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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Alastair McIntosh who wrote (23296)	7/8/2006 1:18:22 PM
From: Lane3	Respond to of 541422

I read that about the Gulf Stream the other day. At first I thought they were debunking the whole Atlantic Conveyor notion, but they weren't. So it's not quite as dramatic as it seems. Still...

To: Alastair McIntosh who wrote (23296)	7/10/2006 5:12:45 AM
From: thames_sider	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541422

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.

To: Alastair McIntosh who wrote (23296)	7/10/2006 11:17:09 AM
From: JohnM	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 541422

Alastair, I'm commenting on the American Scientist article you posted a couple of days ago. Given the rather inflammatory language of your opening paragraphs, I assumed it was yet one more summary of bits and pieces of counter evidence. However, as I've read the responses of the past few days, it's clear it is more than that. So, I've just completed a read and have a couple of responses. First, you don't make the charge, but it's frequently assumed that if any piece of Gore's argument comes apart, the entire argument comes apart. So it's important to position this argument about the status of the Gulf Stream argument within what I understand to be Gore's argument. The two points about which he asserts scientific consensus vis a vis global warming are that (a) it is occurring and (b) a great deal of the explanation lies in human sources. He never, at least explicitly, claims consensus beyond those two. However, an inattentive viewer with less polished parsing skills than frequently displayed on this thread might come to the conclusion that many of the remaining assertions are also made on the basis of a scientific consensus. So, on to the gulf stream warming argument. First, the author of this piece assumes that the gulf stream argument he is trying to counter is the scientific consensus. He says as such several times in the piece. He and his friend Battisti are trying to counter that consensus. So, on that point, Gore would remain correct. Second, what about the viability of this author's argument. Best I can tell it's an intriguing proposal of a counter argument that's well beyond the ability of any of us who post here to evaluate. It's one of those items which makes science so intriguing. That is, the structurally induced incentive to counter "conventional wisdom" as this author has done. The test of the viability of the argument lies in future attempts to engage it, the old Popperian argument that the truth of an argument lies in its ability to withstand counter arguments. We are not likely, best I can tell, to know the results of that for some time. So, in conclusion, contrary to your assertions, this piece strikes me as more substantiation for Gore's argument. Thoughts?