We’re doomed or something
…this week brings news of another potential mega-scale perturbation. According to a new study just out in Nature Climate Change by Stefan Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and a group of co-authors, we’re now seeing a slowdown of the great ocean circulation that, among other planetary roles, helps to partly drive the Gulf Stream off the U.S. east coast. The consequences could be dire – including significant extra sea level rise for coastal cities like New York and Boston.
There’s no point in reading the rest of the article, it’s exactly as doomy as you’d expect. Oh, and exactly as wrong as you’d expect, with Cult member Chris Mooney refusing to actually investigate the claim
(Breitbart) But the paper, whose co-authors include one Michael E Mann, appears to be contradicted by real-world evidence which shows nothing of the kind.
Here is what the leading expert in the field, H Thomas Rossby, a professor at the University of Rhode Island Graduate School of Oceanography said in 2014 about the Gulf Stream, which he has been measuring for the last 20 years.
“We find absolutely no evidence that suggests that the Gulf Stream is slowing down.â€
Oops. Anthony Watts dives deep into the paper and notes (along with all the science)
Of course, Rahmstorf and Mann don’t list Rossby’s study in their references, nor seem to use the “highly accurate†ADCP data. Instead they use a model along with [proxies, reconstructions, and] the highly interpolated GISS data to come to the conclusions they want. So, it isn’t surprising they are chasing phantoms in their study. They claim (in Figure 1 from their paper) that this cold spot south of Greenland is caused by meltwater from Greenland and it is evidence of a slowed circulation:
This is the Cult of Climastrology at its best: fear mongering with anything but real data. Computer models, proxies, invented data, etc are the be all say all. If the thermometer says 65 and their models say 72, they’ll go with 72. This is all about politics, particularly the politics of fear. “Science” is a means to that fear. And it very much begs the question that should be on everyone’s minds, including CoC members: why do they lie to us like this?
