Atlantic Cooling

Tuesday, September 24, 2024

Atlantic Cooling

If you are interested in sober science reporting on climate, the sad reality these days is that the attention hog of anthropogenic climate change is oinking around every last bit of news, making it all unbearable.

On second thought, sweep the swine from your mind’s eye. Maybe it’s the domineering axe grinding that ruins it all. The screeches of stone on steel, the sparks flying, the distinct smell of sulphur…

At any rate, trying to figure out what’s actually going on in the climate system used to be a subject of interest to geographers and their like. Once, it was a hobby of eighteenth century polymath scientists traveling the world trying to figure out how it worked, and in comparing notes, they built our foundational understanding of the planet’s weather and climate systems, the ways that currents of air and water interact with the hard features of physical geography, and how all that impacts life in many ways. (Not to be too sentimental: they were, of course, the white male aristocrats of a long forgotten era.)

Instead, the field of wonder and inquiry has turned into a bog of dark moral scolds whose agendas determine nearly all their interpretations, and every research explanation has to end in dire finger-wagging at society, which must be brow-beaten into consuming goods and services produced in some of the least efficient means possible. Hardly a single research grant to study a climate phenomenon is written unless the researchers promise to emphasize that whatever is going on rates as a catastrophic change and requires humanity to repent, clad in sackcloth and ashes, eating gray porridge till the cows go home to their promised Nirvana.

Wait! Where was I? Oh, yeah. This was the news that brought me here:

There has been an unexpected drop in Atlantic Ocean sea surface temperatures observed in recent months, and no one quite knows how it came about or what it means.

I was trying to find was more information that might describe the phenomenon and potential reasons for its occurrence. Is it rare? Is it significant? How will it affect, for instance, the next several seasons here in the northern temperate zones of North America?

Here are clips from two reports that thankfully leave out the alarmism.

The first mentions there’s more to the events than just manmade climate change:

NOAA data shows Atlantic sea surface temperatures have cooled at a surprising rate since May. Since June began, temperatures have been a degree or two Fahrenheit colder than normal for this time of year. That means El Niño will likely be replaced by its counterpart, La Niña, a weather system that allows cold water to rise to the surface of the Atlantic, some time between September and November. Both El Niño and La Niña are complex systems driven by trade winds, solar heating, and rainfall in the tropic regions, and can be difficult to predict. Still, the sudden shift in Atlantic temperatures has been puzzling, and nobody seems to know why it’s happened so quickly.

The second mentions that the climate system does some things we lack a clear understanding of:

While unprecedented, the recent dramatic cooling is not likely to be caused by human-driven climate change. "I can't rule it out," said McPhaden. "But at first blush, this is just a natural variation of the climate system over the equatorial Atlantic."

Maybe the image should be one of hogs grinding axes while cows ascend in the background... Hmm. Nah.