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More Signs of Gulf Stream Slowdown as Floods Devastate Cumbria, England
11
December, 2015
Back
in 2009 heavy rains fell over the Northern UK.
The rains, abnormally intense, pushed river levels to heights never
before measured. A wall of water built-up. Surging over banks, it
inundated the town of Carlisle, Cumbria, England — forcing many to
flee to higher ground.
At
the time, weather forecasters and climatologists wondered if there
might have been a global warming link to the freak Cumbria floods.
There was certainly risk. Risk that the North Atlantic would become a
mess of storms as the Gulf Stream slowed down and cold air masses
collided with warm — developing a raging storm track to the west of
the UK. A climate situation with the potential to draw in
never-before-seen rivers of moisture and set off flooding the likes
of which the UK has never known. Flood defenses were shored up. New
commitments were made to shift the country away from carbon
emissions.
But
in just six short years many of those commitments have lagged.
Funding for flood defenses was cut by conservatives in the UK
parliament even
as similar funds for wind and solar energy were targeted in favor of
fracking the countryside for natural gas.
The usual litany of climate change denial spewed out of the regular
conservative mouthpieces in the politics and the media. It was the
height of hubris and mismanagement. And again we have a ‘never
before seen’ rainstorm roaring up out of a greatly troubled North
Atlantic.
*****
(On
December 6 of 2015 river levels at Sands Centre in Carlisle hit 8
meters above the typical range. The previous record highest level for
this river gauge was 4.5 meters — a level the new flood defense
systems were designed to contain. But this week’s rainfall simply
overwhelmed both flood defenses and previous expectations for the
upper limits of extreme weather. Image source: Shoothill
Gauge Map.)
On
Saturday and Sunday of December 5th and 6th, 2015, Cumbria flooded
again. An even higher flood surge than before overwhelmed the new
defenses and forced residents to yet again flee. Then, just three
days later on Wednesday more than two months worth of rain fell over
the Cumbria region. The
amount at 341 mm in just 24 hours was a new UK record and compares to
average total rainfall for the month of December at 146 mm.
The county was again overwhelmed by water. Human chains were formed
to help bring those stranded to safety. After
the waters began to subside — devastation. More than 6,000 homes
were found to have been flooded with perhaps as many as 20,000 people
displaced.
This
was the flood UK parliamentarians swore they would fight to keep from
happening again. The one conservative politicians said would never
again happen in our lifetime. A flood that was worse than the
terrible event of 2009 happening just six years after the first. And
one that was almost certainly made worse by the dreadful alterations
wrought by human forced climate change on the environment of the
North Atlantic.
The
Gulf Stream Slowdown and The Great New Storms of the North Atlantic
One
doesn’t have to be a climatologist to see that sea surface
temperature patterns in the North Atlantic are all topsy-turvy. The
region of ocean to the west of the UK is cooler than normal. It’s a
great cool pool once predicted by climate scientists and now made
real by a human-forced warming of the world’s airs and waters. The
result of an ever-increasing glacial melt outflow coming from
Greenland.
(Temperature
anomaly deltas in the region of the Gulf Stream are in the range of
-5 C below average in the northern, Greenland melt-related, cool
pool, and +9 C above average in a hot ribbon off the US East Coast.
This overall new 14 C temperature variance from south to north is
generating new atmospheric instabilities that intensify storm systems
firing off in the North Atlantic. Image source: Earth
Nullschool.)
Climate
scientists have known for a long time that just such a cool pool of
fresh glacial melt could play havok with weather across the North
Atlantic and on to far-flung regions of the globe. And it’s just
such a weather disruptor that we see developing there now. One that
was originally dramatized in the film The
Day After Tomorrow.
But one that will all-too-likely represent centuries of catastrophic
weather terminating in a new, much hotter, far more toxic, and far
less life-sustaining world — rather than simply a week-long
hemisphere-sized superstorm abruptly halted by a nonsensical new ice
age (Please see World
Ocean Heartbeat Fading).
To
the south of our cool pool and on off the US East Coast we find that
sea surface temperatures are screaming hot. Hot as in the range of
5-9 degrees Celsius (9-16 degrees Fahrenheit) above normal. Both the
cool pool to the north and the hot pool to the south taken together
are an ominous sign that the
Gulf Stream is slowing down.
The cool, fresh water outflow from glaciers near Greenland is
interrupting a heat and salt driven over-turning there. The
over-turning, which drives the Gulf Stream current, slows down. As a
result, heat that would be transported northward instead backs up off
the US East Coast.
What
results is a kind of dipole temperature pattern that aids in storm
generation over the North Atlantic. The cool pool tends to pull cold
air southward from Greenland. The hot ribbon off the US East Coast
tends to draw warm, moist, tropical air into collision with the
trough zone south and east of Greenland. The result is a high
potential for storm bombification in the region west of the UK. These
storms, in turn, pull rivers of moisture up from the tropical airs to
the south and over England, Ireland and Scotland. This confluence of
weather sets off unprecedented storms and heavy rainfall for the UK.
Both
the new North Atlantic sea surface temperature pattern and the
resulting storms are not normal. They are an upshot of only recently
emerging weather patterns resulting from a human-forced climate
change. And, sadly, we can expect to see them continue to worsen.
This year, in particular, could see some extraordinary trans-Atlantic
storms as the El Nino-driven tendency for trough development and
tropical air injection over the US East Coast comes into play.
But
overall, El Nino or no, the new dipole temperature anomaly pattern in
the North Atlantic fed by Greenland melt and a related Gulf Stream
slowdown will tend to keep pushing the region into a stormier and
stormier pattern for the foreseeable future. The UK and its
politicians should be made well aware of the consequences of their
actions.Continuing
to plan to burn fossil fuels is simply adding more fuel to an already
raging climate fire.
Links:
Hat
Tip to Dr.
James Hansen
Hat
Tip to Neven, Jeremy, and Miles
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