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?
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.
Leonard Nimoy was right?!
What did he say?
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Damn. I guess he was right! Its funny because that channel is filled with climate deniers.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
What will be the consequences to this?
It will have to be renamed to the Gulf Trickle.
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“Am I a joke to you?” - Nuclear power in Europe.
Nuclear plants need water to cool. This would also make Western Europe drier.
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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.
France is still gangster with it. But the rest of Europe pretends that it’s greener to buy oil from Russia.
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We unfuck ourselves like we always do.
But first, a whole lot of nothing….
Every fossil fuel executive.
gonna need some serious convincing not to put every single person who works for a fossil fuel company in the pit too tbh
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.
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.
fug
How many times are we going to learn this for the first time?
What’ll they do with all those jets they made then?
Fly them slower. Haven’t hit stall speed yet.
Hate a weak stream
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!
8 seconds of rain? That doesn’t sound much…
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
no I think poor people will just freeze to death. The rich are always fine in times of want
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?
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Inb4 Europe turns into Canada with less over the top language protection laws
less over the top language protection laws
Elaborate on that, bucko.
A Parisian expert in French literature failed Quebec’s “French Proficiency Exam”, not to mention how other languages don’t get anything close to the pedestal treatment English and French get under Canada’s official bilingualism. One of Trudeau’s cabinet was subjected to quebecoise nationalist mistreatment because she spoke an indigenous language instead of French.
And BTW, I’m saying that as someone of Quebecoise descent, likely pure laine as recently as my grandmother.
Your response was a relief; as the emoji I posted was indicating, I was worried it was some frothing about pronoun preferences having some legal protections.
Nah, I just think official language status is a violation of free speech, and of the natural development and evolution of culture.
I mean just look at France and Quebec in contrast, motherland French and Quebecoise French are nearly separate languages from each other with how incomprehensible they can be to each other, and yet both Quebec and France have strict prescriptivist official language policies in place supposedly in the name of “preserving the French language.”
If there was any sort of naturalness to any of it they’d rigidly have maintained the same exact language with all the same linguistic conventions, and yet that has not happened at all, debunking the supposed entire point of this farce in the first place.
The only reason to maintain it at this point is that it excludes the lower classes from public office and official spaces, since they are the most likely to diverge from a prescribed cultural structure, and you can see that in Ontario where francophones raised riot when funds were beginning to be allocated for the language support of Indian and Chinese languages that actually had more speakers within Ontario than French did. It’s not about preserving a minority language, it’s about refusing the rights of immigrants to have their languages accommodated as well.
“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?
