John Larkin knows remarkably little. Every body ought to know that the Gulf Stream turned right off for 1300+/-10 years, from some 12900 years ago to roughly 11,500 years ago.
Everybody thus knows that the Gulf Stream is not totally long term stable.
We have also known that has been carrying about 30% water than it used to for a few decades now.
The latest reports aren't any kind of hysterical reaction to any kind of unexpected situation and the likeliest explanation for John Larkin's chocie of words is that that's waht he read on some denialist web-site.
It's not a new discovery, just a slightly more detailed (and more elaborately researched) report on the well-known fact that the Gulf Stream has been slowing down recently.
he northern waters are heating up and that it can cause a deluge of cold wa ter to be dumped into those same warm waters.... Doesn't that mean the two will have some element of counter effect? Then the southern waters are al so heating up which also should strengthen the current, no? I guess it is a bit more complex than just A-B.
Arctic ice is melting, which dumps fresh water into the Gulf Stream off Gre enland, which messes up the thermo-haline circulation which relies on the w arm water getting so far north that it cools off and sinks, driving a cold return current along the bottom of the Atlantic.
The last time the Gulf Stream stopped, some 12900 years ago, it is strongly suspected that all the fresh water in Lake Agassiz suddenly drained out
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messing up the therm0-haline circulation for 1300+/-10 years.
slows or stops. That cold water has to come up to displace the warm water leaving and if it is warmer or stops that should make the Gulf even warmer , no? Does that mean the shrimpers will be catching more cooked shrimp?
Probably not. At the end of the last ice age, the warmed water seems to flo wed into the Southern Ocean, warming it up and boiling out a lot of dissolv ed CO2, which helped move the planet from an ice (180 ppm CO2 in the atmosp here) to the current interglacial (270 ppm CO2 in the atmosphere - until re cently).
The planets weather systems are essentially a mechanism for moving heat fro m the equator (where it is absorbed) to the poles (where it is radiated aw ay).
The weather systems aren't all that particular about which pole gets the he at.
The problem for Curstior Doom is that while the Daily Mail's agenda is prov ide more-or-less plausible nonsense which titillates right-wing nitwits lik e Cursitor Doom, the Guardian is less interested in Cursitor Doom's emotion al reactions, and rather more interested in looking like reliable source of factual news.
The Guardian does have an agenda to pursue - it's to look like a quality ne wspaper. This isn't the same agenda as the Daily Mail's.
If you want a particular sort of emotional gratification, read the Daily Ma il. If you want more or less reliable information, read the Guardian. It's an English language newspaper, so it's science journalists don't know much about science and are filling in time in the hope of making it to foreign c orrespondent, but at least they don't publish denialist propaganda like the ir equivalents in the Murdoch press.
ate is experiencing an unprecedented slowdown and may be less stable than t hought - with potentially severe consequences
titch of corroboration...15% slowdown in the era of modern measurement is h uge by any reasonable measure, we're literally talking about mass flow of o ceanic proportions. How come the dimwitted are blind to scale? Never fails.
John Larkin distrusts them, despite the fact that he knows nothing about th em beyond the fact that he doesn't like the results than can be deduced fro m them by people who know more than he does (which has to be a very large m ajoiryt).
More anti-anthopogenic global warming bias nonsense.
If it isn't what Anthony Watts wants John Larkin - and other gullible sucke rs - to believe, John Larkin won't believe it. He's the prefect target for denialist propaganda, and wears the "please mislead me!" T-shirt with pride .
Since power radiated scales as T^4 the climate models are correct to have a moderate gain in the range of 3+/-0.8 if they are to reproduce observational results. It is unconditionally stable provided that the gain is under 4 and only goes unstable if you boil the oceans at the equator which is remarkably hard to do. Humans would be suffocated by high CO2 levels before thermal runaway becomes a problem on Earth.
There is only one Earth to observe. Perhaps we could do with making a clone to put the trash the planet climate change deniers on and see how long they last. Snag is we only have one Earth to play with.
Still the way things are going with Trump and Putin global warming will be the least of our problems a nuclear winter looks quite possible too.
The Caribbean surface waters will warm even more in summer than they do today and become less productive as a result. Warmer water holds less oxygen and the cold current would bring nutrients in with it. Where a warm and cold current interact and mix tends to be very fertile.
The seas will stratify more with cold water stuck in the deepest parts and warmer water nearer the surface. It is quite likely to cause more precipitation from the warmer humid air and stronger hurricanes since sea surface temperature is a powerful driver for them.
Humans have had, apparently for thousands of years, an appetite for doomsday, apocalypse, alien invasion, Judgement Day disaster predictions. There's big money to be made there for creative people.
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John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc
picosecond timing precision measurement
jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com
http://www.highlandtechnology.com
Not a useful response. Humans have also had a predilection for creating self-inflicted disaster.
Hell's teeth, that's been a truism for 2500 years! Consider that Cassandra (daughter of King Priam of Troy) was cursed by being able to predict the future - /plus/ that nobody believed her!
Or, to mirror your phrases "there's big money to be made by denying disaster predictions".
And a predilection for predicting human-race disaster. Hollywood keeps cranking out space invader, giant volcano, alien plague, asteroid collision, monkey takeover, planet freezing, zombie movies, and they sell.
Exactly. And it's still profitable.
No, the real money is making the disaster predictions, not denying them.
Who is going to make a scientific or political or show-biz fortune (or publish journal papers) by saying that nothing much is going to happen?
So many people are just chronically scared.
So many of the OT posts here are about climate diaster. Not brownie recipes or tips about great hikes. Lots of engineers are chronically scared, too. Bad engineers. Wusses seldom do good design.
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John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc
picosecond timing precision measurement
jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com
http://www.highlandtechnology.com
The interesting parameter is the ability of the Gulf stream to transfer power [W], which depends both the temperature difference [K]
a century or two and the speed for much less than that.
The Gulf stream keeps the waters ice free nearly up to the Spitzbergen at 80 N. The size of the (floating) multi year Arctic ice has been reduced during last few years, indicating that more power is transferred to the North with the Gulf stream, not less. Claims that the melting would be due to direct radiation forcing in the Arctic is
huge amount of energy needed for melting ice into water. After all, the Arctic ice is in the darkness for 6 months and in the summer the sun never rises above 24 degrees.
The same Gulf stream is also warning the waters around Greenland, warming the air and increasing melting of the glaciers.
What happen if the Gulf stream power transfer drops significantly due to reduced salinity ? It also reduces melting of floating Arctic ice as well as melting of Greenland glaciers. The salinity will increase and the conveyer is more efficient, restarting the circulation.
What about MWP and LIA ? Some claim that this was an European phenomenon only. Then how to explain this ? With the variation of the Gulf stream power transfer ? During MWP, the Vikings had agriculture on the coast of Greenland and during LIA, they had winter markets on the river Thames ice ? Stable Gulf stream since the year 400 AD and Mann's hockey sticks are not both possible.
This isn't electrical current, it's ocean current. It affects things other than ammeters. Sediments and shells, yeah, that makes sense. Measure is a bigger field than can be covered by boxes with numeric readouts.
When Mt. St. Helens erupted, there was a study in the literature that noted the historic (well, oral tradition from the natives) and sediment data, and predicted the magnitude to be expected. That was good info, and having it ahead of time is how we humans prepare for the future.
It works. Grumbling that things are not to your satisfaction... doesn't.
On Saturday, April 14, 2018 at 7:49:30 AM UTC+10, snipped-for-privacy@downunder.com wr ote:
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This shows an imperfect appreciation of what's actually going on.
Increased CO2 levels directly affect the effective radiating altitude for w avelengths that CO2 absorbs, which is to say that the region in the atmosph ere that's at -18C (the earth's effective temperature as a black-body radia tor) mores up to a slightly higher altitude. The lapse rate - the rate at w hich the atmosphere gets cooler as you go higher - doesn't change, so the t emperature at the surface goes up a bit.
If it gets above zero Celcius, sea ice melts. Ocean water doesn't freeze un til it gets down to -2 Celcius, but the salt in the sea water that lowers i ts freezing point doesn't get incorporated into the ice formed.
Melting sea ice does soak up energy, but that's getting shipped up from the equator all the time, both as warm water (in ocean currents) as a warm air (wind).
That didn't work during the Younger Dryas - the Gulf Stream stayed off for
1300+/-10 years.
Why not? The major reason why the Thames freezes over less frequently these days is the architecture of the Thames. A new London Bridge was built in 1831 wi th fewer arches, allowing more water from the sea to pass up river unencumb ered. Saltier water means a lower freezing point. And the construction of t he Embankment later in the 19th Century narrowed the Thames making it flow faster, another factor making freezing less likely.
The previous London Bridge had been there since 1209.
Fluctuations in the Gulf Stream, and other ocean currents, may have played a part as well but a faster flowing, more salty, Thames is less likely to freeze over.
John Larkin's appetite is more for "all is for the best in this, the best of all possible worlds".
The fossil carbon extraction industry is spending quite a lot of money churning out the kind of nonsense that John Larkin prefers to read, so there's also big money being made there by creative (if dishonest) people.
The task is to use the kind of critical thinking skills that John Larkin lacks to pick out the stories that hew closest to real facts.
te is experiencing an unprecedented slowdown and may be less stable than th ought - with potentially severe consequences
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Some of the same people who made money trying to tell that smoking really w asn't all that bad for you are not making money by telling you that climate change isn't happening, and that - to the extent that is it happening - it isn't a bad thing.
Hollywood makes attention-grabbing fiction, but they do sell it as fiction. The denialism lobby is in the business of misleading people for money so t hat the people who fund them can keep on making money in the way they are s et up to do.
It's certainly more difficult to publish negative results, but it's even ha rder to publish results that aren't supported by persuasive evidence - the kind of evidence that it take more effort to appreciate than John Larkin is ever going to put in.
The anxieties about anthropogenic global warming don't strike well-informed observers as irrational.
If you aren't anxious enough about units failing in the field, you may not be motivated to do properly toleranced designs. I've cleaned up after a few of them.
That doesn't stop you from doing innovative design, though quite a few inno vations don't work out.
There's a saying from the early days of aviation - "There are bold pilots a nd there are old pilots, but there are no old, bold pilots."
Of course John Larkin isn't bold enough to design his own transformers and inductors, or brave enough to go out find a local coil winding shop to wind them for him (or a specialist printed circuit shop that will make printed windings), but he is brave enough to ignore the scientific evidence (which he doesn't understand) that indicates that anthropogenic global warming is real, happening now, and getting worse. An objective observer might call hi m foolhardy, rather than brave, but nobody who posts here is going to be ob jective about John Larkin.
mate is experiencing an unprecedented slowdown and may be less stable than thought - with potentially severe consequences
It does seem to have been part of the motivation to give Al Gore a slice of the Nobel Peace Prize for work on publicising anthropogenic global warming .
It certainly wasn't marketed as a horror movie, and it does seem to have be en free of the usual cliches of the genre - such as screaming scantily clad young women - but John Larkin does seem to have total faith in his own jud gement, which represents a particularly impressive triumph of hope over exp erience.
Hurricanes are start up when there's enough hot water - over 26.3 Celcius d own to fifty metres - over a big enough area of ocean that's more than 3 de grees (angle) away from the equator - and there's enough wind to get the fe edback loop going.
How bad they get depends on how much of area of warm enough water is availa ble down the hurricane path, so the intensity is erratic, and you get more in some years than others.
But anthropogenic global warming means more warm water, and the way they wo rk means that this translates into roughly the same number of hurricanes wi th the usual Guassian distribution of ferocity, but with the mean ferocity a bit higher, and a correspondingly bigger standard deviation on ferocity.
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