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Phys.Org is reporting on the results of a recent study by University of Washington oceanographers. The paper, published 28 July, 2016 in Geophysical Research Letters [abstract only, full text paywalled] details research pointing to a cause of the slowdown in the Atlantic Ocean circulation currents.
From the Phys.org article:
The ocean circulation that is responsible for England's mild climate appears to be slowing down. The shift is not sudden or dramatic, as in the 2004 sci-fi movie "The Day After Tomorrow," but it is a real effect that has consequences for the climates of eastern North America and Western Europe.
Also unlike in that movie, and in theories of long-term climate change, these recent trends are not connected with the melting of the Arctic sea ice and buildup of freshwater near the North Pole. Instead, they seem to be connected to shifts at the southern end of the planet, according to a recent University of Washington study in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
"It doesn't work like in the movie, of course," said Kathryn Kelly, an oceanographer at the UW's Applied Physics Laboratory. "The slowdown is actually happening very gradually, but it seems to be happening like predicted: It does seem to be spinning down."
The study looked at data from satellites and ocean sensors off Miami that have tracked what's known as the Atlantic overturning circulation for more than a decade. Together they show a definite slowdown since 2004, confirming a trend suspected before then from spottier data.
[...] "It appears that this 10-year slowdown is not related to salinity," Kelly said. In fact, despite more ice melt, surface water in the Arctic is getting saltier and therefore denser, she said, because of less precipitation. "That means the slowdown could not possibly be due to salinity—it's just backwards. The North Atlantic has actually been getting saltier."
[More...]
Instead, the authors saw a surprising connection with a current around the southern tip of South Africa. In what's known as the Agulhas Current, warm Indian Ocean water flows south along the African coast and around the continent's tip toward the Atlantic, but then makes a sharp turn back to join the stormy southern circumpolar current. Warm water that escapes into the Atlantic around the cape of South Africa is known as the Agulhas Leakage. The new research shows the amount of leakage changes with the quantity of heat transported northward by the overturning circulation.
"We've found that the two are connected, but I don't think we've found that one causes the other," Kelly said. "It's more likely that whatever changed the Agulhas changed the whole system."
She believes atmospheric changes may be affecting both currents simultaneously.
"Most people have thought this current should be driven by a salinity change, but maybe it's the [Southern Ocean] winds," Kelly said.
The finding could have implications for northern European and eastern U.S. climates, and for understanding how the world's oceans carry heat from the tropics toward the poles.
Have any Soylentils noticed any effect from the current slowdown?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 05 2016, @06:09PM
All the anti-immigration people should be forced to stay on the island...
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Wednesday October 05 2016, @06:18PM
Those immigrants who are ok with going to Sweden might still be tempted by the Frozen United Christian Kingdom, and they won't have to sneak onto ferries if they can just walk across the ice.
(Score: 5, Informative) by edIII on Wednesday October 05 2016, @07:02PM
There are very few immigrants. Let's call them what they are - REFUGEES.
Which is why you're probably correct. The refugees aren't seeking better lives in a more stable country, they're seeking to stay alive by getting away from ISIS and Assad. If I had to put up with that bullshit, then yeah, Siberia looks like a better option.
However, in both cases the correct response to "fixing" immigration and refugees from flooding into your country is to care about the country they were fleeing. Perhaps even help to fix it, which could be more economical than dealing with millions of refugees across Nimby-land.
Which I guess doesn't make any fucking difference if large parts of the world are going to disappear with rising oceans and become uninhabitable. Those Nimby-land people will have to realize there are no other backyards left.
That's where we are headed. A world of shifting refugee populations.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Wednesday October 05 2016, @07:19PM
Many are refugees. A massive amount are immigrants looking for a better life, away from bad not not life-threatening situations.
I'm sure you realize that UKIP, Brexit and friends are fueled by the "native" masses angry at the legal Polish and East-European influx which happened before the 2008 crisis, long before the Arab Spring. They had to take that one on the chin until they voted to Brexit, but they can legally turn their anger to the other immigrants who were dumb enough to be born outside the EU. The real refugees are only one extra set of newcomers.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday October 05 2016, @07:44PM
So yes,this is a problem. But it's not necessarily going to be a critical one. It's worth noting here that the US has a considerable ability to absorb refugees (even if the more delicate European countries do not) and in fact one could set up on new land masses refugee friendly countries along the line of the US system prior to 1920.
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by edIII on Wednesday October 05 2016, @07:47PM
Burn in hell you fucking idiot. You deserve to die when your such a denialist. Of course you would upend reality itself just so you can have a world in which human beings aren't responsible for our environment.
Piece of shit.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday October 05 2016, @08:34PM
Burn in hell you fucking idiot. You deserve to die when your such a denialist.
You're just another hypocritical, morally bankrupt, childish psychopath on the internet. Why do your views on the afterlife have any relevance?
Of course you would upend reality itself just so you can have a world in which human beings aren't responsible for our environment.
You might care to note that my point was factual. We already know the primary means of sea level rise possible. The distribution of land by elevation is already known. So we can project what happens when worst case scenarios happen. And as usual with climate change, we find that the effects aren't that bad for the long duration it'll happen over. Human societies are incredibly adaptive, including the absorption of refugees, and while there are probably limits, we can also help natural systems become more adaptive as well through work, law, and technology. We don't have to and probably won't be helpless in our "responsibility" nor do we need ignore more important problems than climate change in order to address it.
And I think it remains a glaring warning sign that climate change mitigation advocates can't show that their solutions are better than doing nothing. Remember the key dynamic here: poor people make more children. A lot of climate change "fixes" eventually produce an overpopulated world without the means to wean itself off of fossil fuels. It's time to end the hysterics and grow up. Do you want to fix real world problems or is it just going to be ranting about who deserves death du jour?
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Wednesday October 05 2016, @11:54PM
Tarbaby, khallow! Remember, it's a tarbaby.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by edIII on Thursday October 06 2016, @12:51AM
You have zero morality beyond "Capitalism is pure and wonderful", so shut the fuck up about morals. You don't know what they are, or why they matter.
You are a corporate apologist, a shill, and a staunch denialist anytime the discussion moves towards corporations taking responsibility for their actions and contributing positively to the communities they STEAL from.
Our world is dying, our people exploited, our people sick, and you would argue right up until the point of our collective death, that is everything is fine, corporations are good for us, and money is speech.
Again, burn in hell. BURN. When your skins falls off, may it grow back. So it can burn again.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Thursday October 06 2016, @01:55AM
Our world is dying, our people exploited, our people sick, and you would argue right up until the point of our collective death, that is everything is fine, corporations are good for us, and money is speech.
And you are full of shit. Let's go through that list, eh? World is dying? There are obvious environmental problems, pollution and species extinction, some on large scale. When I think dying, I think growing disruptions of global scale ecosystems. We're not close to that. Sure, if we continue polluting more and more, there will be such problems of such extent and severity that most people would agree the world is dying.
But here's the huge thing you ignore. We already have a large part of the world, the developed world, which has gone past that. Once the rest of the world joins them, the threat of global scale pollution is no longer a problem. This is something that's already fixable, just by staying out of the way for the most part. Even now, the current greatest polluter, China is making the first steps towards cleaning up its enormous mess. India will follow and sometime around the beginning of the next century so will Africa. That's what I consider the most likely outcome here.
Our people exploited? Welcome to cooperation where mutual exploitation (what most of us would call "working together" to use a less misleading term) for mutual gain is what civilization is all about.
Our people sick? Well, once again, in the developed world, they're healthier than they've ever been. So no.
and you would argue right up until the point of our collective death
Come up with an argument that's not shit. Show you're more than some self-loathing monster that would rather help us get better than kill us.
that is everything is fine
Everything is not fine. But your flavor of chicken little is a significant part of why everything isn't fine. There's way too many people out there that think we need to undergo harmful religious rituals of sacrifice and destruction to show how much we care. Maybe we should something productive instead, eh? Maybe we should fix actual problems, eh?
corporations are good for us
They have turned out to be a great way to organize people and do things together. They extend far past the business world and appear in both the non profit and public sectors as well. But what I think is particularly important here is the realization that nothing would improve, if we got rid of them. That's because none of what people consider problems of corporations really are. They're problems of the powerful and the wealthy given inordinate control of society.
money is speech
You can say whatever you want, when you want, how you want, you just can't spend a dime to do it. We'll see how influential your speech will be, when you aren't allowed to speak it via such economic restrictions.
Again, burn in hell. BURN. When your skins falls off, may it grow back. So it can burn again.
And may you one day get a clue. A CLUE. And then when that happens, may your brain grow a little bigger so that you can get another clue.
I think what is really sad here is that I have the moral high ground despite all your pointless insistence to the contrary. While we've heard of the Machiavelli maxim, its converse also holds. Means do not justify the ends. You can't ignore the consequences of your actions and still be moral. One should have moral means, moral ends, and moral outcomes. Without all three, you are excessively hurting people one way or another.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 06 2016, @01:07AM
Silly boy, you have a few migrants now and you end up with Trump. Just wait until the real flow of refugees starts. What kind of dick is going to be running your country then?
Absorb refugees LMAO.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday October 06 2016, @02:24AM
Silly boy, you have a few migrants now and you end up with Trump. Just wait until the real flow of refugees starts. What kind of dick is going to be running your country then?
The US already has a much higher tolerance for immigrants than most other countries. For example, for about the last 30 years, the US has had a higher per capita immigration rate than the EU had in 2015. The countries with much higher immigrant rates tend to be popular tourist destinations, oil rich Middle East countries with large numbers of guest workers, and developing world countries on the edge of war zones with weak border control. Syria was an example of the last category. This year [cia.gov] (estimated) is unusual due to the huge immigration flux to the EU. The US is currently below Spain, Norway, Canada, Australia, Sweden, Austria, Switzerland, and Ireland, but still way above United Kingdom, Germany, and France.
And why would the "real flow" of climate refugees happen in the first place? A huge thing that is missed here is the time. We're speaking of climate-induced migrations over hundreds and thousands of years. There are plenty of solutions over that time period that don't boil down to "send them all to the US". If there is a near future refugee crash, it's going to come from the usual sources: war, corruption, epic resource mismanagement, etc. Climate change can make those worse, but it's going to be a minor factor.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 06 2016, @04:11AM
Hey now, I may not agree with him, ever, but khallow is actually rational and typically pretty spot on with facts. Save that kind of bile for the delusional nutjobs like Runaway and jmorris. It shocked the hell out of me realizing that a rational right winger actually exists. Its like catching a shiny legendary pokemon in the wild.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday October 05 2016, @09:10PM
It's worth noting here that the US has a considerable ability to absorb refugees (even if the more delicate European countries do not)
Looking at the success of South Africa and Rhodesia (until they gave up and were wiped out) there's some space in Africa too. Also Russian Siberia.
If we can build Las Vegas in a desert, its worth pointing out we aren't running out of desert in Africa or Australia.
The problem with discussing the problem rationally and scientifically is there are a lot of very devout religious believers in the whole secular end times message of global warming and they get MIGHTY unhappy any time their solutions are questioned. How dare you guys be apostates etc etc.
(Score: 2) by edIII on Thursday October 06 2016, @01:12AM
It's also worth noting, that Las Vegas was a desert oasis before we got there. Additionally, it helped quite a bit that we had Hoover Dam. Without all of that cheap energy and plentiful water, I sincerely doubt Las Vegas would have grown into what it is today. Hoover Dam is right next to Las Vegas too, and Lake Mead is YUGE. These days the water levels are low though, and we might see climate change kill Las Vegas. That's much easier than you think when the water levels shut the damn off. No water and expensive electricity will turn Las Vegas into Detroit.
Las Vegas was only doing as well as it was before due to its bowl shape that allowed it to collect rain water in the center. Cesars Palace knows all about it with their million dollar systems to collect water and pump it into Lake Mead, lest it ruin a couple hundred million dollars in property :)
You need to pick another desert. Las Vegas has too many bonuses.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday October 06 2016, @03:15AM
Hoover Dam is right next to Las Vegas too, and Lake Mead is YUGE. These days the water levels are low though, and we might see climate change kill Las Vegas.
Resource mismanagement is not climate change. There's a two thousand year reconstruction [noaa.gov] of rainfall in the Colorado river watershed which shows several droughts more severe than the present. From the link:
Droughts in the West, including in the Upper Colorado Basin, have been getting more widespread and severe during the last 50 to 90 years of instrument-based weather records (large-scale U.S. weather records go back to 1895). Tree ring records provide a useful paleoclimatic index that extends our historical perspective of droughts centuries beyond the approximately 100-year instrumental record. A 2129-year paleoclimatic reconstruction of precipitation for northwest New Mexico indicates that, during the last 2000 years, there have been many droughts more severe and longer-lasting than the droughts of the last 110 years. This has implications for water management in the West. For example, the Colorado Compact is the legal agreement used for allocation of Colorado River waters among the western states. The Compact was negotiated early in the 20th century during a very wet period, which was not representative of the long-term climatic conditions of the West.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Bogsnoticus on Thursday October 06 2016, @02:48AM
> "When you add in that the northern latitudes, including Greenland and Antarctica become available for colonization"
Perhaps you should consult a map to work out exactly which direction Antarctica is.
Genius by birth. Evil by choice.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday October 06 2016, @03:02AM
(Score: 2) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Thursday October 06 2016, @09:12AM
> Eyeballing an elevation histogram [britannica.com], it looks like even complete loss of the ice caps, which only results in a 100 meter rise of sea level, is about 10% loss of existing land area which is not great, but still leaves a massive amount of backyard available for refugees.
Now overlay human population centres on that histogram. That 10% of land area houses a LOT more than 10% of the world's population.
Do you really want to have to move every coastal city, town and village 20 miles inland in the space of a century?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday October 06 2016, @04:58PM
Do you really want to have to move every coastal city, town and village 20 miles inland in the space of a century?
Depends. What do I get in exchange? If it's a universal developed world, then it is more than worth the cost.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Wednesday October 05 2016, @08:35PM
However, in both cases the correct response to "fixing" immigration and refugees from flooding into your country is to care about the country they were fleeing.
Perhaps you have a prescription for that?
Every country has a collection of gut-wounded public servants and politicians that have fallen on their sword solving middle east problems. Gosh if only they had "cared"!
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 05 2016, @10:55PM
Well lets be honest, a lot of the problems stem from greedy interests trying to control the black gold. The West did their best to undermine legitimate governments and install dictators that would give them what they wanted. Sure there are a lot of other problems, but Western interference has never been about helping, only controlling.
(Score: 2) by edIII on Thursday October 06 2016, @12:47AM
Like Anon said, we share a large portion of the responsibility for the Middle East. Had we stayed out of it, or even just been more compassionate to the Palestinians (more aid and rebuilding), then maybe we wouldn't have our issues today. However, we are every bit the imperialists that we are claimed to be. Black GOLD. Texas Tea. That's why we "care".
My idea? Well it's not a good one probably. It's so fucking bad that not only is their home a completely fucked up hell hole, they're leaving and fucking up others. I'm not referring to the refugees, but their ideology and terrorism.
My two thoughts are for the world to cut its losses and bomb the Middle East until it's "silent" ever more, accompanied by the thought that we come in and rebuild under fire.
Either solution is peppered with half-assed politicians that will constrain rebuilding efforts with "diplomacy" (corruption and who makes the money) and also constrain the military from implementing a "final solution" (noooo don't kill the peoples). We would have won Vietnam if we let the military do what it needed to do, but that wasn't a righteous activity by any stretch of the imagination so there was no support at home.
Syria could be different and we could approach it with the idea that we kill everything breathing in Syria and just let expatriated Syrians flow back into the country. A lot easier to rebuild when nobody is left alive right? We can not shoot women and children to the best of our abilities, but we can damn well make sure that Assad is DEAD. We kill the remaining people in government, kill the higher ups, and decimate the military in to complete submission. Not like we haven't done that before, and we have pictures of Japan surrendering to us.
In a way, what we care about is creating safe land for Syrians to live on, and that used to Syria. Making it "Great Again" is simply a matter of bullets pointed correctly and then actually fired.
Palestine is easier since they're in a position to finally receive help, if only the world would give it. Iran may actually be able to be worked with, once Palestine is no longer a talking point beyond, "See how we brought peace?". Iraq is a cluster fuck, and they just need to go through their civil war that we engendered. Pakistan deserved to be invaded during Afghanistan, along with Saudi Arabia.
Most of the Middle East is so fucked up just because they can use Palestine as an issue, and that's an issue we can actually remove with the appropriate political willpower and resources.
It's Syria now, but if those problems get worse, or exacerbated by climate change, then we may find ourselves living with the people of the Middle East in our own backyards. I don't want to do that, and I don't think you want to either right?
So either through destruction or creation, we need to handle the Middle East.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.