My Comments: My early years were spent in Europe where I learned our climate was moderated significantly by the Gulf Stream. Warm water flowing up from the tropics assured us that freezing to death in England and France was a rare happening.

My life on this planet is increasingly limited. I’m truly concerned about a potential disaster that may consume the lives of my children and grandchildren.  

We now have a speaker of the House who believes, along with too many Americans, that climate change is a hoax, perpetuated by those on the left side of the political spectrum. They would rather have the world burn as they are eager for what they believe is the second coming of Christ.

Nikki Reisch, director of the Climate & Energy Program at the Center of International Environmental Law said, “Giving Mike Johnson a platform for his pro-oil, anti-human rights agenda puts our collective future in greater peril.”

Meanwhile, the globe is experiencing excessive heat, flooding, mudslides and on and on. If you listen to scientists, it’s likely to get much worse. Not listening to them will not make reality disappear.

by Ben Turner / 23 OCT 2023 / https://tinyurl.com/ydsj3my4

The Gulf Stream is almost certainly weakening, a new study has confirmed.

The flow of warm water through the Florida Straits has slowed by 4% over the past four decades, with grave implications for the world’s climate. 

The ocean current starts near Florida and threads a belt of warm water along the U.S. East Coast and Canada before crossing the Atlantic to Europe. The heat it transports is essential for maintaining temperate conditions and regulating sea levels. 

But this stream is slowing down, researchers wrote in a study published Sept. 25 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. 

“This is the strongest, most definitive evidence we have of the weakening of this climatically-relevant ocean current,” lead-author Christopher Piecuch, a physical oceanographer at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, said in a statement.

The Gulf Stream is just a small component of the thermohaline circulation — a global conveyor belt of ocean currents that moves oxygen, nutrients, carbon and heat around the planet, while also helping to control sea levels and hurricane activity. 

Beginning in the Caribbean before flowing out into the Atlantic through the Florida Straits, the Gulf Stream brings warmer southerly waters (which are saltier and denser) northward to cool and sink in the North Atlantic. After dropping deep beneath the ocean and releasing its heat into the atmosphere, the water slowly drifts southward, where it heats up again and the cycle repeats.

This process is vital for maintaining temperatures and sea levels across the U.S. East Coast — whose waters are kept up to 5 feet (1.5 meters) lower than water further offshore by the sweeping motion of the current.

As Earth’s climate warms, an enormous influx of cold, fresh water from melting ice sheets is spilling into oceans, possibly causing the Gulf Stream to slow or even veer toward outright collapse, according to scientists. But due to the scale and complexity of the system, this is hard to prove.

To find definitive evidence that the stream is slowing, scientists analyzed data spanning 40 years from three separate sources — undersea cables, satellite altimetry and observations made on site — to observe the motions of the current around the Florida Straits.

Their statistical analysis revealed that the current had slowed by 4%, with just a 1% chance of their measurement being a fluke caused by random fluctuations.

At first glance, a 4% shift may seem like a miniscule change, but “the worry is that’s just the slow start,” Helen Czerski, an oceanographer at University College London (UCL) who was not involved in the study, told Live Science.

“It’s like those early days of COVID. People were like: ‘Oh, there’s only 60 cases. We don’t care about this,'” she added. “There’s only 60 cases, yeah, but yesterday there were 30 and the day before that there were 15. If you just think a week ahead, we’ve got a problem.”

To find definitive proof that climate change is the culprit, scientists will need to tease apart the differences between the natural variability of the ocean systems and the impact made by global heating — a tricky task given the relatively short time that humans have been directly measuring the ocean flows in detail.