Gulf Stream weakening now 99% certain, and ramifications will be global Spoiler The Gulf Stream is almost certainly weakening, a new study has confirmed. The flow of warm water through the Florida Straits has slowed by 4% over the past four decades, with grave implications for the world's climate. The ocean current starts near Florida and threads a belt of warm water along the U.S. East Coast and Canada before crossing the Atlantic to Europe. The heat it transports is essential for maintaining temperate conditions and regulating sea levels. But this stream is slowing down, researchers wrote in a study published Sept. 25 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. Related: Gulf Stream current could collapse in 2025, plunging Earth into climate chaos: 'We were actually bewildered' "This is the strongest, most definitive evidence we have of the weakening of this climatically-relevant ocean current," lead-author Christopher Piecuch, a physical oceanographer at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, said in a statement. The Gulf Stream is just a small component of the thermohaline circulation — a global conveyor belt of ocean currents that moves oxygen, nutrients, carbon and heat around the planet, while also helping to control sea levels and hurricane activity. Beginning in Caribbean before flowing out into the Atlantic through the Florida Straits, the Gulf Stream brings warmer southerly waters (which are saltier and denser) northward to cool and sink in the North Atlantic. After dropping deep beneath the ocean and releasing its heat into the atmosphere, the water slowly drifts southward, where it heats up again and the cycle repeats. This process is vital for maintaining temperatures and sea levels across the U.S. East Coast — whose waters are kept up to 5 feet (1.5 meters) lower than water further offshore by the sweeping motion of the current. As Earth’s climate warms, an enormous influx of cold, fresh water from melting ice sheets is spilling into oceans, possibly causing the Gulf Stream to slow or even veer toward outright collapse, according to scientists. But due to the scale and complexity of the system, this is hard to prove. To find definitive evidence that the stream is slowing, scientists analyzed data spanning 40 years from three separate sources — undersea cables, satellite altimetry and observations made on site — to observe the motions of the current around the Florida Straits. Their statistical analysis revealed that the current had slowed by 4%, with just a 1% chance of their measurement being a fluke caused by random fluctuations. At first glance, a 4% shift may seem like a miniscule change, but "the worry is that's just the slow start," Helen Czerski, an oceanographer at University College London (UCL) who was not involved in the study, told Live Science. Related: Read about the planet's engine in an interview with Helen Czerski "It's like those early days of COVID. People were like: 'Oh, there's only 60 cases. We don't care about this,'" she added. "There's only 60 cases, yeah, but yesterday there were 30 and the day before that there were 15. If you just think a week ahead, we've got a problem." To find definitive proof that climate change is the culprit, scientists will need to tease apart the differences between the natural variability of the ocean systems and the impact made by global heating — a tricky task given the relatively short time that humans have been directly measuring the ocean flows in detail.
Last year MS was the lowest. This year flow is so low salt water is flowing up to NOLA and threatening water supply Historic low water levels on Mississippi River stymie commercial barge traffic in Arkansas Commercial barge traffic on the Arkansas River has been shuttered due to the Mississippi River’s historic low water levels, Port of Little Rock Executive Director Bryan Day told Talk Business & Politics. Water levels at Montgomery Point Lock and Dam, are too low for commercial traffic, he said. Dredging efforts could have the traffic flowing again in 7-10 days, but there is no guarantee that will happen, Day said. If a commercial barge can get onto the Arkansas River or any water in its tributary system, it can move all the way to Tulsa, Okla., with no issues, he said. Water levels in the Arkansas River tributary system, named the McClellan-Kerr Arkansas River Navigation System, are passable. Read more here.
By the end of September, more than half of the world’s countries could fit inside the land burned this year in the Canadian wilderness. Since the 1970s, the average area burned in the country had already doubled; this year, wildfires consumed that average six times over. The modern single-year record had been set in 1989, when almost 19 million acres burned across the country. In 2023, the total has passed 45 million. “I can’t think of any analogy for the extent to which the modern records were not only broken but destroyed here,” says the fire scientist John Abatzoglou, who in July told me that the 8.8 million hectares on fire was “chart redefining,” then watched as the burn area doubled from there. The fire historian Stephen Pyne calls it “mythology becoming ecology” — “a slow-motion Ragnarok.” The climate activist Tzeporah Berman put it even more sharply to me: “It’s like our country exploded.”
here is a list of countries that, all together, have a smaller carbon footprint than this year’s Canadian fires: Afghanistan, Albania, Angola, Antigua and Barbuda, Armenia, Austria, Azerbaijan, the Bahamas, Bahrain, Barbados, Belarus, Belize, Benin, Bhutan, Bolivia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Botswana, Brunei, Bulgaria, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cambodia, Cameroon, Cape Verde, Central African Republic, Chad, Comoros, Costa Rica, Croatia, Cuba, Cyprus, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Denmark, Djibouti, Dominica, Dominican Republic, East Timor, Ecuador, El Salvador, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Estonia, Estwatini, Ethiopia, Fiji, Finland, Gabon, Gambia, Georgia, Ghana, Greece, Greenland, Grenada, Guatemala, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Guyana, Haiti, Honduras, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Ivory Coast, Jamaica, Jordan, Kenya, Kiribati, Kyrgyzstan, Laos, Latvia, Lebanon, Lesotho, Liberia, Libya, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Madagascar, Malawi, Maldives, Mali, Malta, Mauritania, Mauritius, Moldova, Mongolia, Montenegro, Mozambique, Namibia, Nepal, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Niger, North Korea, North Macedonia, Norway, Palau, Panama, Papua New Guinea, Paraguay, Peru, Portugal, the Republic of Congo, Rwanda, Samoa, Sao Tome and Principe, Senegal, Serbia, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, Solomon Islands, Somalia, South Sudan, Sri Lanka, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Lucia, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Sudan, Suriname, Sweden, Switzerland, Syria, Tajikistan, Tanzania, Togo, Tonga, Trinidad and Tobago, Uganda, Uruguay, Vanuatu, Western Sahara, Yemen, Zambia and Zimbabwe. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/24/magazine/canada-wildfires.html
it's incredible. The NHC sent a plane through the storm yesterday and it was dropping pressure 10 mb *between passes*
Some areas in and around Dallas have received 9”+ rainfall in the past ~8 hours. Totally normal October weather, correct? This has just been sitting like this since the start of the WS with very little movement but slowly shifting southeast.
Sounds like a bunch of wind energy projects on the east coast have been scrapped because of financing costs going up https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/01/business/energy-environment/offshore-wind-farm-new-jersey.html
He is hands-down the biggest pussy to ever grace this board, emphasized when he logs in to "like" posts commenting on him. And there's not a doubt in my mind that, as he does so, he's chuckling to himself "I'm so in these guys' heads, they can't stop talking about me!" Just a miserable, miserable existence that cannot comprehend life existing outside the tip of his fucking nose.
Woof It’s been 653 days and counting since Central Park last measured an inch of snow in a single day. That is almost double the previous record of 383 days, which ended in March 1998. An especially lackluster winter season last year left sleds untested and only produced 2.3 inches of snow in the park in total, the least amount of snow that has ever been recorded there since record-keeping began in 1869. One snowstorm that began on Feb. 27 did have a two-day total of almost two inches, but because daily records are recorded from midnight to midnight, less than an inch fell each day, keeping the streak alive. In a normal winter, Central Park will see nearly 24 inches of snow through the season.
Not a ton of info but this seems like a good bill. Need to pay these folks way more A bill has been introduced in the U.S. Senate that would remove overtime pay caps for wildland firefighters. Crews in the U.S. departments of the Interior and Agriculture face annual limits on the amount of overtime they can work but frequently exceed those limits as fire seasons have become longer. According to bill sponsor Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, the Wildland Firefighter Fair Pay Act would ensure firefighters receive all overtime time pay they’re owed. The U.S. Forest Service says up to 500 supervisors either stop working or continue to work without additional compensation upon reaching the salary cap each year. https://www.knau.org/knau-and-arizo...-limits-on-overtime-for-wildland-firefighters
Gonna make those firefighter fat cats even fatter. - rural whites on disability or food stamps who vote Republican
selfishly Colorado has had a pretty normal and wet winter. but that's fucking alarming for Canada and the midwest / northeastern US
PNW is also having its lowest snowpack in years. In British Columbia you don't even need snowshoes on a lot of hikes. Totally cool and normal. https://www.king5.com/article/tech/...west/281-2c9820a0-0a3f-4c4a-bfce-a9926ce6b384 The snowpack in Washington's mountain ranges has seen up to a 60% decrease over 75 years and that trend will likely continue for the rest of the century.
Think the snowpack on the Oregon Cascades isn't too far under normal, but it's really bad in Washington, a lot of that is the current El Nino. There's going to be a shit ton of snow dumped over the next couple of days it looks like at least.
'Cliff-Like' Collapse of Critical Current System More Likely Than Thought: Study "The new study adds significantly to the rising concern about an AMOC collapse in the not-too-distant future," said one scientist. "We will ignore this at our peril." A study published Friday warned that a systemic collapse of the Atlantic Ocean currents driving warm water from the tropics toward Europe could be more likely than researchers previously estimated—an event that would send temperatures plummeting in much of the continent. The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), which includes the Gulf Stream, could be headed for a relatively sudden shutdown that René Van Western, who led the Dutch study published in Science Advances, called "cliff-like." "We are heading towards a tipping point." Spoiler For many millennia, the Gulf Stream has carried warm waters from the Gulf of Mexico northward along the eastern North American seaboard and across the Atlantic to Europe. As human-caused global heating melts the Greenland ice sheet, massive quantities of fresh water are released into the North Atlantic, cooling the AMOC—which delivers the bulk of the Gulf Stream's heat—toward a "tipping point" that could stop the current in its tracks. An AMOC shutdown would cause temperatures to rise in the Southern Hemisphere but plunge dramatically in Europe. In the study's model, London cools by an average of 18°F and Bergen, Norway by 27°F. An AMOC failure would also cause sea levels to rise along North America's east coast. "We are moving closer [to the collapse], but we we're not sure how much closer," van Westen toldThe Associated Press. "We are heading towards a tipping point." According to the study: Although AMOC collapses have been induced in complex global climate models by strong freshwater forcing, the processes of an AMOC tipping event have so far not been investigated. Here, we show results of the first tipping event in the Community Earth System Model, including the large climate impacts of the collapse. Using these results, we develop a physics-based and observable early warning signal of AMOC tipping: the minimum of the AMOC-induced freshwater transport at the southern boundary of the Atlantic. Reanalysis products indicate that the present-day AMOC is on route to tipping. The early warning signal is a useful alternative to classical statistical ones, which, when applied to our simulated tipping event, turn out to be sensitive to the analyzed time interval before tipping. "The research makes a convincing case that the AMOC is approaching a tipping point based on a robust, physically based early warning indicator," said Tim Lenton, director of the University of Exeter's Global Systems Institute. "What it cannot and does not say is how close the tipping point, because... there is insufficient data to make a statistically reliable estimate of that. "We have to plan for the worst," added Lenton, who was not involved in the Dutch study. "We should invest in collecting relevant data and improving estimation of how close a tipping point is, improving assessment of what its impacts would be, and getting pre-prepared for how we could best manage and adapt to those impacts if they start to unfold." Stefan Rahmstorf—who leads the Earth Systems Analysis department at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Research in Germany and was not part of the new study—called the research "a major advance in AMOC stability science." "The new study adds significantly to the rising concern about an AMOC collapse in the not-too-distant future," Rahmstorf told The Associated Press. "We will ignore this at our peril." Antarctic Tipping Point That Occurred 8,000 Years Ago 'Could Happen Again' "We now have direct evidence that this ice sheet suffered rapid ice loss in the past," said a Cambridge researcher. As European Union scientists confirmed that last month continued a worrying trend of historically high temperatures, U.K. researchers released a study Thursday warning how fossil fuel-driven global heating could lead to catastrophic and rapid ice loss in Antarctica not seen for thousands of years. The study, published by researchers at the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) and the University of Cambridge in Nature Geoscience, relies on an ice core from the West Antarctic Ice Sheet that is over 2,100 feet long. Spoiler "We now have direct evidence that this ice sheet suffered rapid ice loss in the past," said senior author and Cambridge Earth sciences professor Eric Wolff in a statement. "This scenario isn't something that exists only in our model predictions and it could happen again if parts of this ice sheet become unstable." "The very same processes we are seeing just beginning now, in areas like Thwaites Glacier, have played out before in similar areas of Antarctica and indeed, the pace of ice loss was equal to our worst fears about a runaway ice loss." Study co-author and BAS researcher Isobel Rowell explained that "we wanted to know what happened to the West Antarctic Ice Sheet at the end of the Last Ice Age, when temperatures on Earth were rising, albeit at a slower rate than current anthropogenic warming." "Using ice cores we can go back to that time and estimate the ice sheet's thickness and extent," she continued. The team measured stable water isotopes and the pressure of air bubbles in the core, and found that the ice sheet "shrank suddenly and dramatically" about 8,000 years ago. "We already knew from models that the ice thinned around this time, but the date of this was uncertain," Rowell noted, referencing estimates of 5,000-12,000 years ago. "We now have a very precisely dated observation of that retreat that can be built into improved models." Previous models also didn't indicate how quickly the retreat happened. However, the team's measurements showed that "once the ice thinned, it shrunk really fast," said Wolff. "This was clearly a tipping point—a runaway process," he added. "It's now crucial to find out whether extra warmth could destabilize the ice and cause it to start retreating again." University of Colorado Boulder glaciologist Ted Scambos was not involved with the study, but he called it "an excellent piece of detective work" and toldCNN that its takeaway message is "the amount of ice stored in Antarctica can change very quickly—at a pace that would be hard to deal with for many coastal cities." CNN pointed out that the study contributes to mounting warnings from scientists about conditions in Antarctica: For example, the Thwaites Glacier, also in West Antarctica, is melting rapidly. A 2022 study said the Thwaites—dubbed the Doomsday Glacier for the catastrophic impact its collapse would have on sea-level rise—was hanging on "by its fingernails" as the planet warms. This new study adds to these concerns, Scambos said. "[It] shows that the very same processes we are seeing just beginning now, in areas like Thwaites Glacier, have played out before in similar areas of Antarctica and indeed, the pace of ice loss was equal to our worst fears about a runaway ice loss." As Common Dreamsreported in October, a study published in Nature Climate Change found that the West Antarctic Ice Sheet—which contains enough ice to increase the global mean sea level by over 17 feet—faces an "unavoidable" increase in melting for the rest of this century. "If we wanted to preserve it in its historical state, we would have needed action on climate change decades ago," lead author and BAS researcher Kaitlin Naughten said at the time—while also stressing that "we must not stop working to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels." The release of that study preceded the 28th United Nations Climate Change Conference in Dubai. After COP28 ended in December with a final agreement that did not explicitly endorse a global phaseout of fossil fuels, scientists called it a "tragedy for the planet." Despite the heat that the United Arab Emirates caught for having a fossil fuel CEO lead the latest summit, COP29 host Azerbaijan plans to have an oil executive head the next one, scheduled for November. Azerbaijan also plans to boost its gas production by a third during the next decade. The COP29 host is far from alone. Global Witness revealed last month that the oil and gas companies that signed a decarbonization pact at last year's conference plan to burn through around 62% of the world's carbon budget by 2050—which sparked fresh demands for governments to stop caving to polluters and implement more ambitious climate policies. nbd
Canada's wildfire season last year was historically horrible hopefully they get a ton of snow the next few months
Shit is not looking good https://agriculture.canada.ca/en/agricultural-production/weather/canadian-drought-monitor
Definitely not good, but as I said earlier the El Nino this year is probably making this worse than our normal global warming years. The flip side is that if you get a ton of rain in the winter years then that adds more fuel that can start wildfires easier in the dry summer on the west coast. I'm really hoping California doesn't see that later this year because they've gotten so much rain this winter.
The Oregon Cascades are getting a bunch of snow from yesterday till tomorrow. Is that not making its way up north?
One-off weather events don’t really have much impact: https://www.king5.com/amp/article/t...west/281-2c9820a0-0a3f-4c4a-bfce-a9926ce6b384
I don't disagree but the meteorologist was talking about over twenty inches falling at Mt. Hood the other day, that's a significant event. You're speaking long term and that's a problem that damn near any place west of the Mississippi is going to face. I'm speaking strictly about this season.
Not when typical snowfall (speaking specifically on Rainier) is ~600 inches. Looks like Hood is way below its typical snowpack despite getting 20 inches or whatever amount it got the other day.
Just looking at the map you can see that even if the average is lower there's a huge temp increase in the Midwest.