The Gulf Stream plays a significant role in maintaining the climate of the US East Coast and Western Europe. “We conclude with a high degree of confidence that Gulf Stream transport has indeed slowed by about 4% in the past 40 years.” The full study is Here
Everywhere I look everything is getting fucked to death. Insects, fish, entire ecosystems, entire climates, entire regions near the equator, all FUCKED.
Then my uncle says “how come it’s getting colder some places, I thought the globe was supposed to be warming! Hahahah”
At least he can arguably not give a fuck. He is rich and has no kids. I don’t get why the poors on the right side of the spectrum are so willing to parrot this idiotic bullshit though, don’t they realize their 600 even-poorer grandchildren are FUCKED?
They don’t care because either:
a) they’ll be dead
b) everything will be fine in heaven
c) both?People with poor education are poor at spotting idiotic bullshit. Also there are other factors why people believe things. We aren’t that rational.
It jives with how they see Trump as a “Godly, Christian man.” According to recent polls, they view him as more “Christian” than Mike fucking Pence.
I wonder if part of it is that belief begets belief? They believe in Trump because he believes so deeply in himself and they identify with that?
don’t they realize their 600 even-poorer grandchildren are FUCKED?
No. The effort to make that unclear has been very successful.
Yes, but think of the profits.
Where are those profits going? Definitely not to you, that’s for sure.
So we suiciding or what? Only slightly kidding.
As a very religious person until my 20s, I have brought up this idea to multiple people lol. My depressed-ass brain was like, why tf don’t we just rush to heaven instead?..
I can ASSURE you, the “it’ll all be 100% fine when you’re dead” has killed so many people’s drives to be a good person.
The planet is fucked because this 40% of USA voters don’t give one flying fuck about future generations.
I remember a case where a mother killed her two young kids because she wanted them to go to heaven. Her reasoning was that if they grew up and became sinners they would end up in hell. By murdering them before they knew what sin was she actually saved them. Thing is, if you believe in that shit then what she did really makes perfect sense.
That’s what I’ll ask christian mothers from now on.
“If you really love your children how come you didn’t smother them immediately after their baptism?”
A horrible, horrible mental image entered my mind: a priest dunking an infant into the baptismal font during a baptism ceremony and then proceeding smoothly to a requiem prayer as the infant drowns in holy water.
They’ve drowned babies doing baptisms before… if you look online you can find some CRAZY violent orthodox baptisms out of russia and the like. They dunk them babies like a goddamn basketball. Baby pulling mad g forces.
I would have wished my horrible mental image was just a figment of my imagination, lol! Reality is stranger than fiction, indeed.
as a species, pretty much.
But who’ll think of the poor investors? /s
Robust Weakening of the Gulf Stream During the Past Four Decades Observed in the Florida Straits https://doi.org/10.1029/2023GL105170
Plain Language Summary
The Gulf Stream is a major ocean current located off the East Coast of the United States. It carries a tremendous amount of seawater and along with it heat, carbon, and other ocean constituents. Because of this, the Gulf Stream plays an important role in weather and climate, influencing phenomena as seemingly unrelated as sea level along coastal Florida and temperature and precipitation over continental Europe. Given how important this ocean current is to science and society, scientists have tried to determine whether the Gulf Stream has undergone significant changes under global warming, but so far, they have not reached a firm conclusion. Here we report our effort to synthesize available Gulf Stream observations from the Florida Straits near Miami, and to assess whether and how the Gulf Stream transport there has changed since 1982. We conclude with a high degree of confidence that Gulf Stream transport has indeed slowed by about 4% in the past 40 years, the first conclusive, unambiguous observational evidence that this ocean current has undergone significant change in the recent past. Future studies should try to identify the cause of this change.
What will be the consequences to this?
Rise in sea levels on the east coast, reduced rain in the east coast, stronger storms, and more precipitation in Europe and the tropics. According to wiki.
I think it’ll also make some areas cold as fuck and probably heat up the gulf.
Western Europe will get pretty fucked without it, We’re much further north than people realise. The Netherlands is further north than Calgary, Canada
The consequences are unpredictable. More extreme weather is about the only certainty.
The energy of the heat transfer will not just be missing in Europe. It’ll also be in excess in the Caribbeans, perhaps creating stronger winds worldwide.
Imagine a house with water radiators, where you turn off the circulation pump while keeping the furnace on full blast. It’s gotta go somewhere.
Read the article in my above comment. it could throw Europe into another ice age, and cause mass starvation. Not to mention the AMOC feeds plankton which is the basis for all of sea life food-webs and so the ripples of this could be very very vast.
Britain and Iceland are utterly fucked.
The good news is that Iceland won’t have to go around apologizing for its name anymore.
Greenland still will be inaccurate though, unless the Arctic decides to just melt.
Maybe the warming and freezing will cancel out and the much smaller islands that will be left after the sea levels rise will still be temperate and worth living on.
Edit: This is not an “I’m alright, Jack” comment. I’d rather this wasn’t even a vague possibility and that the planet wasn’t warming out of control.
Maybe the warming and freezing will cancel out and the much smaller islands that will be left after the sea levels rise will still be temperate and worth living on.
Maybe, but food and water will be extremely scarce. We can’t all just up and move. You and I will almost certainly die of starvation.
So’s Norway - quite a few places on the west coast (the most inhabited non-Oslo part of the country) rely on the fact that the gulf stream keeps them unusually warm for their latitude
I’m already seeing things that would normally grow fine out in the garden suffer from abnormally late and early frosts and mild summers. Rip my tomatos and onions. Everyone’s complaining about 20+ degree springs in the mainland while I’m screaming that it’s still snowing in late May.
East coast of Canada and US will become arid. Caribbean will become hotter and storms will become more severe. Scotland, Ireland, Iceland, and Norway will be substantially colder (compare latitude of UK with Northern Canada) and with less precipitation. Basically, everywhere that relies on warm tropical moist air currents will drastically change.
We unfuck ourselves like we always do.
But first, a whole lot of nothing….
What will be the consequences to this?
It will have to be renamed to the Gulf Trickle.
the EU will cave to any Russian demands if it gets a lot colder in Europe. they wont have any other choice.
“Am I a joke to you?” - Nuclear power in Europe.
they still have it? huh. I thought nuclear wasnt green enough for the EU
That’s just Germany. I don’t think the anti-nuclear sentiment is that popular elsewhere. Finland just started a new reactor, granted we began bulding it already back in 2005.
It’s not green enough for the ecofascists who’d rather have coal than nuclear, but we still have nuclear.
Nuclear plants need water to cool. This would also make Western Europe drier.
I welcome the decrease in temperature, but it would be great if it weren’t connected to the earth being irreparably fucked. One winter at -40 (C or F) and people will start moving south and I might actually be able to afford to buy a house.
Every fossil fuel executive.
I was hoping the silver lining of climate change would be hotter weather here in Ireland. Shit.
I mean it will wind up warmer than Siberia is now.
What’ll they do with all those jets they made then?
Fly them slower. Haven’t hit stall speed yet.
Is this not the only tipping point that can actually reduce energy held by the biosphere due to increased ice in the northern hemisphere, and therefor increasing Earth’s albedo?
Not sure there’ll still be ice in the north by then.
Have a communist perspective!
While this is awful news, although completely unsurprising, this sentence stuck out to me: “I have been studying western boundary currents – primarily the Agulhas Current off South Africa – for 30 years,” Is this a full-time profession that pays a living wage?
This is what tenured professors do. They apply for research grants in their field, run laboratories, and publish papers. It’s how most public academic research gets done and this is indeed a full-time job that pays decently (but not fabulously) well. As far as the focus of her studies go: she is an Oceanography professor at the University of Miami, so… like… what else is she going to research other than the boundary of the western Atlantic ocean?
Thank you for the detailed reply!
Absolutely it is!
They pay them a ton in their native currents-cyCurrents-sea hehehe
Ahh even better! 😁
Reminds me of this super tangentially related joke:
You’d think a pirate’s favorite letter would be Rrrrr, but their true love will always be the C
I doubt you understand what the job is about, considering your comment.
So no real evidence this is
connected tocaused by climate change huh?“The climate changing is not proof of climate change!”
Top minds are hard at work here today.
Even if OP meant global warming, they didn’t include evidence here because it’s pretty much implied. If you’re literate enough to read actual papers there are indeed people that work out the odds each event or disaster is unrelated to GW, and those odds are often tiny.
A phenomenon that causes climate change is not necessarily caused by climate change. If i burn a forest down it would increase climate change, but the cause is me burning down a forest.
Holy shit I think you’re on to something
my dude this is the very definition of climate change
No its not. And im not denying climate change or anything.
This is a phenomenon that increases climate change, but i saw nothing in the article suggesting this slowdown of the stream was caused by climate change.
For example, if i start a forest fire and a ton of trees are burned, this will increase climate change, but this theoretical forest fire wouldnt have been caused BY climate change - it would have been caused by me.
The abstract strongly suggests “climate change is likely responsible”, but i saw nothing in the article supporting that. Maybe i just missed it, but i was quite disappointed.
Of course, all of that northern ice melting and turning into water must have nothing to do with how water moves in oceans.
Probably does - but it was disappointing the article did not give any expert’s explanation on the matter. Why is it so wrong to state that those details are missing from the article?
The issue isn’t that you stated the details are missing, but how you did it.
This is most likely caused by changes in ocean temperatures. Those changes are part of climate change.
Global weather is an extremely complex system. Any change will have knock-on effects on the rest of the system. If the changes are big enough, you start seeing big effects like this.
I’m not sure what your example is meant to show. An ocean-scale current isn’t something you can walk up to and mess with. But burning forests is certainly a contributor to climate change, which would be one of the causative factors in ocean warming and currents changing.
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Ice from Greenland and Canada is melting and flowing into the northern North Atlantic, slowing down the Gulf Stream. This is quite well known in the climate community, which might be why the article did not explicitly say it.
