Alarmists Turn Up Their Fearmongering On the Antarctic
Tired of killing us all by weakening the AMOC, alarmists have turned on the ACC, the “Antarctic Circumpolar Current”
Or turned it off, because in another case of ‘climate change’ causing ‘climate change’, aka ‘tipping points’, all of them disastrous, it seems “the accelerating melt of Antarctica’s ice sheet”, which isn’t even a thing, is weakening the current which in turn could (drum roll please) “accelerate ice loss”.
Which, in turn, could be catstophrzzzz dizzastrphzz must… keep… eyes… open. Wait, there might be something to this issue after all, but not what that article suggested.
According to Daily Galaxy, amplified by MSN:
“The Antarctic Circumpolar Current (ACC), the strongest ocean current on Earth, is rapidly weakening due to the accelerating melt of Antarctica’s ice sheet.
According to a new study published in Environmental Research Letters, researchers warn that this current could slow down by up to 20 percent by 2050, a dramatic shift that would disrupt global climate patterns, ocean temperatures, and rising sea levels.”
Now from our “18 Ways To Hype Trivia” series, you’ll note that “rapidly weakening” in the first sentence has become “could slow down by up to 20 percent by 2050” in the second. And the dance of the seven vagues continues:
“Researchers from the University of Melbourne in Australia used supercomputer simulations to model how freshwater influx from melting ice is weakening the convection process that fuels the ACC.
Their findings suggest that the weakening current could accelerate ice loss, intensify extreme weather, and alter ocean ecosystems worldwide.”
So something that isn’t happening except inside a computer could cause something else that isn’t happening. As monkeys could fly out of our armpits. But we’re not stocking up on bananas just yet.
The piece does state, correctly, that:
“The ACC is a massive current that moves about 264 million gallons of water per second around Antarctica, creating a barrier that separates the Southern Ocean from the rest of the world’s oceans. This current plays a critical role in Earth’s climate system…”
But here again we want to bring in a point made by Javier Vinós in Solving the Climate Puzzle about the actual role of the polar regions in Earth’s climate system. If the ACC weakens and the continent’s climate becomes less isolated from the rest of the planet, he points out, the result could be a deep cooling of the climate, not a warming.
Vinós notes that the enhanced greenhouse effect is essentially absent in polar regions in winter as there is virtually no moisture in the atmosphere and water vapour is the key greenhouse gas. In consequence, heat that reaches the poles is efficiently radiated into space, cooling the Earth.
But it doesn’t always get there, partly for transient reasons but also for ones that operate over very long periods due to geological configurations and their impact on air and water currents.
Including the process whereby continental drift led to an increasing isolation of Antarctica, meaning instead of “global warming” being a process where everything gets hotter, or colder, due to the shadowy influence of “climate change”, you could well get a situation where what happens at the poles has an opposite effect elsewhere.
As Vinós observes in defending his hypothesis, Antarctica is one of those places that doesn’t behave the way computer models say it should:
“The Enhanced CO2 Effect hypothesis faces a major challenge in Antarctica. According to the Pleistocene CO2-temperature relationship, current CO2 levels should correspond to Antarctic temperatures 12°C (22 °F) higher than they are.
However… Antarctica has not warmed over the past 200 years despite rising CO2 levels. This discrepancy poses a serious problem for the hypothesis.
While explanations have been proposed to account for this anomaly, the fact remains that if the CO2-temperature relationship does not hold now, it cannot be used to defend past causality or to predict future climate outcomes.”
Vinós writes that the “Winter Gatekeeper hypothesis” he puts forward in competition with the orthodox view:
“has considerable explanatory power for past climatic puzzles. The Oligocene and Miocene climates are particularly challenging. Most of the CO2 decline of the past 50 million years occurred during the Oligocene when levels dropped from 800 to 300 ppm.
Despite this remarkable decline in CO2 levels, the Oligocene ended with an extended warming period of 2.5 million years in a world significantly warmer than today. Coinciding with this warming trend and the decline in CO2 was the gradual emergence of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, which reduced heat and moisture transport toward the South Pole.
The Winter Gatekeeper hypothesis suggests that this reduction caused Antarctica to cool while the rest of the world warmed. By creating extremely cold Antarctic Bottom Water, the Antarctic Circumpolar Current also sequestered CO2.”
As we have mentioned a number of times, despite loose talk of the “last ice age” referring to the boringly-named “Last Glacial Period“ that began at the end of the Eemian interglacial around 115,000 years ago and ended roughly 11,700 years ago, an actual ice age refers either to a period with significant persistent ice at both poles, in which case we’ve been in one throughout the entire 2.58-million-year Pleistocene.
And we still are, or to a period with significant persistent ice at one pole, in which case we’ve been in one for 34 million years including the entire Oligocene and then the “Neogene” consisting of the Miocene, Pliocene and Pleistocene.
Don’t worry. There won’t be a test. At least not on that point. But there will be one on the issue of whether the isolation of Antarctica caused a late Oligocene warming trend because heat couldn’t get to the South Pole to be ejected back into space.
And whether if Antarctica should become less isolated in future, and more heat should be transported to the South Pole, it would be a sign of the Earth warming or a cause of it cooling, as it accelerated the escape of Earth’s heat to space.
They are not trivial questions because the planet has been cooling, cyclically to be sure but on a downward line, throughout the last 50 million years and the last 2.58 and indeed during the current Holocene interglacial.
During the Last Glacial Maximum (yes, also a snooze of a moniker) it got colder than at almost any point in the last half-million years including the three previous glaciations, at least so far as we can tell from the proxies. And both temperature and CO2 reached levels perilously close to a huge planetary die-off of plants and anything above them in the food chain.
So if the ACC should weaken, for natural or man-made reasons, it could trigger the next glaciation with catastrophic effects, maybe even terminal ones for Gaia. As the news story rightly said, climate is complicated. But not in the simple way it then claimed.
We ourselves do not claim to know how climate works, especially the complex feedback mechanisms that can very easily produce outcomes unexpected in direction as well as intensity. We would not dare undertake geoengineering projects and instead insist on maximum capacity to adapt.
Nor would we dare write an article promising doom and eventually petering out with:
“One of the challenges scientists face is that the Antarctic Circumpolar Current has not been monitored for very long, making it difficult to determine exactly how much of this slowdown is part of a natural cycle versus climate change-driven acceleration.”
Let alone follow that admission with the non sequitur that:
“The weakening of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current is yet another sign that climate change is already affecting Earth’s largest natural systems.”
In which, again, a statistical description of a set of variables is mistakenly cited as a causal force. But then again, we aren’t employed by editors who expect every article to end with some tedious and tendentious variant of:
“If left unchecked, the continued melting of Antarctic ice could push ocean currents past a tipping point, leading to irreversible disruptions in Earth’s climate. Scientists warn that the world must act now to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and mitigate the worst effects of global climate change.”
Even if the piece already said:
“According to researchers, long-term data collection is essential to better understand how the ACC is evolving and what future climate models should predict. Expanding satellite observations, deploying more ocean monitoring instruments, and improving climate simulations will help scientists track these changes more accurately.”
What if they did and it turned out there was no story? Oh well.
On to 18 Ways Climate Change Is Frizzing Your Hair or something.
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