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I posted on how Europe might end up cooler rather than warmer as a consequence of global warming and its affect on ocean currents, click here for the post.

Following the post, a reader of this blog, Phil Done, suggested in response to a comment from Ian Mott, that Mott really should read up on the phenomenon at Wikipedia.

Mott, who likes working things out for himself, has had a read at Wikipedia and done a bit of a general google and emailed me his findings as follows:

A check of the first pages of google sites dealing with the claimed ice age that would be produced by the collapse of the ‘Atlantic Conveyor’ reveals some interesting stuff. Most carry vague descriptions of how this would take place and seem to indicate that it will be caused by a change in northern salinity levels due to melt water from the Greenland Ice Sheet that will prevent this less dense water from submerging and thereby altering the flow pattern. Most carry the claim that evaporation from the gulf stream currently make this body of water very saline and more dense than the rest of the ocean. All point to the disruption of this salinity level by fresh melt water as the primary agent of disturbed flow pattern.

A good example is http:www.enviroliteracy.org/article.php/545.htm which has a curious link to a graphic called “The Atlantic Thermohaline Circulation” at www.clivar.org/publications/other_pubs/clivar_transp/pdf.files/ . Now the most curious thing about this graphic is that the Gulf Stream is shown as flowing due east from New York to Portugal before heading north past the UK. The generally accepted route up the US east coast appears to have been an inconvenient fact to be ignored for the sake of the story. Even more curious is a “cold, saline bottom current” heading north past New Zealand, through the shallows of Vanuatu into the far north pacific where it surfaces between Alaska and Kamchatka where, curiously, it is supposedly warmed in this sub-arctic clime for the journey south.

The brightest spot was at www.awitness.org/column/global_warming_ice_age.html that rightly pointed out that the mini-iceage of the 1400’s was no such thing and that the other common example provided 12000 years ago was actually a slight pause in the middle of a period of glaciation with little relevance to this scenario.

But it is the actual numbers involved that reveal the truth. According to www.encyclopedia.com/html/G/GulfS1tre.asp the initial speed of the Gulf Stream is 6.4km/hour over a width of 80km. This slows further north as it widens so for the sake of this analysis we assume the Gulf Stream/North Atlantic Current has a median flow of only 3.6km/hr, is 100km wide and about 500m deep. At this speed the entire trip from Florida to Iceland will only take 70 days. And even assuming zero rainfall, the maximum evaporation is only likely to be 70/365 days x 2000mm evaporation = 383mm evaporation per cycle. And this means the 500 metre thick water column is left to absorb the salt reserves of 0.383 metres of evaporated water before it heads south again. As normal ocean salt level is 3.5% then the 499.617 remaining metres of the water column absorbs 3.5% of 0.383 metres of water, a total of 13.4 millimetres of salt that is added to the 17.5 metres of salt in the column. This is an increase of only 0.07657 of 1%.

And as for the claimed impact of fresh water on the current, we have a total of 180 km3 of water flowing past any given point in the north atlantic each hour. This amounts to 1.577 million km3 each year which disperses into the approx 160 million km3 North Atlantic (40 million km2 x average depth of 3.926km). This north atlantic data is derived from the whole of atlantic data from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/atlantic_ocean .

The entire ice volume of Greenland is only 2.44 million km3 so a complete melt over a highly improbable twenty years would add only 0.122 million km3 to the annual current flow of 1.577 million km3, for a total of 1.699 million km3 pa. The existing salt in the NA Current, at 3.5% of volume, will be 0.055195 million km3. And this will only reduce the salinity level of the combined current and melt water by one 14th to 3.25%.

A slightly less improbable 100 year total melt, but still very rapid in climatic terms, would involve only 0.0244 km3 per annum. This would produce a combined flow of 1.6014 million km3 with a salinity of 3.45%. This range is only half the variation normally observed within a 1000 metre ocean profile. See www.windows.ucar.edu/tour/link=/earth/water/salinity_dept

In summary:

The North Atlantic currents are horizontal cycles that flow in a clockwise direction due to the rotation of the Earth. They are doing the same thing as the water in a northern hemisphere bathtub and for the same reason. They are, in most part, not vertical cycles with surface water flowing north and sea floor water flowing south so any theory based on a disturbed flow due to lower salinity from ice sheet melt water is a theory that ignores the primary determinants of current flow, the rotation of the earth.

The theory of increased salinity in the Gulf Stream/Nth Atlantic Current due to evaporation ignores the fact that precipitation also takes place in the same regions. Ocean salinity maps indicate that highest salinity is actually in the middle of the North Atlantic (Sargasso Sea with high air pressure and low rainfall), not in the northern regions.

The volume of water in the Gulf Stream/Nth Atlantic Current is of such magnitude that a complete melt of the Greenland Ice Sheet over a period of only 100 years, contracting North at 27km/year, would dissipate the fresh water to such an extent that salinity levels would only drop from 3.5% to 3.45%. This variation is well within the normal range of ocean salinity levels. To suggest that a minor change in the chemical composition of such a large body of water could override the influence of factors of such magnitude as the rotation of the Earth, itself, is pure fantasy.

Consequently, we must conclude that the Pentagon was rather charitable in describing the Atlantic Conveyor/Ice Age scenario as an extreme scenario and very low probability event. It is, in fact, a highly improbable event that not only extrapolates known effects to improbable extremes but also excludes mitigating factors that are of thousands of orders of magnitude greater.

I am not endorsing Mott’s conclusions, but posting them for general discussion.

About 10,000 climate experts, diplomats, politicians and groupies met in Montreal over the last two weeks to put in place global policies for ‘climate control’ post the Kyoto agreement which will expire in 2012.

Before the conference, and some way into the second week of the event, Benny Peiser predicted the end of Kyoto-type agreements. The Financial Post published the following opinion on 8 December:

As the UN’s climate convention in Montreal draws to a close, it is becoming apparent that, despite the usual rhetoric, all attempts will fail to extend the Kyoto Treaty beyond its expiration in 2012. No one will be surprised about this outcome. After all, the U.S. administration has insisted time and again that it would not budge.

… The driving-force behind this seismic shift of the political landscape is one man and one man only: Tony Blair.

No other world leader has raised the issue of climate change as high on the international agenda as the British Prime Minister. No other person has tried harder, longer and more doggedly to sway the Bush administration. For years, he was the acclaimed champion of environmental activists throughout the world. No wonder then that Blair stunned incredulous observers and green campaigners by his conversion from advocate of command and control ecology to crusader of a more sensible environmentalism.

Alert political observers had spotted the first signs of a conspicuous change of tone earlier this year. Already in January, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, and then even more so at the G8 meeting in Gleneagles, Blair highlighted the key issue of his new line of reasoning: “No-one is going to damage their economy in trying to tackle this problem of the environment. There are ways that we can tackle climate change fully consistent with growing our economies.” He dropped the real bombshell a couple of months ago at the Clinton Global Initiative in New York when the fall-out of Blair’s new thinking blew apart the green consensus: “I don’t think people are going to start negotiating another major treaty like Kyoto.”

… The reasons for Blair’s radical transformation are not difficult to discern. Europe is in turmoil as an enlarged EU is struggling both politically and economically. Worryingly, there is a growing realization that the Kyoto Protocol, contrary to the assurances of its advocates, is having a deleterious effect on Europe’s already sluggish economy. While the implementation of Kyoto and the myriad of other environmental regulations are strangling Europe’s lethargic economies, the economies of its international competitors (that is the U.S., India and China) are enjoying boom times unrestricted by self-imposed limits of growth. Besides, most European countries have been unable to achieve their Kyoto targets and will be forced to pay huge amounts of corrective payments that are mandated under the Kyoto treaty.

Even a small country like Ireland is currently facing a bill of 300 million pounds to 400 million pounds for failing to meet its Kyoto targets. The cost that Britain will incur by 2050 as a result of its current emission targets are estimated to range from 60 billion pounds to 400 billion pounds.

Benny Peiser is British and a global warming skeptic.

Perhaps, sensing the talk were not going to deliver the type of agreement that so many global warming believers wanted … well an environmental group organised for Bill Clinton to speak.

According to CNN:

Clinton, a champion of the Kyoto Protocol, the existing emissions-controls agreement opposed by the Bush administration, spoke in the final hours of a two-week U.N. climate conference at which Washington has come under heavy criticism for its stand.

“There’s no longer any serious doubt that climate change is real, acclerating and caused by human activities,” said Clinton, whose address was interrupted repeatedly by enthusiastic applause.

“We are uncertain about how deep and the time of arrival of the consequences, but we are quite clear they will not be good.”

Canadian officials said the U.S. delegation was displeased with the last-minute scheduling of the Clinton speech.

According to The Courier Mail:

Mr Clinton stoutly defended the Kyoto Protocol, whose framework was approved by his administration in 1997, but which was ditched by Bush in March 2001, in one of his first acts in office.

…To loud cheers from an audience of thousands of delegates and green activists, Mr Clinton said: “I liked the Kyoto Protocol. I helped to write it. And I signed it.”

Mr Clinton was invited by the Canadian branch of the Sierra Club environment group to speak at the final day of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the treaty that oversees Kyoto.

Because it was not an official UNFCCC event, all UN logos and backdrops were carefully removed from the podium.

Negotiations were going to the wire on Friday on how to further greenhouse gas cuts beyond Kyoto’s present commitment, which runs out in 2012.

So what was finally decided? According to ABC Online :

A landmark UN conference agreed on Saturday to extend the life of the Kyoto Protocol on climate change and launch a dialogue between Kyoto members and the United States on long-term action on greenhouse gases.

“We have completed our Montreal marathon, although the road before us remains so long. We are going to reconcile humanity with its planet,” Canadian Environment Minister Stephane Dion said as he brought down the gavel on a meeting high on drama, and long on exhaustion.

The meeting of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was tasked with charting the next steps in tackling the emissions from fossil fuel gases that scientists say are trapping heat from the Sun and disrupting Earth’s fragile climate system.

After often-bitter negotiations, members of the Kyoto Protocol agreed to start talks on how to cut their emissions beyond 2012, when the treaty’s present “commitment period” expires.

That agreement was a crucial show of support for a treaty that has been in deep trouble since March 2001 when the United States, the world’s biggest carbon polluter, walked away from it.

Australia is only other industrialised country that has refused to ratify Kyoto.

The accord also gave a powerful boost to the fledgling market in carbon emissions, a key mechanism set up under Kyoto to encourage cuts.

The market has been beset by fears that Kyoto could die after 2012.
“Kyoto is alive and kicking,” declared European Environment Commissioner Stavros Dimas.

It is interesting to ponder that Bill Clinton, an American, apparenlty stole the show, delivered for the global warming believers and socialists, but they will presumably continue hating America.

Where to next for Tony Blair?