New Study Indicates Gulf Stream Shutting Down Due to Global Warming

Nice OP and thread.

I've read quite a few stories and articles in the past few years that basically state a similar theme to this and to the Day after Tomorrow or whatever it's called. That global warming will cause global cooling with all the cold water being introduced to the oceans.

It's too bad that in Florida they can't even talk about this. LOL

a reply to: raymundoko

I fired that warning shot about Pavlovian climate cranks in the OP to keep ideological trolls at bay, and tease out a more constructive conversation here, and for the most part it has worked.
I take it by your previous sarcastic sign-off (before you edited it out), you think your post somehow undermines my point about climate trolls. But the content of your reply only reinforces it.

First of all this –

And, Greenland's ice sheet isn't even melting:

Source

Your source doesn’t show that at all. I don’t know if you just read it incorrectly, or tried to pull a fast one here, but either way – the first map is just a one day dataset in March. So yes, congratulations, it’s true - Greenland doesn’t melt much in March! But even that map seems to show it accumulating less mass on 3/23/2015 than it did for the 1990-2011 average ironically. More importantly, further on down they post this graph which shows Greenland losing overall mass through its summer melt seasons:



See how the last few years of summer melt are running below the mean? [Note – I just had a suspicion, thanks to the2ofusr1’s response - where your misinformation is coming from, so I took a glance at WUWT, and boom – there they are, butchering this exact same graph with willful ignorance]. So if it’s not clear enough from your own link, here’s another one from the same institution (DMI):

Greenland ice sheet mass loss doubles

A new study shows that the Greenland ice sheet is now losing around 375 km3 of ice every year, more than double the amount of previous estimates.

You are just flat out wrong about Greenland. But you seem to have thrown it in as part of a gish-gallop of authoritarian rebuttal that is very typical of climate trolls (that read too much WUWT). The way you quickly emptied the chamber with “the gulf stream doesn’t affect European weather, it’s not even weakening, Greenland’s not melting anyway” is the same sort of dogmatic appeal we hear from the “It’s not warming, even if it is warming it’s not man-made, even if it is man-made it’s not a problem, even if it is a problem there’s nothing we can do about it” crowd.

I am completely open to skeptical viewpoints as long as they can present their information rationally, honestly and objectively. But just because you found some decent sources doesn’t mean you’re still not piling on the confirmation bias to paint an overall cherry-picked and distorted version of the facts.

Someone already pointed me to the Rossby study in this thread, and it seems to be very valid research. However, it also doesn’t particularly contradict anything the new study says. Rossby’s paper only covers the last 20 years, and still found an overall weakening – just not a statistically significant one. This is in line with Rahmstorf et al who themselves pointed out a partial recovery since 1990 in the abstract. I have access to the entire paper, and this is what’s inside:



So their long term proxy method is in fact validated by Rossby et al, since it actually correlates with those direct measurements.

From the graph above it also appears the “recovery” was only temporary, which is further reinforced by more recent observations, like this paper:

Observed decline of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation 2004–2012

But regardless I haven’t said anything in this thread about it being some kind of definitive proof of anything. It’s just as I wrote in the OP “another log on the fire” of compelling evidence out there.

You however choose to automatically dismiss all that compelling evidence by cherry-picking a few random examples that appear contradictory on the initial surface. In your rush to judgment you also clearly whiffed on key points like Greenland’s ice melt, or how much your own links even contradict themselves. Here’s what that Scientific American article you linked to says in summary:

Three new climate studies indicate that our long-held belief about the Gulf Stream's role in tempering Europe's winters may not be correct. Yet the studies themselves do not agree.

There’s a lot of information out there, sometimes contradictory. The important thing is to weigh it out carefully and in context. You simply focused on the bits and pieces you liked and filtered out the rest, and then arrogantly declared:

Shows how ridiculous the OP is and completely debunks the premise it is based on.

If you think this kind of blatant cherry-picking and intellectual dishonesty does anything to dispel the caricature of a Pavlovian Climate Crank, you are sadly mistaken.

originally posted by: Masterjaden
a reply to: mc_squared

I don't give a crap on which side of the divide someone rests on, if they think that govt running anything will be better than the people, they are nutso.

Govt wastes so much, what will be the cost of the agency that runs it??? Where will that money come from??? Out of the dividends? and when the oil companies raise their prices to offset, how will the dividends not only cover the costs of the govt running this program but return enough money to the people to offset the increase in price???

The whole idea is idiocy. Taxing people and companies (which becomes the people with cost increases) to try and prevent something that likely doesn't exist is idiocy.

Yes, I SAID it, it likely doesn't exist, especially not AGW or ACC whatever the catch phrase to distract their inability to predict ANYTHING accurately is right now.

How do we know that this isn't the effect of the gulf of Mexico oil spill that was predicted after that fiasco? Why do people that believe in AGW always blame EVERYTHING on global warming..

It's ludicrous, it's one of those circular arguments, if it's colder than they predicted, oh, we were right, if it's warmer, oh we were right. It is unequivocally a catch all.

Jaden

Just remember what a little tea tax caused in the late 1700's if you REALLY think taxing CARBON credits is a good idea.

See that's where I think you make your mistake. The democrats attempting to profit off of climate change with a carbon tax or whatever. Is not the same thing as a conspiracy to invent global warming by the science community.....


The far more obvious answer is that democrats believed the science community so they hurried up and found a way to profit. While the GOP got mad the dems might profit and denied the whole thing. The thought that all the worlds scientist are secretly working for Obama is crazy talk. The thought they are all held captive from coorilating data by the American government is crazy.

a reply to: amazing

If you do... off to the shrink with you!

originally posted by: Elementalist
Whatever happens to Gaea, she has faced it before. I deeply belive and feel the past trauma of this planet body we live on (asteroid strikes are traumatic events for example).

Gaea is still here, beautiful as ever and still fillEd with life and longevity.

The humans, are more insignificant, and worry about everything their overly expansive minds, possibly can. With our tiny memories we don't comprehend or understand the history events this planet has taken...

So present changes on Earth are going to be shocking and sometimes disturbing to the worrying mind.

I say relax, live and let Earth be. There is nothing we can do, or will learn, that she hasn't been through. Technology is just toys and useless wet dreams of a minor species, to a celestial body.

Everything will be fine; Gaea, Sol, and humanity will remain constant with time..

So as long as we call the Earth "Gaea", everything will be fine... Mother Nature will take care of Herself so we can rape and pillage the planet however we want...if that isn't rejection of reality then I don't know what is. (Deep Sigh)

originally posted by: AreUKiddingMe

originally posted by: Elementalist
Whatever happens to Gaea, she has faced it before. I deeply belive and feel the past trauma of this planet body we live on (asteroid strikes are traumatic events for example).

Gaea is still here, beautiful as ever and still fillEd with life and longevity.

The humans, are more insignificant, and worry about everything their overly expansive minds, possibly can. With our tiny memories we don't comprehend or understand the history events this planet has taken...

So present changes on Earth are going to be shocking and sometimes disturbing to the worrying mind.

I say relax, live and let Earth be. There is nothing we can do, or will learn, that she hasn't been through. Technology is just toys and useless wet dreams of a minor species, to a celestial body.

Everything will be fine; Gaea, Sol, and humanity will remain constant with time..

So as long as we call the Earth "Gaea", everything will be fine... Mother Nature will take care of Herself so we can rape and pillage the planet however we want...if that isn't rejection of reality then I don't know what is. (Deep Sigh)

You are correct, And even though "mother earth" will be okay. Earth will be, it's the humans, that I worry about. I'm here now, I've got kids and they'll have kids and I'll have people on earth a hundred years from now. What will the earth be like for them. It's already warming uncomfortably for me in the past 15 years. I'm moving somewhere cooler in a year or 2.

originally posted by: Kali74
a reply to: raymundoko

The completely vindicated Hockey Stick?

No, the Hockey stick was only vindicated after it was significantly changed. It's all there in the Wiki for you to read.

a reply to: mc_squared

Yeah, I must have read it wrong, what do I know?

Or I didn't read it wrong at all...

Top: The total daily contribution to the surface mass balance from the entire ice sheet (blue line, Gt/day). Bottom: The accumulated surface mass balance from September 1st to now (blue line, Gt) and the season 2011-12 (red) which had very high summer melt in Greenland. For comparison, the mean curve from the period 1990-2011 is shown (dark grey). The same calendar day in each of the 22 years (in the period 1990-2011) will have its own value. These differences from year to year are illustrated by the light grey band. For each calendar day, however, the lowest and highest values of the 22 years have been left out.

So yes, all the years of 2011-2014 are below the mean for ice melt, but they match the mean for buildup. Summers are warmer there, so more ice is melting in the summer, but it is fully rebounding during the winter.

Also, 2012 was a record melt, 2013 saw less melt and 2014 was less melt as well although still above the mean.

You do realize your second source, also from DMI, is the same exact report I used right? Scroll down to the bottom of your article, you will see they sourced that article using this link which is the exact same paper only in Danish...

Edit: However, by all means, call me a crank salivating to a bell, it doesn't change the peer reviewed science I have linked for you. But that seems to be your crowds response. If the science is sound, ad hominem!

a reply to: raymundoko

It was not significantly changed. New proxy data became available and so a new reconstruction was made... the shape of it? Still hockey stick.

a reply to: Kali74

Wait...the shape was never an issue...is that some type of straw man? The issue was the data used to make the graph. The original proxy data they used did not match actual measurements. Mann knew this and that is where the controversy came from. "Hockey Stick" was just the nickname it got. There was email correspondence confirming this during the famous "climategate". Mann continues to use Proxy data instead of actual measurements because it works more in his favor. This is why some of his recent papers have been rejected. The media loves him though.

The people who take issue with the shape are those who feel if you include the paleoclimate record (all history, not just medieval warming period) you see that even with the hockey stick we are far below the average for the planet. We are still in a warming period following an ice age and will continue to warm unless we are plunged into another abrupt ice age...co2 definitely plays a factor, you can simply look for my contributions to other threads to confirm that I agree with that. What I disagree with is the extent to which co2 is a factor, and how quickly warming will take place.

See This for reference. Specifically the image: 2000_Year_Temperature_Comparison.png as it doesn't look so much like a Hockey Stick, which again, wasn't the issue for climate scientists who disagreed with his findings. The image Holocene_Temperature_Variations.png shows that we are still exiting a glacial period. EPICA_temperature_plot.svg shows the global average temperature using paleoclimate data, clearly showing we are exiting a glacial period. What happens when we go back further? Five_Myr_Climate_Change.svg shows that we are still below the earths average. (Vostok ice cores)

a reply to: raymundoko

Except that multiple other groups have reproduced Mann's general picture with other data sets and techniques and they are all consistent. That has been reviewed over and over and there is no significant error or new understanding.

We are still in a warming period following an ice age and will continue to warm unless we are plunged into another abrupt ice age.

No. It hasn't been a nice steady 'warming period following an ice age', it has been a warming period ending the Ice Age, then a leisurely decline, followed by a huge sudden spike in the industrial age. It's exactly as you expect by the big picture physics.

Take a look at this.

www.realclimate.org...


The natural (unforced by humans) temperature peaked aroound 8000 BC to 6000 BC, about as predicted as the Milankovitch orbital forcing peaked at about 8000BC.

a reply to: raymundoko

You know what, you're right - I jumped the gun a bit on that particular graph, but that graph also doesn't tell the entire story, and the answer is still posted right there in your own link:

Note that the accumulated curve does not end at 0 at the end of the year. Over the year, it snows more than it melts, but calving of icebergs also adds to the total mass budget of the ice sheet. Satellite observations over the last decade show that the ice sheet is not in balance. The calving loss is greater than the gain from surface mass balance, and Greenland is losing mass at about 200 Gt/yr.

So it doesn't change the end result: Greenland is losing overall mass and you were cherry-picking.

a reply to: raymundoko

Since you kept inviting us to read your wiki link on the hockey stick controversy I did. Lots of interesting stuff in there too.

On Mann's results:

More than two dozen reconstructions, using various statistical methods and combinations of proxy records, have supported the broad consensus shown in the original 1998 hockey-stick graph, with variations in how flat the pre-20th century "shaft" appears.[12][13] The 2007 IPCC Fourth Assessment Report cited 14 reconstructions, 10 of which covered 1,000 years or longer, to support its strengthened conclusion that it was likely that Northern Hemisphere temperatures during the 20th century were the highest in at least the past 1,300 years.[14] Over a dozen subsequent reconstructions, including Mann et al. 2008 and PAGES 2k Consortium 2013, have supported these general conclusions.

New studies using different methods continued to extend the period covered by reconstructions, and agreed well with Mann et al. 2008, as in the Ljungqvist 2010 2,000 year extratropical Northern Hemisphere reconstruction. Studies by Christiansen and Ljungqvist investigated previous underestimation of low-frequency variability, and reaffirmed Mann et al.'s conclusions about the Little Ice Age and the Medieval Warm Period.

At the request of the U.S. Congress, initiated by Representative Sherwood Boehlert as chairman of the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Science, a special "Committee on Surface Temperature Reconstructions for the Past 2,000 Years" was assembled by the National Research Council to quickly prepare a concise report.
...
It broadly agreed with the basic findings of the original MBH studies which had subsequently been supported by other reconstructions and proxy records, while emphasising uncertainties over earlier periods.[166] The contested principal component analysis methodology had a small tendency to bias results so was not recommended, but it had little influence on the final reconstructions, and other methods produced similar results.

Meanwhile the skeptics:

The Wegman Report alleged that paleoclimatologists did not seem to interact with "the statistical community":
...
Despite congressman Waxman pressing Wegman to release the code Ritson had requested, Wegman still declined to "disclose the details of our methods" and Mann said "It would appear that Dr. Wegman has completely failed to live up to the very standards he has publicly demanded of others."
...
The Wegman Report lacked peer review, but was sent out to a number of referees shortly before it was released:[175] one of the referees, Grace Wahba, later said she received the report only 3 days in advance, and her criticisms were ignored.
...
The report reiterated the claim that the MBH method created a hockey-stick shape from random red noise, but Wegman failed to respond when the issue was shown to have been caused by an error in McIntyre and McKitrick's methodology, and despite repeated requests did not provide his code for comparison.
...
Barton and U.S. Rep. Ed Whitfield requested Edward Wegman to set up a team of statisticians to investigate, and they supported McIntyre and McKitrick's view that there were statistical failings, although they did not quantify whether there was any significant effect. They also produced an extensive network analysis which has been discredited by expert opinion and found to have issues of plagiarism.

Thanks for the reading suggestion - very helpful!

Good post MC , I will star you for getting a lot of data together to attempt yo win me over to the dark side with data. But the real story lies in the fact that if this is true, it is a naturally correcting factor to the heating affect. I can say with 100 % certainty there is evidence the data suggest the cycle was going to repeat itself until the Sun begins to expand toward swallowing the Earth. I still say that people make pollution not much heat. We are as ants to Geosphere.

You are however fanning the flames of fear porn.

IF the gulf change occurs as predicted, global warming will be the desired action by those in the ice age that will hit at least Europe. When ice expands temps lower worldwide. Naturally i would think, "wa la problem solved". I fear not the temp going up and making land usable in the higher latitudes. I fear a stripping of all human rights to make your wishes of controlling more humanity to do whatever to stop Nature from doing it's thing it has done before, come true. In light of ignoring those of us who are Scientists saying the models are failures, you should keep on believing the fear porn of global disasters about temperatures while certain people get wealth and poor countries get denied energy. Think about the car that runs on H2 i have been touting and promote ideas to fix it, don't waste our brain time alarming people for a natural cycle when there are lots of alternative ideas being ignored so carbon can be taxed. Some want to let the same gov that is ignoring the ideas get money to promote their 'winners' in certain peoples hands. NOT THE IDEAS of the little people that are working right now.


We need to prosecute the liars who took money to build solar plants and abandon them for one thing. We need to use H2 and split it with green tech is my idea. Please, work that angle if you really care.

a reply to: raymundoko

Hockey stick as in dramatic incline after relative stability. So no, not about the shape but what the shape represents... point being the original reconstruction was vindicated by the second which showed the same trend.

a reply to: Justoneman

What is H2?

If you mean Hydrogen then how do you plan on acquiring it without massive amounts of energy expended?

I still think there are about three main issues here.

A. Most scientists and scientific organizations are telling me that man is creating a global warming cycle that is unrelated to any natural warming cycle that we're going through. Even if some scientists are saying otherwise...I'll listen to them but I have to go with with what most scientists are telling me, since I'm not a scientists myself. I know that there are billions of dollars from big oil, car and fossil fuel companies funding research against man made global warming. If I follow the money...well there you go. If all of the scientists at NASA are lying to me then it's the biggest conspiracy int he history of the Universe and Occam's Razor would tell me to go with the simplest answer, which is that they are telling me the truth.

B. Solar and renewable energy is the way to go. I just got Solar Panels on my house and they provide 95% of all the power that I use. In even a year, I could swap the panels out with newer versions and I'll be creating more power then I'll ever use.

C. Let's say we're wrong about global warming, a very small percentage, in my opinion, but let's say we're wrong. Besides a carbon TAx with I am dead set against, everything that we are proposing to stop global warming is good for the environment and us:

. More fuel efficient cars.
. Subsidies taken from old technology like coal plants and combustion engine automobiles and redirected to electric cars and renewable energy sources
. Less pollution.
. more trees
. sea walls and new construction laws that take into account sea level rise.
. better water policies and drought forecasting
. less reliance on foreign oil ..so that we can stop being friends with Saudi Arabia, get out of Iraq and Afghanistan and the middle east. No more wars over oil? How great would that be!
. green buildings, better insulation, more recycling
. no more fracking
. Less smog
. more and better public transportation


There's no downside to any of this...except the carbon tax.

a reply to: mbkennel

Did you read my post? The issue wasn't the shape...That's not what he got flak about from the scientific community. It was that he used proxy data that disagreed with actual measurements. He had to update his data.

Edit: I'm reading your link now.

a reply to: Kali74

The trend was vindicated, I agree. The issue was how he decided to come up with the original chart using data he knew didn't agree with measurements. To me, that's shoddy science. He could have gotten the same image with actual data, but it looked slightly worse with the original data he used.