G'day Blacknad,
Why is Europe So Warm? Summary: - Europe is much warmer than say Canada at the same latitudes.
- Caused by circulation of warm water from the tropics
- Circulation is both surface - Gulf Stream and convection - "The Conveyer"
- Saline reduction will NOT cool Europe
Detail: Too much doomsday predictions and THAT film have meant that so many people now think that Global Warming will plunge Europe into a cold period. The mechanism goes like this:
- Warming world = Arctic Ice melt
- Salt levels reduce in Atlantic
- Gulf stream fails
- Europe gets cold
The trouble with this theory is it is based on a rather unique previous event when billions of tons of water was realised into the Atlantic from two huge lakes in Canada. Whether it was salt water (it wasn't) or not, the point is it was bloody cold. It disrupted everything in the Atlantic to a very deep level. It was an awful lot of water.
Reduce saline and it
may have an effect on the Gulf Stream but it is not the gulf stream that keeps the climate of Europe warmer than it ought to be. It is the multi-ocean conveyer system that travels deep down in the ocean down the Atlantic and nearer the surface with nice warm tropical water from the Equator and over off the coast of France and around the UK.
The Gulf Stream is wind related and a surface system. If it suddenly stopped Europe will not be a pleasant place to be
weather wise. But the warm water will still continue to moderate the climate and the effect may be quite temporary or quite small.
Personal Opinion - Feel free to ignore Includes rants on:
- Climate Modelling
- Volcanic Activities being ignored
- Meteor Risks being ignored - to our peril
Actually all of this is theory. This is just my best guess. I have a computer climate model that fits my guess but also a model that plunges the world into a full blown glaciation because of a nudge distrupting the conveyor convection currents. The model does not hold up to real historic events by the way but I have the most contemptuous opinion for global climate computer models. All they are is a graphical way to represent someone's pet theory. They are not based on sound science nor is it possible to feed in even the basic components of what makes up world weather. How do you feed in the mechanisms of cloud formation and just how shiny different clouds are when the reflectivity of clouds is a recently discovered thing, not understood at all by those that have spent their lives just studying clouds. What about volcanic eruptions? You cannot leave these out because they happen all the time and have an effect on climate, sometimes such as Krakatoa, for a couple of years (anything bigger than Krakatoa and you are then back into fairy tale stuff - they do happen but the frequency is such that any model that included them has strayed into cookoo land).
And because of all this global warming hysteria there is one event that WILL happen and will kill huge numbers of people that cannot get enough funding to even set up an early warning system. What's the higer risk to you? Being struck by lightning or killed by a meteor? How about I make it easier. What about being killed in any accident other than a auto accident or being injured or killed by a meteor? If you said any accident you'd be WRONG!!!
Any good actuarial person will tell you the risk of meteor is up there with pretty much any other accident. It does not seem logical to humans because our brains are not wired to think of really huge risks that happen infrequently. Hence you have idiotic contstruction on major fault zones including hospitals built right over the San Andreas fault and gas storage tanks built over the worst liquifaction area of Tokyo. They will be destroyed but maybe not for decades so they are not considered.
Meteors hit this earth with depressing frequency. A big one that would kill a few million hits every few hundred years. One that can wipe most of the human race as it is currently distributed hits as little as the hundreds of thousands of years. So you get say 5 billion and divide it by say 500,000 years and in percentage terms you get a lot of dead people per year. But it is not the really big ones that concern me because they are rather infrequent after all. What of the smaller ones that could tip us back into a glaciation? A few hundred million dollars budget and we could have full monitoring of all of the quadrants of the skies giving enough warning so that we could actually do something about it. What's the point of creating nuclear weapons we cannot use against each other but have finally reached a technological level where we could stop a meteor catastrophy given enough warning if we can't be bothered spending a relatively small sum to give us any reasonable warning. A nuclear missile flown into space will not blow up even a small meteor by the way - mostly they are not solid anyway, but with enough warning it can be detonated a distance away from the meteor changing its tragectory by a small degree, but enough to miss us.
The US Government hands out $9 billion in pure research funds of which $3 bilion now goes to global warming. And meteors? The funding for a detection system for the southern hemisphere was cut. That is the trouble with something like global warming. If you use it to cry wolf, then the bear that is no longer being watched just might eat you.
End of rant Richard
