This is the first definitive proof that things are changing, and climate change is likely responsible.
The Gulf Stream plays a significant role in maintaining the climate of the US East Coast and Western Europe. "We conclude with a high degree of confidence that Gulf Stream transport has indeed slowed by about 4% in the past 40 years."
The full study is Here
The Gulf Stream is a major ocean current located off the East Coast of the United States. It carries a tremendous amount of seawater and along with it heat, carbon, and other ocean constituents. Because of this, the Gulf Stream plays an important role in weather and climate, influencing phenomena as seemingly unrelated as sea level along coastal Florida and temperature and precipitation over continental Europe. Given how important this ocean current is to science and society, scientists have tried to determine whether the Gulf Stream has undergone significant changes under global warming, but so far, they have not reached a firm conclusion. Here we report our effort to synthesize available Gulf Stream observations from the Florida Straits near Miami, and to assess whether and how the Gulf Stream transport there has changed since 1982. We conclude with a high degree of confidence that Gulf Stream transport has indeed slowed by about 4% in the past 40 years, the first conclusive, unambiguous observational evidence that this ocean current has undergone significant change in the recent past. Future studies should try to identify the cause of this change.
Rise in sea levels on the east coast, reduced rain in the east coast, stronger storms, and more precipitation in Europe and the tropics. According to wiki.
I think it'll also make some areas cold as fuck and probably heat up the gulf.
The consequences are unpredictable. More extreme weather is about the only certainty.
The energy of the heat transfer will not just be missing in Europe. It'll also be in excess in the Caribbeans, perhaps creating stronger winds worldwide.
Imagine a house with water radiators, where you turn off the circulation pump while keeping the furnace on full blast. It's gotta go somewhere.
Maybe the warming and freezing will cancel out and the much smaller islands that will be left after the sea levels rise will still be temperate and worth living on.
Edit: This is not an "I'm alright, Jack" comment. I'd rather this wasn't even a vague possibility and that the planet wasn't warming out of control.
So's Norway - quite a few places on the west coast (the most inhabited non-Oslo part of the country) rely on the fact that the gulf stream keeps them unusually warm for their latitude
I'm already seeing things that would normally grow fine out in the garden suffer from abnormally late and early frosts and mild summers. Rip my tomatos and onions. Everyone's complaining about 20+ degree springs in the mainland while I'm screaming that it's still snowing in late May.
East coast of Canada and US will become arid. Caribbean will become hotter and storms will become more severe. Scotland, Ireland, Iceland, and Norway will be substantially colder (compare latitude of UK with Northern Canada) and with less precipitation. Basically, everywhere that relies on warm tropical moist air currents will drastically change.
I welcome the decrease in temperature, but it would be great if it weren't connected to the earth being irreparably fucked. One winter at -40 (C or F) and people will start moving south and I might actually be able to afford to buy a house.
While this is awful news, although completely unsurprising, this sentence stuck out to me: “I have been studying western boundary currents – primarily the Agulhas Current off South Africa – for 30 years,”
Is this a full-time profession that pays a living wage?
This is what tenured professors do. They apply for research grants in their field, run laboratories, and publish papers. It's how most public academic research gets done and this is indeed a full-time job that pays decently (but not fabulously) well. As far as the focus of her studies go: she is an Oceanography professor at the University of Miami, so... like... what else is she going to research other than the boundary of the western Atlantic ocean?
Seeing this, i kinda hope that it happens as fast as possible. That way the rich will see exactly what they've done, and maybe we'll manage to get some revenge
Yeah, force the rich to see all the poor people dying from their ivory towers. I'm sure they'll suddenly start worrying about other people's suffering.
Boi you're the one who just decided to go to bat for anti-immigrant, anti-indigenous, and anti-working-class official language statuses and unofficial taboos against monolinguals or "wrong" bilinguals in state representation.
Either that or you're a dumbfuck who didn't read the rest of the thread and decided you wanted to pop off anyways about some unrelated grievance completely separated from this conversation like the dumbfuck doing that would make ya, dumbfuck.
Even if OP meant global warming, they didn't include evidence here because it's pretty much implied. If you're literate enough to read actual papers there are indeed people that work out the odds each event or disaster is unrelated to GW, and those odds are often tiny.
A phenomenon that causes climate change is not necessarily caused by climate change. If i burn a forest down it would increase climate change, but the cause is me burning down a forest.
No its not. And im not denying climate change or anything.
This is a phenomenon that increases climate change, but i saw nothing in the article suggesting this slowdown of the stream was caused by climate change.
For example, if i start a forest fire and a ton of trees are burned, this will increase climate change, but this theoretical forest fire wouldnt have been caused BY climate change - it would have been caused by me.
The abstract strongly suggests "climate change is likely responsible", but i saw nothing in the article supporting that. Maybe i just missed it, but i was quite disappointed.
Is this not the only tipping point that can actually reduce energy held by the biosphere due to increased ice in the northern hemisphere, and therefor increasing Earth's albedo?