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Politics : View from the Center and Left

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To: Alastair McIntosh who wrote (23296)7/10/2006 5:12:45 AM
From: thames_sider  Read Replies (1) of 541432
 
Fascinating article. I'm surprised the central idea, if correct, doesn't receive more publicity. I'd certainly thought it a major cause.
Maps I've seen say that the warm water then tended to flow from the Gulf to much further south, around the Canaries, raising rainfall over what's now the western Sahara.

You omitted this important statement from the penultimate paragraph, for some reason:

I would expect that any slowdown in thermohaline circulation would have a noticeable but not catastrophic effect on climate. The temperature difference between Europe and Labrador should remain. Temperatures will not drop to ice-age levels, not even to the levels of the Little Ice Age, the relatively cold period that Europe suffered a few centuries ago. The North Atlantic will not freeze over, and English Channel ferries will not have to plow their way through sea ice. A slowdown in thermohaline circulation should bring on a cooling tendency of at most a few degrees across the North Atlantic— one that would most likely be overwhelmed by the warming caused by rising concentrations of greenhouse gases. This moderating influence is indeed what the climate models show for the 21st century and what has been stated in reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Instead of creating catastrophe in the North Atlantic region, a slowdown in thermohaline circulation would serve to mitigate the expected anthropogenic warming!

I think it's important to note that this author is clearly no sceptic on GW. Nor doubts that it's human-caused.
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