This isn't supposed to be happening 01 December 05

as I posted similar thoughts before. For me, if the Gulf appears to be heating up faster than normal then the heat is being trapped from slower exiting currents.

Since the ice melt is occurring and since this can slow currents like the Gulf Stream through reduced salinity, then I assumed that it must be occurring and for this not to occur may violate the laws of physics anyway.

And, since the total heat transport system supports both ideas occurring simultaneously, then for me it seemed these hurricanes had to indicate a slowdown of the Gulf Stream.

I also noticed that some of those hurricanes increased in intensity very quickly when they met the exiting waters of the Gulf. I imagined this extra heat energy would not be available if the Gulf Stream was moving this heat sufficiently northward.

All the best,

Dan

Well done Almuth, I think the Realclimate response is illuminating as well: just goes to show what nasty surprises may be in store for us.

And well done Mark on your succinct presentation on BBC breakfast the other morning. How did they manage to slip up and not find a denialist like Bellamy to bluster against you? How unbalanced!!!

Now, to save some time and effort on behalf of our resident contrarians, let’s insert some suggested responses to the article above on their behalf.

Jimbo: “Oh, oh, give me a break here! what is this latest conspiracy from all the tree-hugging-liberal-ecoterrorist-heart-on-the-sleeve-pseudo-scientists to blame it all on the USA again? I do not believe it, first you say we’re responsible for warming the place up, next all you snivelling Brits are going to start complaining that we’re responsible for freezing your foggy little island….....Jeez!

then we’ll have Norb chip in:

” do you really expect me to react with anything other than contempt for this scare-mongering? I’ve said all along that there is more snow than ever falling at the poles and the sea-ice-melt is down to underwater volcanoes. After 40 years in the EPA I’ve come to realise that tobacco, asbestos, chlorinated biphenols, plutonium, CFC’s, Paraquat, GM crops, organo-phosphates and DDT are all misrepresented icons of ultimate human well-being. All those who think that the complete industrialisation of every square inch of productive land and the promotion of unfettered global capitalism as the only saviour of civilsation is dangerous extremist dogma have just proven beyond all doubt what spineless intellectual neanderthals you really are. I sneer at you all.”

There you are: done! No need for stress, high blood pressure or further invective, just sit back guys and have a beer and watch all us ecomentalists go apoplectic!

I’m off to support a fundraiser for a community windfarm’s public enquiry so I’ll miss the uproar that ensues.

best to all

Colin

you da man.

What Colin said.

Best,

D

I have nothing to add! I am still laughing!

Best Regards,

Dan

I was just reading in Real Climate and discovered a few facts I did not know at:

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=159

”...However, my pedantic side obliges me to point out that the Gulf Stream is a predominantly wind-driven western boundary current that moves up from the Gulf of Mexico along the US coast to Cape Hatteras, at which point it heads off into the central Atlantic … It then turns into the North Atlantic Drift which is really the flow of water responsible for the anomalous northward heat transport in the Atlantic…”

So, based on this and other comments I read about the current stability of the “Gulf Stream”, I am not sure if the Gulf heat is increased from slower exiting currents. I guess sometimes what may appear logical to me could be explained by other factors.

I will leave climate science to the climate experts.

Dan

So that just about tops off the year-a record hurricane season, massive bogs across Siberia melting and releasing methane, record lows for the artic sea ice, possibly the warmest year on record etc, etc…and now this.

I wonder how long it will take the good people of Western Europe to reach the perverse, but I fear inevitable, conclusion that they are better off pumping as much CO2 as possible into the atmosphere in order to counter the anticipated cooling that this will cause? Certainly scope for a massive increase in energy requirements if temperatures do fall.

Thanks to Colin for the above-highly amusing. Here’s looking forward to 2006.

Cheers

We all need a good laugh now and again. Well done. I wonder if they get it!

Douglas Coker

PS That’s set me up for the demo.

There seems to have been a lot of emphasis on Europe cooling if the THC slows or even collapses. If the THC slows with far less climate forcing than expected, then presumably a sudden collapse becomes more likely, too. I have looked at all the relevant RealClimate postings and links given, and UNEP reports on this, and it is worth to remember what the real fears are:

Yes, there is a real chance of some temporary regional cooling, probably most significant in Norway.

Also variations in extreme weather throughout much of the Northern Hemisphere. The period which lots of people link to a past THC shutdown (Younger Dryas) was preceded by a few decades of flickerings – very cold, very hot, jumping from one state to another year on year (although I understand that the THC shutdown at the time is only a strong theory – we can’t really go back in time and measure it).

If the North Atlantic cools, even relative to the other oceans, the Asian monsoon could dramatically weaken. We are speking of severe global food shortages here, if this was to happen.

Expanding droughts in central Africa feared – certainly a dramatic change in circulation patterns.

Dramatic warming of the tropical southern hemisphere, including Antarctica, with rapid rises in sea levels possible. And more hurricanes, too, in the warmer tropical waters of the world.

Predicted decline in North Atlantic plankton by up to 50%, leading to vastly higher rises in atmospheric CO2 emissions (deep ocean plankton is already significantly reduced).

Predicted decline in ocean oxygenation/oxygen transfer, with likely devastating effects on plankton and all marine life.

And yes, scientists looking at the extreme greenhouse warming 55 million years ago find evidence of acid, stagnant, largely dead oceans in a hot world with maximum sea levels.

Just to put some perspective on the rather minor “we might get colder winters” scares – and to depress everybody else (sorry).

Almuth

Following are an article from Science Magazine and a letter from Carl Wunsch to Nature. These pieces and the tepid response from RealClimate that Almuth reported, make me think that unbridled alarm is premature.

In fact, the responses that I see here are examples of what I have been discussing, that is excessive hysteria in response to a preliminary and unverified finding. We are not discussing what is happening, we are discussing the worst of what could possibly happen if the worst extrapolation of the trend reported in Nature occurs.

Those who post on this site tend to compare the worst-case climate scenarios to the least traumatic case scenarios of industrial slowdowns. That is inherently not productive.

SCIENCE MAGAZINE ARTICLE

Science 2 December 2005: Vol. 310. no. 5753, pp. 1403 – 1405 DOI: 10.1126/science.310.5753.1403

News of the Week GLOBAL CLIMATE CHANGE: The Atlantic Conveyor May Have Slowed, But Don’t Panic Yet Richard A. Kerr

The ponderous churning of the North Atlantic Ocean that carries warm water northward and returns deep, cold water to the south appears to have slowed in the past decade or two. That would mean that this oceanic radiator is bringing less heat to warm Europe and, if global warming is behind the slowdown, will carry less and less heat to high latitudes in the future. But the slowing is hardly larger than the uncertainty of the observations. And “we don’t know enough about the ocean to know whether this represents a trend” that will persist, says physical oceanographer Harry Bryden of the National Oceanography Centre (NOC) in Southampton, U.K. Bryden and NOC colleagues report detection of the slowdown this week in Nature.

Oceanographers only last year put down a string of instrumented moorings spanning the Atlantic from West Africa to the Bahamas, so for a long conveyor record, the NOC group had to draw on five oceanographic surveys across that stretch of the Atlantic between 1957 and 2004. During ship crossings of a month or two, researchers measured seawater temperature and salinity from the surface to near the bottom. The NOC group used seawater densities calculated from those observations, plus current measurements of the Gulf Stream passing by Florida and a few standard assumptions, to estimate the currents heading north and south through the depth of the Atlantic.

The Gulf Stream remained steady through the 47-year period, and Atlantic flows remained much the same through the 1992 survey. But according to the NOC group’s analysis, the conveyor appears to have slowed dramatically in 1998 and 2004. Fifty percent more Gulf Stream near-surface waters were turning back southward before reaching very far to the north, whereas part of the deep southward flow of cold water had decreased by 50%. All in all, the conveyor had slowed by 30%.

The slowing, although sizable, is comparable to the estimated uncertainty of the observations, Bryden notes. Still, “it’s real variability,” he says. Observed temperature changes driving the conveyor slowdown in shallower waters in the west and in deeper waters are just what he would expect from salinity and circulation changes previously reported in the far north (Science, 16 April 2004, p. 371). That’s where the conveyor turns down from the surface and heads back south. “The pattern is reasonably convincing,” says physical oceanographer Peter Rhines of the University of Washington, Seattle. “It’s a pretty nice picture.”

The picture is still fuzzy, however. “It would be dangerous to jump to the conclusion that there’s a persistent weakening” of the conveyor circulation, says ocean and climate modeler Richard Wood of the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research in Exeter, U.K. Wood, Rhines, and Bryden all worry that the near-instantaneous snapshots taken by the ocean surveys might have been misleading. Like any part of the complex climate system, the conveyor is bound to slow down at times and speed up at others. The two latest surveys, Wood says, may have happened to catch the Atlantic as the conveyor slowed temporarily, giving the impression that a permanent change had taken place.

On the other hand, the NOC analysis may not have even captured what happened in the past decade or so. Climate models simulating the conveyor in a warming world don’t call for such a large slowdown until sometime in the next century, Wood notes. In fact, climate researcher Jeff Knight of the Hadley Centre and colleagues recently reported that changing sea surface temperatures suggest that the conveyor has speeded up a bit since the 1970s (Science, 1 July, p. 41). And physical oceanographers Carl Wunsch and Patrick Heimbach of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have just crunched far more oceanographic data from a variety of sources over the interval of dramatic change (1993 to 2004) in the NOC analysis. In a paper submitted for publication, they report a small slowdown, a quarter the size of the NOC group’s. The change in heat transported northward is negligible, they calculate.

So has the conveyor slowed? Might it continue to slow? “We don’t know,” says Wunsch. And it may take a decade or two more of watching and waiting to know for sure.

LETTER FROM CARL WUNSCH TO NATURE.

“Sir – Your News story “Gulf Stream probed for early warnings of system failure” (Nature 427, 769 (2004)) discusses what the climate in the south of England would be like “without the Gulf Stream.” Sadly, this phrase has been seen far too often, usually in newspapers concerned with the unlikely possibility of a new iceage in Britain triggered by the loss of the Gulf Stream.

European readers should be reassured that the Gulf Stream’s existence is a consequence of the large-scale wind system over the North Atlantic Ocean, and of the nature of fluid motion on a rotating planet. The only way to produce an ocean circulation without a Gulf Stream is either to turn off the wind system, or to stop the Earth’s rotation, or both.

Real questions exist about conceivable changes in the ocean circulation and its climate consequences. However, such discussions are not helped by hyperbole and alarmism. The occurrence of a climate state without the Gulf Stream anytime soon – within tens of millions of years – has a probability of little more than zero.

Carl Wunsch Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology” (Nature 428, 601, April 8, 2004)

With the words “Told You So” printed on it.

All have fun at the march.

Love Ian.

Clearly, they should begin listening to Mark.

Nov. 29, 2005 — The nation is now wrapping up the 11th year of a new era of heightened Atlantic hurricane activity. This era has been unfolding in the Atlantic since 1995, and is expected to continue for the next decade or perhaps longer. NOAA attributes this increased activity to natural occurring cycles in tropical climate patterns near the equator. These cycles, called “the tropical multi-decadal signal,” typically last several decades (20 to 30 years or even longer). As a result, the North Atlantic experiences alternating decades long (20 to 30 year periods or even longer) of above normal or below normal hurricane seasons. NOAA research shows that the tropical multi-decadal signal is causing the increased Atlantic hurricane activity since 1995, and is not related to greenhouse warming. See, http://www.magazine.noaa.gov/stories/mag184.htm

Norbert,

I like NOAA but it may be possible they are a little conservative with their views on climate influences. From your source link, NOAA also said that

“Knowledge of the tropical multi-decadal signal is relatively new, and more research needs to be done.”

With respect to the predictive powers of NOAA, what did NOAA predict for the 2005 hurricane season in May, 2005? From the link below, I share their prediction:

http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/outlooks/hurricane2005/May/hurricane.html

“For the 2005 Atlantic hurricane season the ACE index is expected to be in the range of 120%-190% of the median. The outlook also calls for 12-15 tropical storms, with 7-9 becoming hurricanes, and 3-5 of these becoming major hurricanes [categories 3-4-5 on the Saffir-Simpson scale]. While it is reasonable to expect this range of tropical storms and hurricanes, the total seasonal activity measured by the ACE index can certainly be in the predicted range without all three of these criteria being met ….The vast majority of the tropical storms and hurricanes in 2005 will form during August-October. ….”

[Note: NOAA said: “…certainly be in the predicted range”]

Now, what did their August update say? An excerpt from their link below:

http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/outlooks/hurricane2005/August/hurricane.html

“For the 2005 Atlantic hurricane season the outlook calls for an extremely active season, with the seasonal ACE index forecasted to range from 180%-270% of the median. This range is above the 175% baseline that Goldenberg et al. (Science, 2001) use to define a hyperactive season. The outlook also calls for a seasonal total of 18-21 tropical storms, with 9-11 becoming hurricanes, and 5-7 of these becoming major hurricanes [categories 3-4-5 on the Saffir-Simpson scale]. Because the ACE index does not directly account for the numbers of tropical storms, hurricanes, and major hurricanes, the predicted ACE range can verify even if these numbers fall outside their predicted ranges.”

What was the “reality” of the 2005 hurricane season? A recent NOAA excerpt below:

http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2005/s2540.htm

“Nov. 29, 2005 — The 2005 Atlantic hurricane season is the busiest on record and extends the active hurricane cycle that began in 1995—a trend likely to continue for years to come. The season included 26 named storms, including 13 hurricanes in which seven were major (Category 3 or higher)…”

My assessment below:

Based on these three dated NOAA Assessments (May, August, and November), I have noticed that NOAA was very conservative in all their estimates of “what was going to happen” and “what actually did happen”. Reality is the measure of one’s predictive strength! So NOAA went from 12-15 named storms predicted in May, to 18-21 named storms predicted as late as August, and “reality” provides us with the correct answer which is 26 named storms which according to my math is 173 percent to 217 percent above their May prediction for the 2005 season!

So, when the “harsh reality” is more than double the predicted outcome by your friends at NOAA, then “just maybe”, it is possible that your simplistic assumptions that the worst case scenarios are unlikely becomes simply unsupported.

What I keep reading Norbert is that quite often the true reality can even overshoot the predicted high range of the predicted worst case scenario. In this case, NOAA missed the mark by quite a bit!

If reality could support your basic assumptions, then I think the good people here might be inclined to give your focus the benefit of the doubt.

What you are suggesting is we should plan for the middle of a range and take the average as the design focus and not the worst case scenario. Oh really!

A true professional would never be that presumptuous. For example, if a bridge had 3 data points on its strength criteria to support an intended design load, then the true engineer uses that data on the worst-case strength criteria rather than an average number. Why? So the bridge is unlikely to collapse!

In addition, a safety factor is applied. For bridges, they are often designed to carry many times the maximum design load. For space exploration, because of weight limitations, the safety factor has to be much lower and closer to the maximum stress-factors permitted. Another example is 3 Mile Island. The nuclear core through gross human error went to the worst-case scenario but the containment building did not pop like Chernobyl did. I know 3 Mile Island was a disaster but the containment building held! Those engineers responsible for that part of the system did their job so Three Mile Island was what is was but it did not become a Chernobyl!

With respect to GW/CC, the prudent engineering response would be to design a total solution to meet a reasonable expectation on the worst case scenario and even include a modest safety factor. Why??? Because the expectation when engineers are involved is success not failure! So, what true professionals would suggest we must do may be something many of us would not want to hear including myself.

What would help tremendously would be to eliminate any remaining ambiguity. Scientists have more responsibility then they realize in eliminating remaining uncertainties and with respect to their research, I suggest more funds be provided them.

The real danger is when the scientific community ends up overly conservative in their projections which may reduce our time necessary for any successful prevention or mitigation strategy.

I wonder what a hundred billion dollars would do for their research efforts! What would be the results? Maybe better results than similar funds already invested in Iraq.

Bottom line: I think NOAA is a very valuable organization but they may be overly conservative in their assessment of the climate factors which contributed to the 2005 season based on their less than superior performance in predicting it!

Dan

It is clear the experts are not sure yet.

It is also clear it is too early to tout.

Remember: earlier in the year, we had Kerry Emanuel say the opposite of this press release. We also didn’t have certain people use that preliminary tout in their cheerleading, maybe because it contradicts a worldview.

Best,

D

I agree that it is far too soon to assume that the recent increase in hurricane frequency is the result of the warming of the atmosphere. I said that in my post. Yet, there are many who post here (and Mark) who appear to have let their worldviews overwhelm their patience, which makes them eager to pounce on any press release that reinforces their opinion that mankind is shepherding the planet down the road to perdition.

Kerry Emanuel published a paper in which he described his analysis of recent hurricane data and concluded that GW might be causing an increase in frequency. Many (not just the hated skeptics) have criticized that paper. Unless I remember wrongly, this site did seize upon that paper and incorporate it’s conclusion into its base of proven aspects of GW.

Many would like to avoid false negatives re global warming (acting as if GW is not contributing to any problems, such as hurricanes, when in fact it is). Unlike scientists we lay people can attribute big fat hurricanes to AGW to our heart’s content. It’s only the earth we’re trying to save, not our lousy reputations. I even attributed Hurricane Andrew back in 1992 in part (the nastiest part) to AGW. Maybe someday scientists will have the ability to say whether or not I was right. For now, they just can’t say either way for (scientific) sure.

esp in cost-effective ways, or ways that reduce other problems – the slowing of the ocean conveyor or the likelihood AGW is increasing hurricane intensity and/or frequency only makes it all the more imperative that we act.

We should understand that science is a cultural construction of the real reality and not the real reality, of which none of us has completely correct knowledge – not scientists, not me, not you. And science changes. What I’ve seen of climate science over the past 17 years is that it has become more & more certain re AGW, and more certain of the dangers, risks, & harms, and these are increasingly better understood. I for one would expect science to continue along these lines into the indefinite future—the “it just keeps getting worse & worse” direction. And if we reduce our GHGs (esp. cost-effectively), then no harm done, a lot of non-AGW harm prevented or reduced, even if it turns out I’m wrong later on.

I respect science, but I think it is much too conservative in its assessment of problems, esp serious problems. On some of these AGW aspects, such as runaway GW, if we wait for science to tell us “it’s now certain,” by then it will be way to late to avert. Only a fool would wait around for scientific (95%) certainty on some issues.

“One thing that the RealClimate team make clear, though, is that this study puts an end to any speculation that the intense North Atlantic hurricane season was caused by natural cycle.”

The RealClimate topic that you refer to does indeed challenge the assertion by Dr. William Gray (and others) that hurricane activity is linked to the Atlantic Thermohaline circulation. However, I thought that the majority of climatologists accept that the number of tropical storms developing in the Atlantic is governed by “natural” cycles, such as the NAO and ENSO – and that Global Warming is likely to lead to more intense storms, but not to an increasing number of storms.

Am I missing something here?