Is An Crucial Atlantic Ocean Current Called AMOC Ready To Go Amok?

Warm water heads north toward Europe, cools, 
eventually sinks, goes back south, warms up
and the process repeats itself.  However,
fresh water melting off the Arctic could stop
this circulation, causing extreme, sudden
changes in climate, especially in Europe.

 Is the AMOC ready to go amok?  

I should probably explain that one. 

The AMOC is the Atlantic Meridonal Overturning Circulation. It brings warm water from south to the northern Atlantic Ocean. That rent brings carbon, nutrients and other stuff to sustain a healthy population of fish and other aquatic animals.

It also keeps western and northern Europe much warmer than it would be, considering how far north that area is. If this circulation collapses, that region of the world would turn much, much colder in the winter. And much more variable in the summer. 

The problem is, climate change could make this circulation stop. It's already slowing down. 

For years, there's been a lot of speculation among scientists as to how far climate change needs to go before AMOC collapses. Now, a group of scientists are saying the risks of this circulation collapsing are underestimated. 

 As Gizmodo reports:

"The climate scientists quoted a 2023 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, which said there is 'medium confidence' the AMOC won't abruptly collapse by 2100. If such a low likelihood event did happen, the report added, 'it would very likely cause abrupt shifts in regional weather patterns and water cycle."

Well, at least we have time to plan, right?

But what if it happens sooner? It seems a growing body of researchers think it might.  Some scientists say it could happen as soon as the middle of this century, say 20 or 30 years from now. That's not a lot of time for millions of people to brace themselves for sudden, radical shifts in the climate. 

Nordic nations would probably stop being able to grow their own food under the extreme weather conditions. 

That would be bad enough. But a collapse of AMOC would reverberate around the world, with big time climate changes worldwide.

An AMOC collapse would probably reverse climate change in the northern hemisphere, but that would not be a good thing.

Some European cities would get 10 to 20 degrees colder within just a few decades. Meanwhile, The Atlantic Ocean sea level would rise by more than two feet. Meanwhile, the southern hemisphere would turn much warmer than it already is, and the Antarctic ice cap would melt much faster than it is now, according to renewablematter.eu.

Overall, this circulation's shutdown would also reduce the worlds supply of food.

As I noted, we don't know when, or even if this nightmare scenario will happen. But scientists are definitely worried. 

The AMOC is slowing down, and could collapse, because of melting ice sheets in Greenland and other areas of the Arctic adjacent to the North Atlantic. 

The water flowing up from the south and keeping Europe mild in this AMOC circulation is pretty salty. Once the salty water makes it that far north, it cools and sinks because the high salinity increases its density. 

Fresh water from all that ice melting off of Greenland reduces the saltiness in the water, which in turn reduces the density of the water. So less surface water sinks, which slows the flow of the current. Scientists worry if too much fresh water from ice melt flows into the Atlantic, it'll shut off the current entirely.  

 Scientists have done research on how much fresh water it would take to shut the current off. But past studies uses simulations that provided unrealistic scenarios involving a bunch of fresh water gushing into the Atlantic all at once.

 In February this year, scientists from Utrecht University in the Netherlands used a complex climate model to simulate the collapse of the AMOC and discovered that it could be closer than previously thought.

The Dutch scientists' model kept gradually adding more and more fresh meltwater to the North Atlantic and concluded that could lead to a sudden collapse of the currents in less than 100 years. However, they weren't able to come up with a statistically reliable estimate of exactly when that would happen.  

We better hope it doesn't happen anytime soon. If it does, it'll make the kinds of climate disruptions we're already seeing now just a pleasant walk in the park. 

March Was World's 10th Consecutive Record Hot Month

I'm sounding a bit like a broken record here, but for the 10th month in a row, I'm telling you the world just had a new record for warmest March,  at least since they started keeping track of such things.   

Another very red global climate map, another
record warm month in March, 2024 for Planet Earth. 

NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information said this March was just a hair above the previous record set in 2016. This was the 48th consecutive March that was warmer than the long term average. 

The data sets for NCEI goes back 175 years, so we know it's was the hottest March since at least 1850.  But climate scientists believe the last time the world was this warm was about 125,000 years ago. 

Before my time, that's for sure. 

NCEI says there's a 55 percent chance this year will outdo 2023 and become the world's hottest year on record. There's a 99 percent chance it'll be among the top five warmest.

The reason NCEI gives this year about a 50-50 chance of being hottest despite the first three months breaking records by pretty big margins is El Nino.

Or rather the demise of it. El Nino is rapidly falling apart, to be replaced by La Nina.  

La Nina on balance cools the Earth slightly. That means subsequent months this year might not break new record for hottest ever. Because of climate change, though, months going forward will be among the hottest on record, no matter what happens with La Nina.

With El Nino rapidly fading, you can see cracks in the 10-month long stretch of global record warmth.  Oceans were the warmest on record in March, but land areas were just fourth warmest. But combine oceans and land, you still get a record warm March on Earth. 

As in the previous ten months, very warm conditions relative to average covered huge areas of the globe. These include almost all of Africa, Europe and South American, along with eastern North America, eastern Asia and eastern Australia.

You'd be hard-pressed to find anyplace that was cooler than average in March.  Cool areas relative to average were pretty much limited to  parts of Antarctica, which is interesting, western Australia and a little patch of the North Atlantic just south of Iceland.

That cool patch off of Iceland is not a good sign. This "cold blob" has been often re-appearing in this region for the better part of a decade now. 

There are conflicting theories on this. Some of it could be cold fresh water melting off of Greenland in ever-greater quantities.  Cold, salty water is dense, so it sinks, and warmer water goes over the top of it. But cold fresh water doesn't sink like salty water does, so that could be part of the issue.

However, the cold blob is often there in the winter, when there is virtually no melting from Greenland. 

Increased winds in the region might also encourage the cold blob. However, scientists say those higher regional winds are also a sign of climate change. 

As usual, other climate monitoring organizations agreed closely with NCEI. 

The European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service last Tuesday released their assessment, also with the news that March globally was the warmest on record. 

The Washington Post's account of Tuesday's Copernicus report has a Vermont connection worth noting. The hotter air, the fact that the Atlantic Ocean has heated up so much, has implications for us in the coming months, even if upcoming months turn out to be not quite the hottest ever.

Says WaPO:

"'It should be eye-catching - we are going toward uncharted territory,' said Gillian Gilford, the lead of the Vermont Climate Assessment and a professor at the University of Vermont who reviewed the report. 'It's rather unusual we see such an increased temperature over months and seasons.'

She added that the warmer waters of the Atlantic in particular can lead to larger storms and a more intense hurricane season. It's could also lead, she said, to more storms dumping more water in places like Vermont, in the northeastern United States, which saw intense flooding last summer."

Warmer ocean water adds additional moisture to the atmosphere, which can blow inland and crate serious floods. 

To calm fears, I must say the hot Atlantic is no guarantee Vermont will see additional big floods this spring and summer. Specific weather patterns would need to draw that super saturated air our way. 

We don't know what will happen this summer. For all we know, we in Vermont could have a dry summer if persistent winds come from the dry west or north.  It seems like the wet times are often wetter and the dry times are drier than they used to be. 

The point being with our ever hotter world, expect more surprises and more weather extremes.  Even if a particular month is not the warmest on record for planet Earth. This will go on for the rest of your lives and beyond.   

Ocean Temperatures Have Gone Full Year At Record High Temperatures, Worrying Scientists

An Atlantic Ocean sunrise on an usually warm 
morning in Bethany Beach, Delaware, December, 2022.
Oceans worldwide are now experiencing
record high temperatures. 

The world's oceans have been at record warm levels now for over a  year.  

They have been gradually warming under the influence of climate change, but for the past year, they've heated up at a much faster rate. The oceans are hotter than ever, by a long shot. 

That's bad news for us humans. Hotter oceans make hurricanes, typhoons and other storms that eventually hit land stronger and more destructive. 

The hotter oceans put more water vapor into the air, sometimes helping to turn downpours on land into catastrophic flooding torrents of rain.

The record ocean temperatures are also screwing up food chains in all that water, which could have effects on world food supplies.

So what gives?

Scientists aren't sure, but they are concerned, as Elizabeth Kolbert noted in The New Yorker:

"'We don't really know what's going on,' said Gavin Schmidt, the director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies told me. 'And we haven't known what's going on since about March of last year.' He called the situation 'disquieting.'"

As Wired noted, ocean temperatures in the tropical Atlantic are already where they should be in June. That's the start of hurricane season, and those warm temperatures now are theoretically enough to support a tropical storm or hurricane, 

"It's really getting to be strange that we're just seeing the records break by this much, and for this long,' said Brian McNoldy, a University of Miami hurricane researcher.

Scientists are wondering if the year-long unprecedented global ocean heat wave is just a blip, an outlier in what has been a gradual warming of the oceans created by climate change? Or is something else going on?  

Kolbert in the New Yorker again:

"For the last twelve months, the seas have been so feverish that scientists are starting to worry about not just the physical impacts of all that heat but the theoretical implications. Can the past year be explained by what's already known about climate change, or are there forces at work that haven't been accounted for? And if it's the latter, does this mean the projections for warming, already decidedly grim, are underestimating the dangers?"

Explanations are mostly speculation at this point.  

El Nino usually makes both Earth's atmosphere and oceans warmer. And we've been in an El Nino for the past year. But the oceans have warmed in the past year much more than we'd expect from an El Nino.

An enormous volcanic eruption in the South Pacific back in 2022 released a huge amount of water vapor high into the atmosphere. That might have temporarily added a little heat to the world. The solar cycle is now active. Perhaps that's contributing a little to heating the world, including its oceans. 

And as I've previously reported on, environmental regulations have sharply reduced sulfur emissions from ships, which meant there was less pollution in the air to block the sun. Or this past year's hot oceans could be just a weird blip, some sort of odd natural variability.  Or some or all of the above.

Nobody is really sure. 

Kolbert's New Yorker article says a good test is coming up to help determine whether we should panic over the oddly hot seas.

El Nino is transitioning to the cooler La Nina ocean and weather pattern.  Normally, La Nina tends to blunt the effects of climate change a bit by having a cooling influence on both the lower atmosphere and the oceans. 

If La Nina brings ocean temperatures more in line toward what scientist had expected, then we can breathe a slight, partial sigh of relief.  

In recent days, scientists have started to notice global sea temperatures hinting at a cooling as El Nino fades, but the ocean warmth is still at record heights.  

There is precedence for a big spike in ocean temperatures like we're seeing now. El Ninos in the 1940s brought ocean temperatures from well below normal to a fair amount above normal.  The increase in temperature back then was of a similar scale we're seeing now.

The trouble is, climate change had made oceans warmer. So the latest El Nino appears to have taken a much warmer than normal ocean system and brought those temperatures to extreme heights. 

The New Yorker said that Susan Wijffels, a senior scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution thinks the real test will be over the next 12 months. "If temperatures remain very high, then I would say more people in the community will be really alarmed and say, 'OK, this is outside of what we can explain.'"

Oceans that stay hotter than climatologists had expected can can create a "positive feedback" in which the warmth causes more warmth. Wired explains: 

 "....when the surface warms, it creates a cap of hot water, blocking the nutrients in colder waters below from mixing upwards. 

Phytoplankton need those nutrients to properly grow and sequester carbon, thus mitigating climate change. If warming-induced stratification gets bad enough, 'we don't see what we would call a spring bloom,; says Dennis Hansel, an oceanographer from the University of Miami. 'Those are much harder to make happen if you don't bring nutrients back up to the surface rot support the growth of those algae." 

Whether or not oceans come off their big fever in the past year, those seas will continue to be a growing problem for us in the decades to come. The upward temperature trend will continue, causing more storms and sea level rise. We just don't know how fast that upward trend will become. 

Greenland Ice Loss Worse Than Thought, Says New Study

A new report says ice loss from Greenland - already 
known to be bad - is even worse than thought.

 Climate scientists and others interested in climate change really monitor Greenland as one measure of how bad things are getting as the world warms. 

That's why you disproportionately read about Greenland in the news, and in this here blog thingy. 

Well, here's another one, 

It turns out Greenland has lost more ice than people thought. Even if  the original lower estimate was pretty huge. 

Per the Washington Post: 

"Researchers had previously estimated that the Greenland ice sheet lost about 5,000 gigaton of ice in recent decades, enough to cover Texas in a sheet 26 feet high. The new estimate adds 1,000 gigaton to that period, the equivalent of piling about five more feet of ice on top of that fictitious Texas-sized sheet."

According to The Guardian, if you include the ice loss found in this study, the Greenland ice cap is losing an average of 30 metric tons of ice per hour due to climate change. 

The additional ice loss researchers found came from the glacier's edge, where it meets the water. That portion of the glaciers float on the water. Any floating ice that melts won't raise sea levels like ice loss form inland portions of Greenland ice. Inland ice melt runs downhill into the ocean, raising its level. 

 The ice floating on the waters around Greenland is like the ice cubes in your gin and tonic. If the ice melts in your drink, the water level won't rise, but you won't get as much punch from the gin, as it will get diluted.

The ice loss on the edges of the glacier - on the water - has some similarities to your now ice free, diluted gin and tonic. 

The melting ice dilutes the amount of salt in the North Atlantic. That can mess up the ocean currents that bring relatively warm water - and air - to western Europe in the winter.   

The big Atlantic Ocean circulation is known as the Atlantic Meridonal Overturning Circulation, or AMOC.  Worst case scenario would be this circulation collapsing completely due to too much fresh water gumming up the system. 

A collapse of these large scale currents could really disrupt the climate of western Europe and parts of North America at the very least.  It would probably have worldwide effects, such as frigid weather in western Europe, some parts of North America turning much colder even as the world warms, while other parts of the same continent become hot and arid.

The good news is that most scientists don't see the AMOC collapsing anytime soon. But it is slowing down, so even that could cause lesser but still important weather and  climate headaches around the globe. 

Even if nothing at all happens to AMOC, all that ice melting off Greenland is of course bad news. The melt water raises ocean levels around the world. 

 Ominously, it's not just glaciers melting along the Greenland shores in just parts of that vast island. It's everywhere. "There's basically no part of Greenland that's safe from climate change," said Chad Greene, the study's lead author and a scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Zeke Hausfther, noted on X, formerly Twitter, that the Greenland ice sheet has lost over 6 trillion metric tons of ice since 1970, or more than 700 tons of ice lost per person for every person on the planet today.    

Greenland is actually having a very cold winter. That doesn't matter very much because ice doesn't melt up there even in super warm winters. It's the summers we have to worry about. 

Last year, Greenland lost 196 billion tons of ice.  That's better than some previous years. There was a LOT of melting in 2023, but that was partly offset by lots of snow earlier in the year, which added some mass to Greenland before melt season started. Still the ice loss in 2023 was the most in four years. 

Still, the last year  Greenland actually to its ice mass was in 1996. It's been on a losing streak since. Which also means the rest of the world has been on a losing streak, too.

The Official Numbers Are In And 2023 Was The World's Hottest Year By An Insane Margin

  Shades of red on this map are areas that were warmer
than the long term average for Earth. Dark reds are 
near record warms. Blue is colder than the long
term average, but as you can see, there's not much.

 The receipts are pretty much all in for the world's climate in 2023, and to nobody's surprise, it was the hottest year on record. 

NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information released their 2023 global climate report Friday, and the numbers are pretty shocking.

The world's overall temperature was 2.43 degrees above the pre-industrial average as measured between 1850 and 1900.  This exceeding the old 2016 hottest year record by 0.27 degrees. 

"After seeing the 2023 climate analysis, I have to pause and say that the findings are astounding.....Not only was 2023 the warmest year in NOAA's 174-year climate record, it was the warmest by far," said NOAA Chief Scientist Dr. Sarah Kapnick. 

 Breaking the world hottest year record by barely a quarter degree might not seem like much. But exceeding a record hot year for the whole globe by that margin is insanely huge. 

The top 10 hottest years on record for Earth were each of the past ten years - 2014 to 2023.  Bit of a trend there, huh?

NOAA's data indicates the hottest places on Earth in 2023 - relative to average anyway - were the Arctic, Canada, the northern tier of the United States, much of the North Atlantic, central Asia and the eastern tropical Pacific.

If you were looking for places that were cool relative to average last year, good luck. The only places that came in sort of on the chilly side were eastern and western Antartica, some of the ocean areas west of Antarctica and southern Greenland, for a change.

Other agencies that take Earth's temperature were completely on board with NOAA's assessment. 

The first major set of global data came in on Tuesday (January 9) from the Copernicus Climate Change Service, which is Europe's top climate agency.  Along with agreeing that 2023 was by far the hottest year on record, they also noted it was the first year on record that all 265 days of the year were at least 1 degree Celsius warmer than the pre-industrial average. Almost half of 2023's days were 1.5 degrees Celsius on the warm side. 

WHY SO HOT?

NASA scientists said they were wowed by the fact that every month in 2023 starting in June broke the record for world's hottest month. Sure, El Nino influenced it, but the effects of El Nino on global temperatures are expected to peak in the late winter and early spring. 

El Nino is a periodic warming of the eastern Pacific ocean that tends to lead to higher global temperatures. 

Trend line in global temperatures compared to the
long term average. 2023 was by far the 
warmest of them all. Click on this image 
to make it bigger and easier to see.

Climatologists are scratching their heads. They knew 2023 would be warm, especially as El Nino developed. 

They're usually pretty good about predicting by how much an upcoming year will be different from normal. But 2023 was way warmer than anybody expected. Nobody is 100 percent sure why. 

It could be just a fluke. There's always been hotter than normal years, even before climate change became a thing. Maybe it was just destined to be a hot year then El Nino and climate change just made things insane.

Maybe it's new regulations that reduce aerosol pollution in the air. That could have let more sun through, baking the planet further. But many climate scientists doubt that had much of an effect.

In January, 2022,  the Hunga Tonga volcano in the South Pacific blew up spectacularly, sending an unprecedented amount of water vapor high into the stratosphere. The water up there could be having a slight warming effect on the Earth. But the volcano also sent ash particles high up into the atmosphere. Those ash particles from volcanos typically cool the Earth a little. 

Not only was the Earth's air the hottest on record in 2023. So were the oceans.

OTHER HEAT WEIRDNESS

The rate of increase in ocean temperatures was slower than the previous two years. But that's not exactly a positive size. El Nino transfers heat from the oceans below the surface to the air. That's why the world generally experiences hotter years during an El Nino.

El Nino and climate change worked in concert to make 2023 so much warmer than any previous hot year. El Nino boosts the world's temperature.  So does climate change. It was a double whammy in 2023

A lot of record hot individual days hit different parts of the world in 2023, too. A total of 21 nations or territories had their all-time hottest temperatures on record.

Three nations or territories did manage to have their coldest day on record. That's an example of how climate change can be described as global weirding. For the most part, we're warming up, but we're also seeing larger extremes. 

Which means record cold waves are now less likely than they used to be, but they're also not impossible. 

The best way to blunt further effects from climate change is to sharply reduce the amount of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane from reaching the atmosphere. 

We didn't exactly do a great job with that, says Yale Climate Connections:

"The two main human-emitted heat trapping gases - carbon dioxide and methane - both reached all time highs in 2023, with the methane growth rate hitting the highest level on record. Although CO2 concentrations have hit a new high each year for decades the increase in methane has been more irregular: There was an unexpected leveling off in the 2000s, followed bay a sharp increase in the 2010s and 2020s"

LOOKING AHEAD

Already, the predictions are grim for 2024. NCEI says there's a one in three chance that this year will break the hottest year mark set in 2023. They give 2024 a 99 percent chance of scoring in the top five hottest. 

There will be a few years in the immediate future that end up being slightly cooler than 2023, but not many of them. 

The record global heat of 2023 reminds me of 1998. when a strong El Nino and earlier stages of climate change rocketed that year to become by a large margin the hottest year on record at the time. Now, 1998 is not even in the top 10 hot list anymore. 

Probably 20 years down the road, 2023 will seem like a quaintly chilly year for Planet Earth. The extreme weather effects we'll see at that point will make the current disasters seem like inconvenient weekend downpours. 

You thought the weather extremes over past year in Vermont and much of the rest of the world were way too much. 

You ain't see nothin' yet.  

Monthly Global Climate Report For April Has Some Ominous Signs

Berkeley Earth's temperature map of the world in
April, showing where it was warm or cold relative
to the 1951 to 1980 average. 

 As we do every four weeks or so, we've checked in with NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information for the previous month's global climate summary. 

The report for April has some ominous signs. 

For the world as a whole, April was the fourth warmest on record.  That's in line with most months over the past year, in which we score in the top five warmest, but don't quite make it to hottest.  

That's probably a lingering effect of the La Nina pattern that brought a few years of cooler than normal waters to the eastern Pacific.

That, in turn, kept global temperatures from rising as fast as they might otherwise would have. 

But, now, we're transitioning to the opposite EL Nino pattern, which tends to boost global temperatures. Combine an El Nino with climate change, and you can really make things toasty fast. Which for course is dangerous if you don't like deadly heat waves, droughts in some areas and torrential floods and others.

The April report from NCEI gave hints that we might be starting to feel the effects of El Nino.

The Southern Hemisphere had its hottest April on record. In fact, in that hemisphere, it was the warmest month of any on record, period. 

But the real trouble sign is in the water. As a whole, the world's oceans were the warmest on record for  April. 

Warm water is a reservoir that can transfer additional heat to the atmosphere, further destabilizing the climate. And never mind how record high ocean temperatures can really do a number on marine ecosystems and fisheries. 

In April, the warmest spots, relative to average, were in northeastern Canada, the northeastern United States, Antarctica, eastern and southwestern Europe, western South America and parts of Southeast Asia.

The only coolish spots were a patch of the Pacific Ocean between Antarctica and the southern tip of South America, Alaska, northwestern Asia and western Australia. 

By the way, about 3.4 percent of the Earth's surface had its warmest April on record, according to Berkeley Earth.  That doesn't sound like much, but that's a lot of real estate and ocean surface to have a warmest month on record. By the way, Burlington, Vermont is included in that 3.4 percent with a record warm April. 

At the moment, Berkeley Earth is giving roughly even 50/50 odds that 2023 will be the world's warmest on record, as they expect to see El Nino's temperature boost become more apparent in the second half of this year.  

There's a famous United Nations goal of keeping global temperatures from exceeding 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.  With El Nino about to give world temperatures a boost, the World Meteorological Organization is predicting that sometimes within the next five years, chances are we'll at least briefly go above that 1.5 degree threshold. 

The WMO is also pretty much guaranteeing that the next five years will be the warmest on record for the Earth, if you look at data since 1850. 

A more permanent shift toward global temperatures above the 1.5 degree threshold are expected in the 2030s, which really isn't all that far off if you think about it.