Ocean-wide Sensor Array Provides New Look at Global Ocean Current (nature.com) 73
An anonymous reader shares a Nature article: The North Atlantic Ocean is a major driver of the global currents that regulate Earth's climate, mix the oceans and sequester carbon from the atmosphere -- but researchers haven't been able to get a good look at its inner workings until now. The first results from an array of sensors strung across this region reveal that things are much more complicated than scientists previously believed. Researchers with the Overturning in the Subpolar North Atlantic Program (OSNAP) presented their findings this week at an ocean science meeting in Portland, Oregon. With nearly two years of data from late 2014 to 2016, the team found that the strength of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation -- which pumps warm surface water north and returns colder water at depth -- varies with the winds and the seasons, transporting an average of roughly 15.3 million cubic metres of water per second. The measurements are similar in magnitude to those from another array called RAPID, which has been operating between Florida and the Canary Islands since 2004. But scientists say they were surprised by how much the currents measured by the OSNAP array varied over the course of two years.
OSNAP is an excellent name... (Score:1)
for a system that will show in great detail how human activity is irrevocably changing the climate
of the planet for the worse.
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for a system that will show in great detail how human activity is irrevocably changing the climate
of the planet for the worse.
Hate to break it to you, but it actually proves we don't have a thorough-enough understanding of planetary systems to be able to make reliable predictions 100 years or more in the future.
From TFA:
The first results from an array of sensors strung across this region reveal that things are much more complicated than scientists previously believed.
Ocean currents a huge major factor in global climate trends, and here we're still making major discoveries about things like ocean currents and magma plumes.
Only recently it was accidentally discovered by a NASA satellite that the accelerated Antarctic ice-melt rates that had been blamed on AGW were actually being
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Hate to break it to you, but it actually proves we don't have a thorough-enough understanding of planetary systems to be able to make reliable predictions 100 years or more in the future.
I guess it was just an accident then that a relatively simple climate model from 1967 was able to make pretty accurate predictions of the climate.
The first climate model turns 50, and predicted global warming almost perfectly [forbes.com]
Only recently it was accidentally discovered by a NASA satellite that the accelerated Antarctic ice-melt rates that had been blamed on AGW were actually being caused by a monster-sized magma plume rivaling the Yellowstone magma plume underneath the ocean floor under the Antarctic.
What evidence do you have that this magma plume is a recent phenomena that caused a sudden increase in Antarctic ice melt rates rather than something that has existed for thousands of years?
Re: OSNAP is an excellent name... (Score:4, Insightful)
You seem to have a faith based belief that scientists don't know nuthin'.
We already know that there is a greenhouse effect on Earth since the normal thermodynamic temperature of an object orbiting at Earth's distance from the sun is about 0 degrees Fahrenheit (-18 degrees Celsius). Earth's average surface temperature is about 58 F. The presence of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere explains that temperature difference nicely. It makes sense that increasing the level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere would increase temperatures. So scientists may not be able to predict with precision exactly what temperatures will be in 100 years but they can pretty easily predict they will be warmer than they are now as long as greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere continue to increase. It's difficult to predict exactly what will happen since there are no analogs in Earth's history to the current rapid increase in greenhouse gases. Uncertainty is not your friend because the effects could just as easily be worse than expected as they could be better than expected.
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The alternative explanation is that CO2 levels follow the growth of vegetation (warmer weather = humidity = rapid vegetation growth = more CO2). But there is also plankton which releases chemicals to boost cloud cover when temperatures get too warm. That cloud cover then reflects sunlight out to space.
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That means mathematically for CO2 to increase the temperature by 1C degrees that a single molecule of CO2 must be capturing and radiating back 2500C degrees.
I'm afraid your math is missing two parts: one, the thermodynamics of the problem, the CO2 molecules aren't sitting there in a vacuum, they're rattling around in thermal equilibrium as part of the atmosphere; two, the direction of outgoing vs. incoming radiation. So, in order of what happens:
any given CO2 molecule happens to be really good at absorbing IR (much more so than the rest of the stuff you list) while being transparent in the visible. Yep, very true, just go into a lab and measure absorption spe
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But the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere just doesn't appear to be capable of being the big bogey man everyone is trying to make it out to be.
For your edification here is a link to a study that measured the change in forcing from the increase in CO2 over about a decade. It found a statistically significant trend of an increase in forcing of 0.2 W/m^2 per decade.
Observational determination of surface radiative forcing by CO2 from 2000 to 2010 [nature.com]
And there's a PDF copy of the whole thing here [google.com] so you don't need a subscription to Nature to read it.
CO2 is, however, a direct by product of an industrialized society so stopping CO2 emissions would mean slowing down industry. And if you follow the money trail, in the US at least, when the USSR collapsed the US based Communists needed to go somewhere else to ply their trade so they joined the environmentalism movements. What better way to destroy capitalism then to claim the artifacts of a capitalist society are going to destroy all life on the planet by increasing plant food - CO2 ? Hard to see how our current levels of CO2 can destroy life when during the reign of the dinosaurs the atmosphere had CO2 levels in the range of 2000ppm and we're only at 400ppm.
I find that when people start bringing in economic arguments that they are very motivated to just ignore th
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So, there's a CO2 screen between ground level and high altitude, in the amount of a few
Re: OSNAP is an excellent name... (Score:2)
I'm able to use stock graphs to predict the market well enough to earn money. I don't even bother with the fundamentals. I don't understan. the underlying data. All I am doing is looking at graphs and projecting into the near future. 50 years of accurate predictions might we have a pretty good grasp of climate change. Or it could mean we are predicting the long term weather, as indicated by the recent activity and millions of years of data.
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And, if you read The Black Swan, by Nicholas Nassim Taleb, you will learn why even what you are doing -- predicting the market by assuming that it will behave tomorrow much like it behaved today (which is an excellent way to predict weather as well for up to three days) will one day cost you more money in a day than you've made in all the transactions up to date -- rare, large, expensive fluctuations in the market that do NOT conform to the usual Gaussian, linear regression, simple extrapolation models are
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Except not all trajectories are chaotic in the truly chaos sense of the word, they just noisy and in those situations, they can be averaged.
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It's kind of silly to assume I can lose all my money without understanding my investment strategy, but black swans are similar the point I was getting at. Climate is simply too long term and too complex to know if our models work or if they just work under present conditions.
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What evidence do you have that this magma plume is a recent phenomena that caused a sudden increase in Antarctic ice melt rates rather than something that has existed for thousands of years?
Perhaps you missed this /. article:
https://science.slashdot.org/s... [slashdot.org]
Or, perhaps you were hoping nobody would actually call you on it.
Strat
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No, we didn't miss that article, we just didn't misinterpret it as you have. Nowhere did it state that the magma plume is short-lived. In fact, the NASA press release states "the heat source isn’t a new or increasing threat to the West Antarctic ice sheet." And constant references to the Yellowstone hotspot should have clued you in to the fact that this is likely a long-term phenomenon (Yellowstone has been at its current location for 2.1 million years and is at least 16 million years old).
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No, I did not miss that article. It's certainly possible that the magma plume affects the stability of the ice sheet in Marie Byrd Land. But the magma plume has probably been there for over a million years while the ice sheet there has advanced and retreated many times. Meanwhile ice sheets are melting not just there but all over the place around the periphery of Antarctica and in Greenland, most of them not affected by magma plumes. So the question still is what makes you think there has been a sudden
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for a system that will show in great detail how human activity is irrevocably changing the climate
of the planet for the worse.
Hate to break it to you, but it actually proves we don't have a thorough-enough understanding of planetary systems to be able to make reliable predictions 100 years or more in the future.
From TFA:
The first results from an array of sensors strung across this region reveal that things are much more complicated than scientists previously believed.
Ocean currents a huge major factor in global climate trends, and here we're still making major discoveries about things like ocean currents and magma plumes.
Only recently it was accidentally discovered by a NASA satellite that the accelerated Antarctic ice-melt rates that had been blamed on AGW were actually being caused by a monster-sized magma plume rivaling the Yellowstone magma plume underneath the ocean floor under the Antarctic.
Given that there is so much we are still learning and have yet to learn, it's patently absurd to insist we can reliably & accurately predict global average temperatures 100 years or more in the future.
Strat
You don't need perfect understanding of every little detail to make accurate general predictions.
I can't predict the exact path traveled by the neighbor & his dog on their nightly walk but I can make some predict good guesses as to where they'll be & roughly when.
The big question is how much additional heat is being added to the oceans as that can't be handwaved away and while a lot can be absorbed, it'll eventually be released.
Never mind how much heat will be added in the years to come, what's alre
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You don't need perfect understanding of every little detail to make accurate general predictions.
I'm glad you said that, I was waiting for someone to post that.
In order to predict the behavior of any system, one must first identify the most statistically-relevant major variables. We don't yet know what they are/could be, or how many are necessary, as we don't know yet what all those major factors are and have a very imperfect understanding of many of the ones we do know about, like ocean currents and magma plumes, etc etc etc.
Humans are a blind man trying to describe an elephant by feeling it's trunk.
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We don't yet know what they are/could be
Actually we do.
We just don't know if a specific current is changing its track more to the left or more to the right, hence w don't know if New York is hit or Casablanca or if the current continues to the north and hits Island and Norway as it is right now.
No idea about what bullshit you want to argue.
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If you wanted to simulate the heating of the Earth, you would need temperature, density, humidity, gas ratio levels (everything to run a fluid dynamic simulation in the atmosphere). But you also need to know the topology of the Earth for river flow. That would also require geology and the actual knowledge of every underground river. Then there are underwater volcanoes and fault lines in the oceans which have vents which allow in the inflow of cold water and venting of hot water carrying minerals. Another c
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Humans are a blind man trying to describe an elephant by feeling it's trunk. We don't know what we don't know yet, but it's damned sure it isn't anywhere near certain enough to make predictions accurate & reliable enough 100+ years out that we should make major upheavals in society or cripple ourselves and slow development of civilization.
You're assuming that not responding to the threats that climate science has so far been pretty accurate in predicting won't cause "major upheavals in society or cripple ourselves and slow development of civilization". If the worst of the predictions come to pass that won't be a good assumption.
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Hate to break it to you, but it actually proves we don't have a thorough-enough understanding of planetary systems to be able to make reliable predictions 100 years or more in the future.
So the impacts of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions could be even worse than predicted?
Why are we delaying action again? I've forgotten.
Given that there is so much we are still learning and have yet to learn, it's patently absurd to insist we can reliably & accurately predict global average temperatures 100 years or more in the future.
So those guys who confidently predict that no harm can come from increasing greenhouse gas emissions should be treated with considerable scepticism - yes? Because I think those guys are somewhat less methodical and less trustworthy than an old crone reading the chicken gizzards
Your argument seems to be that because we can't predict the impacts of our emissions, w
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Your argument seems to be that because we can't predict the impacts of our emissions, we should therefore take immediate and substantive action and shut down all our emitting technologies.
Is that your argument?
I already answered if you'd actually bothered to read all the way through my comment. Apparently however you seem to be among those that barely manages to read the title and first line before you REEEEE! and dash out a snarky (if dumb) comment.
That doesn't mean I favor "no limits, pollute all you want". We should take reasoned, well thought-out, pragmatic, economically reasonable, responsible, and practical steps to reduce all forms of pollution. Nobody wants to shit where they eat.
"Reading is fundamental."
Strat
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OP was being sarcastic and obviously had read through your comment. -1 point to BlueStrat for lack of reading comprehension.
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You're right, things could get a LOT worse than predicted, a lot faster than predicted.
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Re: OSNAP is an excellent name... (Score:2)
That is one theory. One that is not supported by the OSNAP network at this time.
Bah, what do these scientists know? (Score:1)
They still haven't found the underground city of Atlantis!
Or have they?
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They still haven't found the underground city of Atlantis!
Maybe because they keep looking in the ocean.
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Atlantis was not underground.
However there are recent findings that indicate Atlantis might have been a coastal city of Spain: http://www.nationalgeographic.... [nationalge...hic.com.au] (there is more, just google).
Assuming the city ever existed as it is AFAIK only mentioned by a single author.
Anit-Science heretics (Score:1, Insightful)
The Post say that Scientist were surprised. Scientist are never surprised. They know everything. Just ask a member of /. they will tell you Science is king and anyone who questions a Scientist believes the Earth is 6000 years old.
Do not question Science or the Scientific conclusions of Scientists.
Global Climate Change is a FACT as established by study showing that 98% of Scientists believe it to be a fact. When 98% of Scientist say something is true you know it is true. That is how we conduct Science.
Re: Anit-Science heretics (Score:1)
I hate to say it, we really believe in publishing that which gets us further funding. Now, I'm not in climate science, but it's pretty obvious across the fields I've worked with.
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Which makes it all the more impressive 98% aren't taking the oil money.
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At one point in history, more than 98% of scientists thought the earth was flat. Huzzah Galileo!
Actually it was long before Galileo that the flat-earth hypothesis was challenged. Aristotle, around 350 BC, summarized the weaknesses in this view that had accumulated up until then.
A flat-earth hypothesis is perfectly reasonable as long as you are dealing with a small local area. But as you travel longer distances, the Earth's curvature begins to matter. For more information, consider this famous essay by Isaac Asimov. [tufts.edu]
TL/DR: generally, new science does not invalidate old science, but instead shows where i
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Most of them were not scientific theory and some have been shown to be partially correct, eg you can measure things like fetal alcohol syndrome by measuring the face and leeches are still used in medicine for those cases where it is useful.
The aether is a good example of a scientific theory that made sense (light is a wave and waves need a substance to travel through) and made predictions (the aether would have wind like properties that could be measured). Once the instruments got accurate enough to measure
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At one point in history, more than 98% of scientists thought the earth was flat. Huzzah Galileo!
That actually never was the case.
Retarded european "commoners" thought the world was flat. That is a huge difference.
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More like uneducated people who had never left the valley they were born in or met anyone who had traveled thought the Earth was flat if they ever bothered thinking about it.
Re:Anit-Science heretics (Score:5, Insightful)
Scientists love to be surprised. It leads to new and interesting insights into the world we live in. Scientists question the results of other scientists all the time. Science is one of the most competitive areas of human activities. The problem for people like you is if you want to question scientific conclusions you need to bring some real science to the table with you.
Re:Anit-Science heretics (Score:4, Insightful)
This. Trashing science is easy. Doing science is hard.
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Trashing science is easy. Doing science is hard.
Then I have to ask: is the science of Trash easy or hard?
Re:Anit-Science heretics (Score:5, Insightful)
No, actually. What you're seeing is an objection to seeing the Autopay box ticked next to any "scientific consensus" that arises. The assumption that such "conclusions" must automatically be reflected in social/economic policies is obnoxious. That's a matter for the political sphere and people's ability and willingness to pay the freight, nothing else.
What alternative to the consensus theory has been proposed? That fairies did it?
Pointing out there is a consensus (when there is) is hardly a crime. There's a consensus. Get over it. Why did a consensus on the issue arise? Because the scientists who supported the theory produced evidence, and then further evidence, and not one person who supports the myriad of alternate (and conflicting) views can produce a shred of evidence in support of the alternatives.
If you want scientists to support your alternative view, stop whining and produce evidence.
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The faux consensus is based on false data. This is a well known fact.
Provide the actual data and the studies to allow us to observe that data ourselves.
In any scientific field, except the faux study of climate, careers would have been destroyed and the rest fled (see cold fusion for an example) but because AGW is a political movement, not science, we keep funding this crap, making bad Hollywood movies, and pretending it's real science when it's clearly not.
Provide evidence of the political motivations of Arrhenius, Fourier et. al., evidence of their collusion and describe in detail how they benefited politically. Svante Arrhenius would now be 150 years old. How is he still alive? Where is he? Is he a vampire?
When you can point to some real science not based on corrupted data and not from people who have previously corrupted or supported corrupted data, let us know. I've been watching this sham go on for decades now. Have yet to see real science take place. Have seen a whole lot of politics, though.
Your alternative theory (that the whole thing is a conspiracy of time travelling communist vampires) is not actually very convincing.
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No, actually. What you're seeing is an objection to seeing the Autopay box ticked next to any "scientific consensus" that arises. The assumption that such "conclusions" must automatically be reflected in social/economic policies is obnoxious. That's a matter for the political sphere and people's ability and willingness to pay the freight, nothing else.
Well if the scientific consensus is correct you can pay now to mitigate the problem or you can pay later (and probably a whole lot more) to adapt to the changes coming down the pike. If the high end of scientific projections on anthropogenic global warming come to pass it could cost us our civilization. It doesn't matter that much to me since I'm old enough I'll be lucky to live another decade but if you're young you may be paying out your butt for the cost of adapting to things like sea level rise, more
Have we finally reached peak hubris? (Score:3, Insightful)
things are much more complicated than scientists previously believed
No doubt. And that will continue to be the case for the foreseeable future.
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things are much more complicated than scientists previously believed
No doubt. And that will continue to be the case for the foreseeable future.
I see no hubris here. Rather, the humility of realizing there is more to understand.
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Also the realization that perfect understanding will never be achieved. It is easy to predict that something will go down hill, predicting the exact course on varied terrain, not so much, especially when some of that terrain is not in sight. This is just part of the process of learning the terrain.
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Well, yeah, but only because it would be silly for a scientist to believe something more complicated than reality. There's really only a single side to the distribution.
You start with the simple model, then add as observations show embellishments to be necessary.
This isn't an error, it's normal progress, as disregarded minor items (like 0.04% of CO2 in
Ocean wide sensor array (Score:1)
I feel like there's a good yo mama joke in here somewhere.