Warming sea: off topic
For several years now global warming has been stopped in its tracks without any effective human intervention. It’s as if the fates treat Mr. Al Gore, who warned us of dire things to come if we didn’t stop releasing so much CO2 the way they treat the rest of us. Maybe I’m not a great CO2 enthusiast, but I’m certainly a global warming believer and have been since before Gore was born. And of all the ways to control the climate I have ever heard of, reducing emissions of CO2 is the only one that doesn’t sound like utter madness. It might work, it’s the only game, we’re in trouble, let’s do it. I don’t need any proof; the burden of proof is inevitably on the person who thinks any rise at all of CO2 can be lived with.
So pusillanimous have been our efforts that by now the flashy goal, “We must not let the global temperature to rise 2o C,” must be abandoned. We’re there. At least the CO2 is there to that point that sooner or later that ceiling will be breached. So there is a call for a new goal. (D.G. Victor and C. F. Kennel Ditch the 2 Degree C Warming goal NATURE vol. 514 no. 7520 Oct. 2, 2014 Page 30)
Does the failure of the temperature to rise as predicted by the CO2 mean we are safe? You’d have to prove it to me. So where has the stuff gone? It got soaked up by the sea. That’s easy. And now the tricky part: where did it go down?
The Gulf Stream (they keep changing terminology to keep us dumbed down, but you know what I mean) starts with hot water in the shallow, brightly lit and fairly landlocked Gulf of Mexico, makes its way around Florida, up the East Coast, dumps heat that keeps Europe comfy and the being cooled by the arctic air and salty because of evaporation during its sojourn in the Gulf, drops to the abyssal (I prefer “abysmal,” but I’ll go with the white coats on this one) plane of the oceans the world over. In other words, that’s where the CO2 has gone, way down there. It will come up eventually as geothermal heat warms it until it rises, but that will not be a long, long time.
I’ve said before that for me the scariest part of global warming is that it may be the overture to a new ice age. The fact that the experts are ready to admit defeat in the campaign to control the gas is disturbing. Oh they aren’t giving up. They just want to redefine the goal and carry on the good fight. Power to them. But it’s a setback all the same.
You see, act the arctic icecap melts and the Arctic Ocean warms, the Gulf Stream gets shut off. Warming coninues. The impending ice age, if it's real, comes sooner. I truly hope I never have to say, “I told you so.”
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