The Telegraph Now Predicts Exceptionally Cold European Winters
Yes, it’s the AMOC silly season, with the Telegraph making fools of themselves this time. An article by Zia Weise, Climate Reporter at Politico, claiming that Europe could soon face glacial winters, dry summers, surging sea levels and ferocious storms because of the collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation
Yes – it’s The Day after Tomorrow, all over again!
That’s funny, because we were told we were already experiencing “dry summers, surging sea levels and ferocious storms”, thanks to global warming!
We are told that the AMOC is already weakening, but, according to the Met Office, it is not:
To recap, the Met Office tell us:
The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) is a measure of the movement of water in the North Atlantic: warm water is transported northward into the subpolar North Atlantic (high northern latitudes), where it cools and sinks before returning southward in the deep ocean.
This northward transport of heat is responsible for the mild climate of Western Europe compared to North-Eastern North America. Changes in the AMOC change the sea temperature in the North Atlantic and hence have a wide range of impacts, including on temperature and precipitation in Europe, sea level along the US East Coast, Atlantic hurricane activity and tropical monsoons. Therefore, monitoring changes in the AMOC is crucial to understand future changes in the climate of these regions.
All of Ms Weise’s “evidence” comes from shonky computer models, programmed by supposed ‘scientists’ who fill their predictions with could’s, maybe’s and possibly’s.
Nor do they know when a ‘tipping point’ will be reached, or indeed if it ever will.
Naturally the EU politicians are lapping it up, eager to feed the public with yet more scare stories to push ‘net zero’.
As one science chappie commented:
“The most important no-regret measure is also the only one scientists say can reduce the risk of the AMOC collapsing in the first place: cutting planet-warming emissions.”
How convenient!
As real scientists have long known, changes of this sort in the AMOC occur naturally every few decades. The Met Office points out that the data we have is so short as to be useless:
The AMOC has been continually measured across the North Atlantic at two latitudes: the RAPID array is at 26.5°N (in the subtropical North Atlantic), and the OSNAP array at 50-60°N (in the subpolar North Atlantic). However, only relatively short timeseries are available from these two, allowing only multi-annual (and shorter timescale) variability to be determined rather than multi-decadal variability.
There is significant inter-annual variability in the subtropical North Atlantic overturning circulation from the RAPID measurements, with a large decline in 2009/10. Much of this variability is driven by changes in local winds. There was a weakening of the subtropical AMOC from 2004-2014, although a longer timeseries is needed to put this into context.
An estimate of the subtropical AMOC from the GloSea5 reanalysis suggests it was stronger in the late 90’s, declining around 2000 before increasing to the mid-2000’s.
Source: climate.metoffice
However, oceanographers have been studying the Atlantic for many years. Two of the most renowned, Bob Dickson and Svein Osterhus, published a paper in 2007, “One hundred years in the Norwegian Sea”.
This is the abstract
At the turn of the 20th century oceanographic research in Norway became extensive and reached a peak in 1909 when Helland-Hansen & Nansen published The Norwegian Sea, a comprehensive description of the oceanographic features of the Nordic Seas. Since then, oceanographers have contributed to two main aspects that were largely inaccessible to the early pioneers, namely quantifying the exchanges of heat, salt and mass between the Atlantic and Arctic Oceans through the Nordic Seas, and piecing together indication of the longer term variability of the system.
During the past 100 years, six events in particular have made an impact on the physical environment of the Norwegian Sea on a timescale of decades, each seeming to involve a different mix of ocean-climate processes, and each therefore providing new insight into the varied nature of physical change and ecosystem response: 1) the Great Chill, 1900–1920; 2) the Warming in the North, 1920–1960; 3) the Great Salinity Anomaly, 1968–1982; 4) the Warming of the Abyss, 1970–present day; 5) the freshening of the subarctic seas; and 6) the warming of the Arctic.
All of these phases were driven by Atlantic circulation regimes. The 1920-60 Warming in the North resulted from the influx of warm Atlantic currents penetrating further north than before.
The Great Salinity Anomaly that followed saw a retreat of Atlantic waters and a freshening of the Arctic Ocean. As fresh water freezes at a high temperature than salt water, Arctic sea ice grew rapidly.
The Telegraph article talks about heavier rainfall bringing more fresh water to the North Atlantic. This is precisely what happened during the 1920-60 warming, one of the factors in the subsequent cool down, known in Iceland as “The Sea Ice Years”.
In short, there is nothing unusual, unnatural or unprecedented about the changes in the AMOC being discussed here. They are all part of the Earth’s thermostat.
Cutting so-called “planet-warming emissions” will have no more effect on the AMOC than King Canute had on the tide!
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