Atlantic Ocean currents weaken, signalling big weather changes: study
reuters.com
reuters.com
source: canadian
For those not in the know, the rubber is formulated to be softer at cold temperatures. Summer/performance tires get ridiculously hard and all-season tires are “meh” at best.
Edit: I was wrong.
This summer: https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2021/07/05/siberia-forest-fir...
2019: https://www.king5.com/article/news/local/unprecedented-numbe...
2018: https://crosscut.com/2018/07/first-smoky-skies-season-arrive...
Im thinking of the scene in Jurassic Park where Jeff Goldblum says: 'Life finds a way.'
I won't get into some contentious discussion, but let's just say it's more and more viable to grow and produce wine in Denmark, which is on its own a positive thing. So that's just one example of a positive change.
I mean, the cold y'all had this winter was possibly climate change, so you have that to look forward to. Likely worse wildfires, too. East Texas will get higher humidity.
So... probably not too nice.
But the warming up of the sea and atmosphere is giving more energy potential to our weather systems. So every hurricane season, tornado season, fire season, monsoonal season, etc is getting worse and worse. And there's no such thing as isolated climate. That extra energy in the system is world wide, which is really bad for most of us.
There may be places that have slight benefits, sure. But the worldwide negative effects cancel those out IMO.
Global warming is adding somewhere between 0.3 and 0.5% more energy to the system. It's a neglible amount of energy for the overall system.
What it does is change the equilibrium of a complex system. Things are going to be different. Not necessarily more intense across the board.
I believe humans may be contributing significantly to current change by increasing greenhouse gases.
It is unknown whether this is a significant problem or a problem humans can or should solve.
We’ll probably adapt, but it might be really bumpy for a decade or so in the 2050s.
Yeah, nah. It doesn't work like that.
But:
1. Deny the Problem Exists
2. Deny We're the Cause
3. Deny It's a Problem
4. Deny We can Solve It
5. It's too Late
5b. And it's the fault of doom prophets who scared us into denying it (it's a mechanism to resist stress) and should have communicated better.
1: https://www.wsj.com/articles/climate-change-natural-disaster...
edit: added "in this regard". Did not mean to suggest that we know how all of the implications of global warming pan out.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/mar/08/global-heati...
It's most correct to plan around every location getting more wet, more dry, more hot, more cold, more storms and more droughts.
This doesn't really track. We're talking about adding less than 1% increase in energy.
A large variation, yes. A direct relationship between a small increase in input and a corresponding large increase in a specific output, no.
Sure, which makes the blanket statement the GP made incorrect:
>Putting more energy into a meta-stable chaotic system will greatly increase the number of extremes across the board
In either case, a 1% change in energy input is always going to be a big deal with regards to an energy dependent chaotic system.
Chaotic systems, in essence, are known for its unpredictability. Watch this to get an idea: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pEjZd-AvPco
Remember that humans are actually very adaptable, our range of habitats extends from the arctic to the tropics, desert to rainforest. Most life is not so tolerant.
(I’m not actually concerned with us running out of cheap abundant energy; PV is already fantastic in this regard, and in a hypothetical collapse of all dispatchable power sources that included never being able to make more batteries, we would be severely inconvenienced rather than utterly finished).
The same Texas where hundreds of people froze to death in February? Seems like there has been some extreme weather.
Just need to make sure you sneak in before that flood, but if you try to time it just right you'll probably wait too long and be in the same situation as everyone else.
I would like to sell it and move further north in the next 5-7 years myself, hopefully, probably either Wisconsin or Michigan, near the Great Lakes. The decision isn't 100% up to me, though, as I'm married. We have been talking about it, though.
Why is that? Chicago flooding risk?
Also I'm asthmatic, and the air quality where I live already has several days a year where it's unwise for me to go outside for too long (and so my dogs don't get their walks :/), and the number of those days are expected to triple by 2050. I can't find that link offhand, but here's one that says that Chicago now has worse air quality than Los Angeles, having stretches of 2 weeks of bad air quality, and that's last year, not in the future[3].
I'm not super concerned about flooding where I live specifically, since I'm in the far suburbs. I do live near enough to a river that it floods some streets in my city that I drive on, but it's already doing that now anyway. Downtown Chicago could see some flooding from the Lake, but it won't be anywhere near as bad as the coasts. I'm actually considering moving to a place that's much closer to Lake Michigan, just up in Wisconsin or Michigan.
But also if we blow past our estimates of warming and get to 4 degrees Celsius or higher, then a good chunk of the US is expected to start turning into a desert, and where I live is approximately where the edge of that is expected to be[4].
I imagine the process will take long enough that I'll be dead before it fully happens, but I also would like to secure a decent home further North before the eventual rush so I can still get a place at a cheap-to-decent price.
[1]: https://climatechange.chicago.gov/climate-impacts/climate-im...
[2]: https://www.afr.com/policy/energy-and-climate/world-to-hit-t...
[3]: https://abc7chicago.com/chicago-air-quality-weather-unhealth...
Notice that "short term" in nature is probably a very long time for a human :)
http://uploads.oneregionforward.org/content/uploads/2015/01/...
Give it a few years. I live in Bucharest (Romania), located at ~45 Northern latitude, and I’ve first started seeing fig trees around here about 10 years ago. In the last few years I’ve started seeing more and more of them, so much so that I’ve started taking photos of almost all of them and I’m thinking of putting those photos on a map and exporting the geo-locations somewhere on GitHub in a .kml or geo-json file for other people to look at.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/1981/02/01/nyregion/big-atom-waste-s...
There have been two weather related massive grid failures in Texas this year so far. I would not want to live there as climate change intensifies. The winters are going to suck.
Slow or local changes are ok because life adapts nicely.
Brutal or global changes will also see adaptation, but will cause much pain and damages.
Moving a cristal glass on a few yards or meters at the average speed of 4 miles or km an hour may be fine for the glass or not, depending if your speed is mostly constant, or not.
If you move the glass excrucingly slowly first, of throw it brutally at the last inch/cm, it will be bad for the glass. You won't hear about the good stories about this, because there are not aligned with the nature if the situation.
On the other hand, there are big risks inherent to change. You don't get to pick just the good parts of climate change. Spitballing here: risks to food stability from droughts, fires, etc. Some areas no longer economically support farming. Other areas open up but aren't as productive, so food is a bigger part of your budget and might be subject to disruption. Political risks: displaced people start eyeing the habitable places and find ways to make life miserabile unless they're let in. Costs of the disruption while everyone tries to adapt weigh on the economy and make the products/services you take for granted today more expensive or unavailable. Your children (or others that you care about) will have to deal with even worse. And things don't stop getting worse until greenhouse gas emissions are dealt with.
The mentality of looking at the silver lining while ignoring the rest is wrong on so many obvious levels.
Have the other major climate models accounted for this? Most I've seen have predicted rapid warming in North America. Not sure how to reconcile the difference. Perhaps the cooling effect is more concentrated over the oceans and coasts?
Yes, models have consistently predicted warming and drying of the western US at least since I was running climateprediction.net HadCM3 models (through BOINC) in the 00s: the return of the Great American Desert, basically everywhere west of the Mississippi and south of British Columbia.
Secondly, the cooling is an average, and relative to the situation without collapse of the AMOC. In most places, it still gets hot; but in Northern Europe, not so much. It even cools relative to the situation in 1900, IIRC.
And yes, you are right about the location. The visible part of the AMOC is called the Gulf Stream, and it's the reason London does not have the same climate as Labrador.
It's just so depressing. No one cares, no one is willing to do anything about it. All the politicians say that it'll get fixed at some point in the future (i.e. after their careers) so that their current donors don't get mad.
You also have the people who see the evidence for a warming climate, and just say "well that still doesn't mean we humans have anything to do with it". Even if it was a completely natural process, the result is going to be bad for us. We should do something.
Oh, we (the global "we") will, eventually. It's just that the incentives for politicians are to let crises get bad before acting, so that people notice them and remember them.
No-one (well hardly anyone) remembers people who stopped a catastrophe from happening in the first place. For example, Stanislav Petrov ought to have a statue in every town in the world.[1] But "who's he?" is what you get when you mention him.
In the case of climate change, when the effects are bad enough for politicians to act, their actions will be draconian but ineffective. I can't offer any Disney ending to the story, but we must carry on anyway. It won't be the end of the world, just a much worse future than we might have had.
We have science and easily observable evidence to guide this change.
Just need to do it now.
Intransigent politicians will be out, and politicians who're in-step with the populace will be in.
2.5% improvement since last US Congress electoral cycle, of more politicians who acknowledge climate science.
Climate deniers: https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/green/news/2021/03/3...
Still with 32% (139 of 435) denying climate science, we have a ways to go.
To be perfectly clear, there is exactly one political party in the United States who still doesn't even acknowledge anthropogenic climate change, never mind taking any steps to change things. It's incredibly frustrating that this too gets framed as a "both sides" issue despite all evidence indicating it's a one sided issue.
I moved off grid two years ago, bought 5ha of abandoned farmland, now more like 30ha, and am rewilding it - transplanted lots of saplings, encouraged wildlife, and within two years we’ve gone from fire-risk scrub to a young ash and oak forest, which is already providing cover for third succession species. We had a fire from a cigarette by a road last week, and it just stopped at the edge of the forest. Green undergrowth doesn’t burn very well.
Long dry springs have started running. Local farmers are taking notice - we’ve had people coming by and turning green with envy at our running water, in August. There was nothing on this land - just a few hopeful looking dips that looked like old water courses. Other people are now planting up around their old springs, which they all bulldozed bare decades ago when they got pumped irrigation from the river - which now runs dry from June - Sept every year, as all the water is pumped out to evaporate on the bare earth of the highlands.
Hunting is a huge part of the lifestyle here, and it’s done pretty sustainably - I’ve been really enheartened talking to people here about the importance of large wildlife to the ecosystem. Local hunt have agreed to have a two year moratorium on boar hunting near us, so we can collect data on population and the impact of their activities - our hope is that by providing habitat for them they stop being an agricultural pest, and their numbers can rebound to the point where their population is stable, and able to support apex predators - wolves. Normal, rural folk are seeing the devastation the changing climate is bringing (fires, floods, fires, floods), and there’s a genuine desire to do something.
Our energy is all renewable, apart from a few weeks in the winter when we run the generator (although that goes next year - new hydro turbine on order).
We don’t fly any more - covid made that decision really easy - all travel is overland. Sure, takes longer - and gives you so much more to see.
I can’t stop global climate change, but I can at least stop being part of the problem - and if enough people take that step, then maybe there’s hope for “we”.
Living in the city feels really more and more repulsive to me, so hearing about people who have moved off-grid or to a rural location sounds super interesting. I have so many questions now, sorry.
Where are you located roughly geographically? (Trying to map your story into places close to me. I'm in Sweden and trying to form a picture of everything you described, and judging from the biome with ash and oak you're likely to the south of my location, latitude-wise.)
Was the farmland a big investment? Do you have prior professional experience with what you do there -- I mean, what you've done sounds successful, how did you know what has to be done? Do you work from your farm? Do you have a blog or something?
No, the land was dirt cheap (less than €0.10 per m2), and we’re only working a small orchard garden - we’ll likely expand that a little in time, and add some glasshouses for winter produce. Relying heavily on automation, as farming is a faff. It’s all a learning experience - both the forestry and rewilding processes, as well as the small agricultural experiments we’re doing.
That movie was nothing more than modern day, “the end is nigh” doomsaying. Is man made global warming real? Almost certainly, but it’s hard to call a documentary visionary when basically none of its predictions have panned out.
Also because even though stopped clocks are right twice a day, you shouldn’t use them for timekeeping — Fiction can be satire, or have a social message, or be hard science to give a narrative explanation to confusing-but-real physics, but it can also be Harry Potter, The Hobbit… or the wildly implausible specific events and timescales in The Day After Tomorrow: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_After_Tomorrow#Politic...
This seems somewhat counter productive, if the northern hemesphere is cooling, how would that result with sea levels rising? Or they're not related ?
This really seems strange, would a new `current` not naturally establish based on the temperature relocations ?
I'm guessing you mean counterintuitive.
That's one of the great things about the scientific method, that it tells you things you never would have guessed.
> how would that result with sea levels rising?
The Gulf Stream (part of the AMOC) brings warm water north, Evaporation happens (and the evaporated water rains out over land, where some is absorbed or flows south). The remaing sea water on the surface is now saltier and denser so sinks.
Without the AMOC, the surface water is less dense. The local mean sea level rises due to gravitational effects. Precipitation also happens more over the sea, freshening the surface sea water. Fresh water is most dense (compact) at 4 degrees Celsius. Salt affects this, but the less salt there is, the smaller the effect.
I guess when you crunch the numbers you get the result they state.
> would a new `current` not naturally establish
Last I checked, some years ago, I think it was believed that no new large-scale overturning current would establish for some thousands of years, which means the sea stratifies (settles into non-mixing layers), with a top relatively fresh and light layer over dense anoxic deeps.
And, lets bury the lede of why no one will care about this unless they are already on board for fighting climate change.
However, the effects are not felt for 80+ years, so, presumably, that concern will evaporate for most people alive today, as they will certainly not experience these externalities.
Thus at the end, the click-bait nature of this article is revealed, as the author notes at the end, that all this dire concern will simply not influence the vast majority of decisions, as concerns about climate change have for the last 30 years.
I use "bury the lede" ironically as someone who read this article as something that may, finally, change the idiotic production and development patterns we've been following in the face the climate change threat, when instead, the real part of the story is that, no, no one will care.
Population setup to be reliant on current system will need to change to use different systems.
The Day After Tomorrow (2004) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0319262/
2 minutes summary - trailer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ku_IseK3xTc
But it was pretty entertaining if you could find a way to stay plugged into the movie and not feel disenchanted by the concept of polar cyclones icing things with tropospheric air. Still, there was that initial kernel of truth to it, which is what we're reading about now.
(not a climate guy; I'm probably getting some parts of this wrong)
After the Warming: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfE8wBReIxw
> Twentieth Century Fox invited a group of scientists to preview this movie, to test their reactions to the "science" used in it. None of the scientists were impressed with what they say, although most conceded that the movie was enjoyable nonsense.
> The consultation by N.A.S.A. scientists was requested before the filming of this movie, but N.A.S.A. stated that the events in this movie were too ridiculous to actually occur, and denied the request.