Global Cooling ahead (not Global Warming) suggests Gulf Stream slowdown or halt.

With all the scary warnings of climate change in the front page news headlines in the last 6 months,(most assume it's global warming) the Guardian newspaper in the UK reported some contradictory facts last Friday, the significance of which, very few people picked up on. The Gulf Stream is not only weakening over time but it came to a dramatic halt for 10 days in 2004, pointing to a period of global cooling ahead (and not global warming ) if this becomes a sustaining trend.

• Ultra rapid climate change >>Global warming or cooling ahead ? 
• Atlantic Gulf Steam current came to a halt for 10 days in 2004  >> "the most abrupt change in the whole [climate] record".

Scientists are totally puzzled and scratching their heads for an explaination. The Guardian calls this a consequence of Global warming, but I would disagree.

The Guardian reports:

Scientists have uncovered more evidence for a dramatic weakening in the vast ocean current that gives Britain its relatively balmy climate by dragging warm water northwards from the tropics. The slowdown, which climate modellers have predicted will follow global warming, has been confirmed by the most detailed study yet of ocean flow in the Atlantic.

Most alarmingly, the data reveal that a part of the current, which is usually 60 times more powerful than the Amazon river, came to a temporary [10 day] halt during November 2004.

The nightmare scenario of a shutdown in the meridional ocean current which drives the Gulf stream was dramatically portrayed in The Day After Tomorrow. The climate disaster film had Europe and North America plunged into a new ice age practically overnight.

Although no scientist thinks the switch-off could happen that quickly, they do agree that even a weakening of the current over a few decades would have profound consequences.....[not very reassuring since up to now scientists never believed thst the Gulf stream could stop--Walter]

Warm water brought to Europe's shores raises the temperature by as much as 10C in some places and without it the continent would be much colder and drier."

Researchers are not sure yet what to make of the 10-day hiatus.

"We'd never seen anything like that before and we don't understand it. We didn't know it could happen," said Harry Bryden, at the National Oceanography Centre, in Southampton, who presented the findings to a conference in Birmingham on rapid climate change.

Is it the first sign that the current is stuttering to a halt? "I want to know more before I say that," Professor Bryden said.

Lloyd Keigwin, a scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, in Massachusetts, in the US, described the temporary shutdown as "the most abrupt change in the whole [climate] record".

He added: "It only lasted 10 days. But suppose it lasted 30 or 60 days, when do you ring up the prime minister and say let's start stockpiling fuel? How can we rule out a longer one next year?"

"Prof Bryden's group stunned climate researchers last year with data suggesting that the flow rate of the Atlantic circulation had dropped by about 6m tonnes of water a second from 1957 to 1998. If the current remained that weak, he predicted, it would lead to a 1C drop in the UK in the next decade. A complete shutdown would lead to a 4C-6C cooling over 20 years."

see full story in the Guardian

Well, in my books I would call this global cooling and not global warming. Could the Gulf Stream be the on-off switch that flips the earth into ice-ages and mini-ice-ages and back? The Tipping Point? The Climate Inflection Point? We will have to rename all our maps..from the Gulf Stream to ? the Gulf Extreme or how about the Gulf Ice Cream or maybe the Gulf Dream (suggestion by David Harries) Nominate your name change

© 2005-2006

Walter Derzko

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Comments

[Farm Girl]

I can't remember where I saw it, maybe it was in the Inconvenient Truth movie or on the web maybe, but wasn't there something about how if the gulf stream halts or changes (I think they said due to desalinization from polar ice cap melt), that this would create warming of the climate in the United States, but at the same time this would create a cooler climate in Europe and the UK?
For some reason that popped into my head.

[David Elfstrom]

This is a myth. Europe will not have any noticeably different climate if the Gulf Stream stops.

Please read (it's very interesting, actually, with lots of colourful illustrations)

The Source of Euope's Mild Climate
American Scientist vol. 94, July-August 2006
The notion that the Gulf Stream is responsible for keeping Europe anomalously warm turns out to be a myth
http://www.americanscientist.org/template/AssetDetail/assetid/51963?fulltext=true&print=yes

In a nutshell, the amount of heat from the Gulf Stream, while large, is insignificant compared to the heat carried by prevailing winds -- caused by the earth's rotation -- that take warm air from stored summer solar energy the ocean and heat up the Western coastlines of both Europe and North America. This is why Vancouver also has mild temperatures despite having a cold arctic stream traveling down from the north.