Reply #15: A friend of mine from Iceland

[Emillereid]

said the place is going to have to be renamed some time soon. There been significant warming and melting of the glacial ice. I've read that too much fresh water in the north Atlantic could effectively turn on the ocean's warm water conveyor belts that keep England and Northern Europe and North American out of the ice age. Apparently studies indicate the switch can be quite rapid and initiate extreme climate change in less than a decade. See an article in Discover: http://www.discover.com/recent_issue/index.html






DISCOVER Vol. 23 No. 9 (September 2002)
Table of Contents



The New Ice Age
Worried about global warming? Talk to a few scientists at Woods Hole. Oceanographers there are seeing big trouble with the Gulf Stream, which warms both North America and Europe
By Brad Lemley







Chemical analysis of fossilized foraminifera, shell-building one-celled creatures, helps climate researchers determine oceanic temperatures during a mini- ice age hundreds of years ago. G. sacculifera (top left) and G. ruber (bottom right) are planktonic organisms that spend their lives floating near the surface but fall like sand grains to the bottom of the ocean when they die. U. peregrina (top right) and C. wuellerstorfi (bottom left) are benthonic organisms that live and die on or in sediments on the seafloor.
Photographs courtesy of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute.

William Curry is a serious, sober climate scientist, not an art critic. But he has spent a lot of time perusing Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze's famous painting "George Washington Crossing the Delaware," which depicts a boatload of colonial American soldiers making their way to attack English and Hessian troops the day after Christmas in 1776. "Most people think these other guys in the boat are rowing, but they are actually pushing the ice away," says Curry, tapping his finger on a reproduction of the painting. Sure enough, the lead oarsman is bashing the frozen river with his boot. "I grew up in Philadelphia. The place in this painting is 30 minutes away by car. I can tell you, this kind of thing just doesn't happen anymore."
    But it may again. Soon. And ice-choked scenes, similar to those immortalized by the 16th-century Flemish painter Pieter Brueghel the Elder, may also return to Europe. His works, including the 1565 masterpiece "Hunters in the Snow," make the now-temperate European landscapes look more like Lapland.
 <snip>
   
    Having given up its heat to the air, the now-cooler water becomes denser and sinks into the North Atlantic by a mile or more in a process oceanographers call thermohaline circulation. This massive column of cascading cold is the main engine powering a deepwater current called the Great Ocean Conveyor that snakes through all the world's oceans. But as the North Atlantic fills with freshwater, it grows less dense, making the waters carried northward by the Gulf Stream less able to sink. The new mass of relatively fresh water sits on top of the ocean like a big thermal blanket, threatening the thermohaline circulation. That in turn could make the Gulf Stream slow or veer southward. At some point, the whole system could simply shut down, and do so quickly. "There is increasing evidence that we are getting closer to a transition point, from which we can jump to a new state. Small changes, such as a couple of years of heavy precipitation or melting ice at high latitudes, could yield a big response," says Joyce. ....more...
   
For the life of me I can't figure the repukes on this one -- their attitude seems antagonistic to nature and science itself -- their response to global warming and environmental issues in general have the quality of a child's temper tantrum that expresses anger at reality itself -- they appear to say: I want to do X (make profit) and I don't care why you say I can't do it, I'm going to anyway, no matter who or what it hurts!