Another Al Gore doomsday prediction bites the dust
In a new paper published yesterday, climate scientists described a newly discovered deep, cold current flowing off Iceland’s coast that appears to make the ocean conveyor belt that warms the northern Atlantic less sensitive to climate change than previously thought.
In other words, another one of Al Gore’s doomsday predictions has proven false.
More significantly, scientists now have no understanding why the ocean conveyor belt shut down during past ice ages, as their most favored theory now appears insufficient.
The conveyor belt exists because the northern Atlantic has a higher salt content than most of the ocean. Put more salt in water and you increase that water’s density, thus causing it to sink to the ocean floor. The dense water then flows south along the ocean floor around Africa and into the Indian Ocean, where it rises and begins its journey back north, bringing with it warm weather to the northern latitudes of North American and Europe.
The consensus theory has been that fresh water from melting Arctic glaciers — caused by man-made global warming — would lower the high salt content of the northern Atlantic Ocean, which in turn would lighten the water, stop it from sinking, and thus cause the conveyor belt to turn off. With the conveyor shut down the flow of warm surface water to the northern hemisphere would cease. Thus, you not only would get a much hotter world, global warming would make Europe much colder and less habitable.
This new data says no, Arctic glaciers don’t produce enough fresh water. The newly discovered current dominates instead, acting to stabilize the conveyor belt.
What complicates this complicated and confusing climate science is that there is evidence in the paleoclimate record that the conveyor belt has shut down repeatedly in the past. Unfortunately, scientists now have really no clear understanding why.
Not that they ever did, based on our limited present knowledge.
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Dear editors:
What’s ‘fishy’ is the writer got the whole thing wrong. So wrong in fact, that a retraction of the articles’ intent to discredit and used to ‘condem’ ‘ atmospheric warmings’ role in the whole global warming scheme should be acknowledged by this site and its editors.
The ocean conveyer belt as its called, is a current that is generated by the formation of ice, NOT the melting of ice, in the North atlantic west of Greenland and on up into the artic regions. The physics of which involves ice creation as cold, wind cooled surface water containing salt begins freezing during the long winter months, creating deep ice fields.
When oceanic ice is formed, salt drops out of solution. leaving freshwater ice on the surface and the salt that was contained in the water that turned to ice, becomes a very cold, salty brine. Its this cold, dense salt brine that sinks below the less dense surface water, down into the depths and begins or pushes or drives the first leg of the conveyer current. Realize that this is a slow moving, very wide and large mass of cold water that drives or initiates this conveyer current. The downward flow of cold highly concentrated salt water flow’s along the deeper portions of the eastern north American continent, continues south along South America etc., eventually splits and moves into three oceans, in a somewhat sloppy figure eight track.
Glacial water ‘ runoff’ does in fact have a negative effect on the overall ‘ conveyer’ current, in that it dilutes the ocean surface water and depending on the time of year, as surface water freezes into artic ice sheets, less salt flows because the ocean surface water is becoming somewhat diluted and holds far less salt then normal. Its complicated to explain in this limited venue, and there’s a time element here that is also misunderstood.
The full cycle is estimated to take 2000 years to complete. This very large mass of moving water is very dense, cold and very powerful in that it causes warmer surface water to flow in the opposite direction on the oceans surfact in the Atlantic, similar in effect as if two wheels were touching such that only one has constant power, enough to cause the wheel its touching, to spin in the opposite direction.
So too, does the gulf stream move North in the opposite direction of the south flowning conveyer current below it. The movement and dynamics of the current are much more complicated then this brief overview, but there are more then one surface current created, the Gulf stream is the largest and most important, since it delivers the heat needed to create the moderate weather patterns Europe has experienced over the centuries.
As global climate warms, slowly over the years, less ice is formed in above the artic circle west of Greenland, so there is less dense, salt enriched water driving the current….as the current slows over the centuries, so too does the Gulf stream, correspondingly less warm water flows across the North Atlantic and then down along the British Isles then along the Eastern Atlantic European continent. normally bringing with it warmer air and a historically moderate western european climate, only with the slowing currents, there’s less heat delivered and hense colder weather patterns, longer colder winters, become the norm for western Europe.
I hope your editors will do their research, to verify my comments, fair is fair.
Sincerely…M. O’Neill, CA, USA