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Ian Joughin/University of Washington via AP
Oh, for the luvva Pete. Climate scolds have been wagging their fingers and shouting about rising temperatures for years now. Before that, they were wagging their fingers and shouting about a new ice age. Well, these things do tend to come around full circle; now they are shouting about an ice age again, and citing problems with the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC.
A key Atlantic current could be pushed to the brink of collapse within decades, supposedly ushering in a new ice age and dramatically raising sea levels, climate scientists have claimed in a controversial new study published in the journal Communications Earth & Environment.
The apocalyptic predictions came as a result of a collaboration between researchers at the Institute of Oceanology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the University of California, San Diego — weeks after one-time climate alarmist Bill Gates publicly downplayed the impact of temperature fluctuations on the planet.
Per the new findings, the at-risk current in question is the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC, a “conveyor belt of the ocean” that funnels warm water toward the ocean surface from the tropics to the Northern Hemisphere.
This current, which includes the Gulf Stream that runs from the Gulf of Mexico to the US East Coast and across the Atlantic to Europe, helps maintain the mild climate of Europe, the UK and the US East Coast.
The study stated that the source of this marine temperature regulator, the Greenland Ice sheet, is being thawed amid warming temperatures, causing meltwater runoff to leach into the North Atlantic — leading to stagnation.
As for the AMOC, there has been a lot of data gathered and crunched, but this study, once you drill down through all of the data, concludes "we don't know enough to make any predictions."
Observational-based estimates have limitations as the available observations of atmospheric and sea surface temperatures lead to large uncertainties of the observation-based air-sea heat flux products. These uncertainties are most pronounced in the early part of each timeseries. As a result, the uncertainties of the reconstructed AMOC anomalies are relatively large (±2 Sv; 2-σ range). Within these uncertainties, the reconstructions of the AMOC based on ERA5 and JRA-55 are in agreement although decadal trends of the best estimates vary between both products (Fig. 9). However, a decline of the AMOC over the last 60 years appears to be unlikely given the increasing trend of the AMOC in both products since around 1990.
More panic-mongering, still not much actual evidence.
Look, ice ages aren't something that happens overnight, ocean currents or no ocean currents. The most recent glaciation, the Wisconsin glacial episode, was the last major glaciation in North America, when the Laurentide ice sheet buried most of what is today Canada and the northern United States under a mile of ice. In Europe, this glaciation is called the Devensian, if you're British, and the Midlandian if you're Irish, because why not? The point is, this glacial cycle began about 115,000 years ago and ended about 11,700 years ago, with a peak about 17-18,000 years ago.
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This isn't something that's going to happen overnight. It's not something that will happen in the lifetime of our great, great grandchildren. A complete reversal of the AMOC, yes, will make Europe noticeably colder than it is now, especially in winters. But there won't be any mile-thick ice sheets pushing their way down from the Arctic, sending Canada and Scandinavia fleeing before it in panic.
Isn't that the opposite of global warming? Shouldn't this be a good thing?]
I sure wish these people would make up their minds.
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Ward Clark hails from Alaska’s Susitna Valley, where he maintains his rural household in one of America’s last free places. Ward is a twelve-year veteran of the U.S. Army, including service in Operation Desert Storm and (in Germany in support of) Operation Joint Endeavor, and today is a staunch minarchist libertarian, along with being an author, novelist, self-employed small businessman, woods bum, and semi-professional bad influence. You can see some of Ward's fiction writing here, and be sure to follow Ward on Rumble!
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