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
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.
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.
At this point i would honestly just shrug it off, what else is new lol
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.
Oof, I’m sorry to hear about your veggies :(
I hope it doesn’t collapse, it would mean a lot of displaced people and loss of life.
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.
What will be the consequences to this?
It will have to be renamed to the Gulf Trickle.
Europe is at the latitude of Canada, it lacks Canada’s climate gradient because of the Gulf stream
We 'bouta see Siberia stretch its way to the Elbe!
Welp, at least we’ll get to see snow again before we drop
We unfuck ourselves like we always do.
But first, a whole lot of nothing….
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.
When we will be able to afford a home, it will be bad enough that we will not want to. Accelerationism is never an answer
You cant go out there. Youll freeze to death. - gerald broflovski
why doesn’t the LAZY gulf stream just work harder??
If it wanted to work harder, it wouldn’t be going to Europe… 🤔
The Gulf stream is letting down our shareholders.
It’s the gulf’s own fault! It should pull itself by its bootstraps to go faster.
We should put wind mills so strengthen it.
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!
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Currents-sea hehehe
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I doubt you understand what the job is about, considering your comment.
It’s amazing how few fucks I give about your doubts! You only learn by asking questions, rude internet stranger.
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I was hoping the silver lining of climate change would be hotter weather here in Ireland. Shit.
What’ll they do with all those jets they made then?
Fly them slower. Haven’t hit stall speed yet.
Oh well, we had a good innings there didn’t we?
Still, I’m in my 40s now, so if it doesn’t completely collapse for about 50 years or so I’m pretty sure I won’t have to worry about it.
Oh boy more droughts! Which will probably lead to massive forest fires. Fuck.
I have no idea what you’re talking about. New York City just got 4-8” of rain in a single day. No droughts or fires there!
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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.
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.
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.
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.
Its just a simple example of cause and effect. I am not denying climate change, i just saw no explanation in the article about which parts of climate change diectly contributed to this, which felt very missing considering its in the abstract. This is all i am saying.
Your explanation is true, but i just wanted the details.
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Inb4 Europe turns into Canada with less over the top language protection laws
“I wish I could still call people slurs”
- you
Boi you’re the one who just decided to go to bat for anti-immigrant, anti-indigenous, and anti-working-class official language statuses and unofficial taboos against monolinguals or “wrong” bilinguals in state representation.
Either that or you’re a dumbfuck who didn’t read the rest of the thread and decided you wanted to pop off anyways about some unrelated grievance completely separated from this conversation like the dumbfuck doing that would make ya, dumbfuck.
Stay mad I guess?
Seeing this, i kinda hope that it happens as fast as possible. That way the rich will see exactly what they’ve done, and maybe we’ll manage to get some revenge
Hundreds of millions will die and hundreds of millions more will suffer, and the rich will care as much as they do right now
Yeah, force the rich to see all the poor people dying from their ivory towers. I’m sure they’ll suddenly start worrying about other people’s suffering.
/s
Ivory towers are still capable of being seiged
Many governments have fallen over the years because they forgot that they only have a thin veil of control over their people
Nah they’ll be fine no matter what happens. Accelerationism hurts the most vulnerable more than anyone else.
I mean we’ll hurt them, not the climate
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.
