Look at in a positive light: There’s a new emerging market for winterwear!
Jason- What’s your proposed solution? Massive greenhouse gas emissions? Lots of space heaters?
Bingo. Thanks Ben. I think any kind of “climatic engineering” we could perform to preserve the Gulf Stream (or to restart it if it failed) would have so many unpredictable, unintended consequences that it could be an even bigger catastrophe than “just letting Britain freeze.”
Maybe it would, maybe it wouldn’t. What, you don’t want to at least look into it? The fatalism confuses me.
Sure, look into it all you want. But weather modeling is ridiculously complicated, and being able to say that intended consequences would be the only consequences is almost certainly impossible. Without such assurances, I’d rather accept an admittedly awful scenario than risk making it far worse.
How could it possibly get any worse? The planet cracks in half?
Umm… Jason… it could get a lot worse. What if the entire Ukraine (the breadbasket of Central Asia) had different weather patterns, so food couldn’t be grown there? Hell, what if our breadbasket (the Midwest) became unihabitable? And so on, and so on.
I don’t know if any of these are likely outcomes of trying to fix the Gulf Stream problem, but they’re both answers to the question “How could it possibly get any worse?”
Britain and other parts of Europe getting really cold would be a miniscule problem compared to any number of possible outcomes. Ever look at the consequences of Antarctica melting, for example? A worldwide 100-200 foot rise in sea level would destroy the vast majority of the world’s major cities, innundate a significant fraction of its arable land, and displace (literally) billions of people. Look at the US alone: New York, Washington, Boston, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Miami, New Orleans, Houston, LA, San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle would be gone. The east coast up to the fall line, the entire states of Florida and Louisiana, huge chunks of the Gulf Coast and the Mississippi valley, and California’s Central and Imperial Valleys (the heart of US agriculture) would all be underwater. And that’s just the US! Global famine would be just one of the cheery outcomes of that little scenario.
Am I saying that would happen? Of course not. But it could, if the models were wrong. To restart the Gulf Stream would require human intervention on a scale never seen. Our track record predicting the consequences of much smaller alterations is pretty damn bad. That doesn’t tend to inspire confidence. I’d need some iron-clad proof before even considering such a proposal.
Of course we should look into it. I also think we should look into colonizing our solar system, doubling our lifespans, and developing faster than light travel so that we can explore the galaxy. But realistically, I doubt any of those things are going to happen within my lifetime. I mean, we can’t even influence weather on a small, short-term scale. Half the time, we can’t even predict it more than a day or two in advance. But hey! As long as we know there’s a problem, it’s practically solved, right? While we’re at it, we should do something about earthquakes and hurricanes. Why do we let those happen all the time?
Something to keep in mind. The “fall line” Markell mentions is an ancient shoreline. Sealevel used to be higher and the world was hotter. And that seems to be where we are headed. How long will it take?
Twas mostly a joke; yes, I know bad things could happen. I just don’t understand the “no, it’s not happening; no, we can’t measure it accurately; no, we can’t do anything about it because it might make it worse, even though we can’t measure it accurately and we don’t think it’s happening anyway” line of reasoning.
Move to Spain?[/quote]
Texas!
Hey, my boss is British.
Jet stream up and dies one day. What are ya gonna do?
As long as there is air and solar heating… there will be a jet stream. Where it’s at from day to day is another issue.
Which is true, but we’re talking about the GULF stream, which is a warm water current that goes up the east coast, across the atlantic, and keeps the UK and northern Europe from freezing over.
Which is true, but we’re talking about the GULF stream, which is a warm water current that goes up the east coast, across the atlantic, and keeps the UK and northern Europe from freezing over.[/quote]
I should note it also keeps Northern America from being too dry…
UC, see one post above mine.
That reasoning makes perfect sense, Jason, though it’s a powerful non-sequitor as I believe it belongs in a global warming thread. All of your posts in this thread seem, well, insane. Fatalism? Maybe you’ve confused Ben Sones with the Almighty, but last I checked the strength and location of the Gulf Stream was not under his dominion.
If there is a possible problem that may not actually exist(we don’t know because we can’t measure it accurately), what the hell do you want people to do? Anything we do leads to the possibility of making things worse, and we don’t even know if there’s really a problem in the first place. It’s perfectly logical to not do anything about things you don’t believe are problems. Step one is isolate the problem. You don’t start trying to fix it before you’ve got it down.
But that’s not this situation. We know with very high certainity that there will be a problem in the future, but we don’t know when, and we probably won’t know when until it’s happening. But that doesn’t really matter, because we don’t have the slightest chance of doing anything about it.
I get that a lot.
;)
If all of Britain and Ireland give up tea and dunk the heating coils from their electric kettles into the sea off Cornwall and Galway, everything will be fine for them.
The good people of Iceland, however, will have to run miles of interconnected drinking straws between their volcanoes and their own southwest coast. Unleash the fires of Surt! Ragnarok is upon you!