us—behave differently. This was immediately obvious when we asked him why, at his age, he keeps showing up for work at a job he’s no longer paid to do.

“It’s fun!” he said. Ed Hopkins and Joe Moran would undoubtedly agree.

“I think that’s one of the reasons for his longevity,” Moran says. “He’s so interested and inquisitive. I regard him as a pot-stirrer. Sometimes people don’t react well when you challenge their long-held ideas, but that’s how real science takes place.”—Dave Hoopman

"America will never be destroyed from the outside,
if we falter and lose our freedoms,
it will be because we destroyed ourselves."
Abraham Lincoln

[billvon 3,119]

>And research shows that temps have been higher than what we are seeing
>today and in some cases higher than even the most extreem predictions.

Of course. At one point the planet was a molten ball of rock. So?

>if man was not the culprit how the hell did get that hot??

Massive volcanic eruptions. Meteor impacts. Solar instability. Milankovitch resonances. There are about a dozen ways temperatures change on this planet. Surely with all your research you have stumbled across a few of these, no?

[rehmwa 2]

Quote

>Of course. At one point the planet was a molten ball of rock.

so the long term perspective is that the planet is cooling over time, not warming

STOP GLOBAL COOLING

...
Driving is a one dimensional activity - a monkey can do it - being proud of your driving abilities is like being proud of being able to put on pants

[billvon 3,119]

>so the long term perspective is that the planet is cooling over time, not warming

>STOP GLOBAL COOLING

Well, but it's also been collecting out of the solar accretion disk for billions of years. It's a lot slower now (just a few stray meteors every once in a while) but we're still gaining about 100 tons a day. So STOP GLOBAL EXPANSION too. (See? There's a cause for everyone.)

[rehmwa 2]

Quote

>solar accretion......we're still gaining about 100 tons a day.

so, if we could just get that 100 tons to stream through a single space (perhaps an area of a square 10 miles on a side, but cut in half by a state boundary so we only use the upper half) and fix a turbine there we should be able to generate a lot of free energy.... Does anyone know of an essentially useless area that fits this description?

we could fund it by taxing gas users
the government (of course I mean the real government - the UN) should have no problem convincing the galactic matter to only enter the planet's system at that single location - maybe with the use of a fence and a strict screening process. We don't need any unsavory hazardous waste to come in as part of that 100 tons/day. Not without the requisite forms and permits, anyway.

Government programs like this always work.

...
Driving is a one dimensional activity - a monkey can do it - being proud of your driving abilities is like being proud of being able to put on pants