No, New York is not about to freeze in a scenario right out of The Day After Tomorrow, whatever the so-called scientists say

After decades of claiming the Earth was warming past the point of no return, a new study claims the warming will prompt an intense cooling, encasing parts of Europe in ice in a scenario straight out of a science fiction film.

In 2021, I posited that “The pressure to ‘act’ on climate change is more intense than the warming and the weather.”  I was responding to a leading “climate scientists” comment following the release of the latest Intergovernmental Report on Climate Change, who claimed that we had “zero years left to avoid dangerous climate change, because it’s here.”  At the time, I’d assumed he was referring to the impacts of increased warming, when the report itself insisted “It is unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land. Widespread and rapid changes in the atmosphere, ocean, cryosphere and biosphere have occurred.” After all, the key focus of the climate change community – other than controlling your lives and implementing socialist policies – has been to prevent a potential 2 degrees of warming for years now, which they consider a critical threshold.  Little did I dream they would suddenly change direction and go back to the original idea of global cooling.  This is science after all and the real card carrying experts know how important it is to keep your story straight, maintaining a modicum of logical consistency.  Surely, they couldn’t possibly say that we need to stop the warming to keep it from cooling because no one could be naive enough to believe that?  Alas, I was wrong.  In the middle of a winter marked by more snowstorms than the previous couple of years, scientists are suddenly claiming that parts of the Northern Hemisphere could experience a deep freeze straight out of the disaster movie, The Day After Tomorrow.  “We are moving closer to the collapse, but we’re not sure how much closer,” explained Rene van Westen, a climate scientist and oceanographer at Utrecht University, and lead author of a new study on the Gulf Stream.  Perhaps explained is the wrong word – what does it mean to move closer and not know how much?  Maybe you are not moving at all in that case?  In any event, “We are heading towards a tipping point,” he insisted using one of the frequent climate panic phrases of the hour.  This particular “tipping point”  is so extreme, however, it will produce a calamity right out of a science fiction film, when New York suddenly froze over, the ice reaching high enough that buildings were covered from bottom to top.  It will happen in Europe instead of New York, and it’s a matter of when, not if.  That’s the “the million-dollar question.”  “We unfortunately can’t answer [that] at the moment,” he said.  “It also depends on the rate of climate change we are inducing as humanity.”  

Mr. van Westen believes this outlandish idea, one that runs counter to decades of fears about warming, because of supposed changes to ocean currents, primarily the Gulf Stream which brings warm water from the tropics in South America to England and other parts of Europe.  As the warmer water reaches the arctic, some of it freezes, leaving the remainder heavier with salt.  The heavy water sinks, then begins drifting southward, where it warms and rises to the surface again, repeating the process, what has been called the “conveyor belt” of the ocean.  Scientists like Mr. van Westen are concerned that ice melting in Greenland has been adding additional freshwater to the system, changing the salt content and slowing the process down, meaning less “heavy” water ultimately makes it south to start the return trip.  A new “study” by Mr. van Westen and his colleagues used a computer simulation to “model” the weakening of this circulating water, attempting to determine what might happen if more freshwater continues to be added from the melting ice and what the overall impact on the climate in Europe would be if the current slowed or even stopped.  The team believes that the Gulf Stream, part of a larger network known as the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, is in danger of reaching the aforementioned tipping point in “decades” rather than centuries, which would lead to the total collapse of the current in a century, or so they claim.  “’We found that once it reaches the tipping point, the conveyor belt shuts down within 100 years,” the authors said.  “The heat transport toward the north is strongly reduced, leading to abrupt climate shifts.”  If that should happen, the simulation calculated that the climate in Europe will cool up to 3 degrees Celsius per decade, sending the continent into a deep freeze and presumably upending the entire global warming paradigm in the process, considering previous warnings were that there would be no snow in England.  Now, however, there’s going to be nothing but ice.

Setting aside that little problem in their logic, a few things jump out to cast doubt on the entire claim.  First, this is yet another “tipping point” that might or might not occur at some indefinite point in the future, only to cause some calamity even further in the future.  In 2021, there was a “tipping point” fear in Antarctica very similar to this one, when a study supposedly found that the ice will melt much faster in 80 years after we reached a tipping point in 40.  As  I wrote at the time, “If temperatures 40 years from now are on target to be just 1 degree Celsius higher 80 years from now, Antarctica will reach the point of no return and sea levels will rise 10 times faster 80 years from now.  Therefore, we must act now.”  Much like the current fear of plunging into a science fiction apocalypse is based on some unspecified idea that the Gulf Stream is slowing, something it’s not quite even clear we could possibly measure, the Antarctica scare was based on a single study that claimed the ice was melting faster than ever.  The actual study didn’t say that though.  Instead, it claimed the ice was expanding, almost the opposite of how it was used in the subsequent simulation.  I quote, “The waxing and waning of Antarctic sea ice is one of Earth’s greatest seasonal habitat changes, and although the maximum extent of the sea ice has increased modestly since the 1970s, inter-annual variability is high, and there is evidence of longer-term decline in its extent.”  In other words, they don’t believe their own measurements when they do not fit into the alarmist agenda.  This time around, it’s not even clear what they are measuring.  Contrary to the euphemism, the gulf stream isn’t actually a clear, coherent conveyor belt, or a log flume out of a Disney ride.  Water is a fluid that doesn’t follow the same dynamics as a solid, there is no clear demarcation between the Gulf Stream and the surrounding ocean; one flows into the other in a gradient that makes it impossible to define what is in the stream and out of it at all times.  There are bends, there are eddies that break off, etc.  It averages 62 miles wide, but the depth varies from 2,600 to 3,900 feet.  It does not move at the same speed throughout, rather an average of 5.6 miles per hour, generally faster near the surface.  It is also influenced by more than the simple salinity and ocean temperature used in the model.  The wind plays a huge part in its formation, cooling, speed, and trajectory.  The language used in the original 2018 studies in Nature magazine is a key give away to the inherent vagueness.  They claimed the current was “weakening,” but what does that actually mean and compared to what?  In fact, the exact claim was that it was the weakest it’s been in 1,600 years, but given the stream wasn’t discovered until 1512, it’s impossible to take that metric seriously, especially given these other concerns.

Second, unlike the Antarctica “tipping point,” the physical mechanism they are describing as the cause of the weakening is unclear and doesn’t make all that much logical sense.  The current begins in the Northern Hemisphere because the formation of ice leaves saltier water behind, the saltier water is heavier, and sinks to the bottom of the ocean, where it then circulates south before rising.  Any ice melting in Greenland, however, is adding extremely cold freshwater to the surface.  How does this water interact with water far, far below?  Conceivably, additional freshwater could cause the salt to rise again to the surface as it follows a traditional concentration gradient (literally pulling the salt up), but that process would be extremely complex and incredibly difficult to measure meaningfully.  If the heavier water was too far below to interact with the freshwater in time, there might be no effect at all.  If it is a medium distance, the effect might be negligible.  The simulation simply dismisses this entirely, taking a complex system and reducing it to a simple input and output that doesn’t reflect reality.  The simulation also conveniently ignores historical evidence that the Gulf Stream has survived significantly higher temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere during the Little Optimum.  In 982, the Viking Erik the Red was exiled and began a new colony on Greenland, when the ice sheets were smaller compared to today, ultimately attracting hundreds of settlers and serving as a trading post with Europe.  Around 1200, however, the ice began to advance towards its current level as the climate cooled and the sea level began to rise.  By 1500, the settlement was abandoned.  The Gulf Stream, however, survived both.  Interestingly, the climate during the Little Optimum was warmer in the North and slightly cooler in the tropics, meaning the current persisted when the situation was the opposite of what we have now.  Given this was the case and the original 2018 studies claimed the Gulf Stream was weaker than before the Little Optimum, meaning there was no effect during the warming period, why would there be some danger of a new calamity?

Third, the phrase “tipping point” is used rather frequently in climate science even when it’s not really clear whether the phenomenon in question actually has a tipping point.  Generally speaking a “tipping point” is defined either as a small input that produces a larger than expected output, or a point after which a system is fundamentally altered and not easily reset to the status quo.  Clearly, some aspects of the climate have a tipping point.  There is a set of conditions that produces a true ice age for example, or more locally, a set of conditions under which a tropical storm becomes a hurricane.  Once these thresholds are crossed, the clock cannot be wound back.  This doesn’t imply that every phenomenon has a tipping point, however, or that all tipping points are equal, much less that we can even know in advance which do and which do not.  Further, a simulation of a complex system that demonstrates a tipping point doesn’t necessarily mean one exists in the real world.  The so-called tipping point for the Gulf Stream is instructive in this regard.  The claim is that after the tipping point is reached, the current will collapse over the course of a hundred years, but that ignores any and all mitigating effects that will happen in the interim.  Over the course of the century after the purported tipping point, the climate in Europe will cool by a supposed 3 degrees, which will necessarily mean there will be more arctic ice, which means more salt in the water, which makes the water even heavier, which could well offset any freshwater coming from Greenland – assuming the ice sheet in Greenland would even continue to melt as any cooling in Europe, especially intense cooling, would likely spill over towards Greenland.  Putting this another way, if the world itself can’t handle 2 degrees of warming without suffering catastrophic effects, why wouldn’t three degrees of cooling across a significant swath of the globe have countervailing effects?  Of course, I cannot say for sure, anymore than the scientists, but that’s why the historical analog is so important.  The Gulf Stream survived the Little Optimum, when the Northern Hemisphere was warmer than it was now, and the Little Ice Age that followed, lasting up until the mid-1800s.  There is nothing happening right now that exceeds those thresholds, making it extremely likely the Gulf Stream will survive whatever the scientists claim.

Ultimately, the claim illustrates two troubling trends in so-called climate science.  The first is the need to move effects that might or might not happen far in the future forward in time.  Proponents of global warming have undoubtedly realized that the average person has a hard time relating to events that are going to occur centuries in the future.  Claiming everything has a “tipping point,” however, enables them to insist the danger is much closer to home, even when they aren’t.  We saw this in the “we have X years to prevent climate change from becoming a catastrophe” statements that started in the early 2000s, and now we see it everywhere.  The second is that the entire field is now driven almost entirely by panic-porn with claims becoming so outlandish they are indeed right out of a movie.  Both, however, illustrate their desperation that people simply aren’t listening to their demands to socialize large portions of the economy, especially when their substitute technologies such as electric cars are proving to be a disaster for the average person, and that is likely a good thing.