4 ms·

Cold spot in the Atlantic: scientists think their worst fears have come true

44 points by G8WyaX 9y ago

chmaynard 9y ago
Citation points to this more detailed article: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2015/09/24/why-some-scientists-are-worried-about-a-cold-blob-in-the-north-atlantic-ocean/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/20...
- doublerebel 9y ago
  And that article points to this follow-up article: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2015/09/24/why-some-scientists-are-worried-about-a-cold-blob-in-the-north-atlantic-ocean/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/20...
padonews 9y ago
this is very very old news of 2015
hedora 9y ago
The issue is that the Atlantic currents may be shutting down. If that happens, Western Europe will become drastically colder. The article doesn’t make this point very coherently.
- TheSpiceIsLife 9y ago
  There's a linked Washington Post article at the bottom, that links to an updated Washington Post article that says: I also quoted two prominent researchers who think this pattern reflects a much feared slowdown in Atlantic ocean circulation, a scenario made famous by the film The Day After Tomorrow. Granted, even if they’re right, what’s happening here will be nothing like the movie. At most, the circulation may be slowing, not stopping abruptly. And with a warming globe overall, there will definitely be no new ice age.
  - StudentStuff 9y ago
    While there might not be a new ice age caused by temperatures decreasing in Europe, this will reduce the growing season for certain crops, increase energy usage, and potentially set the stage for conflict. In the distant past for most of us (WW2 & prior) Europe was a powder keg, with wars and turmoil. Only in the past few decades has the continent acted as more of a singular entity, though with Brexit and potentially Grexit this seems to be unraveling.
    - wallace_f 9y ago
      >Potentially set the stage for conflict. I sincerely hope this idea becomes politically incorrect. There is huge potential for conflict with resources either becoming scarcer, or at least industry and agriculture needing to at least reorganize. Further, Russia is probably the only country to significantly gain from it. However, I don't want a "holy war" over global warming because that won't solve global warming. It will just create war, just as all our wars after WWII have done nothing but that.
      - swombat 9y ago
        I read StudentStuff’s post as implying it will set the stage for conflict over resources, not over ideology.
        wallace_f 9y ago
        In today's world, it will always be about resources, and painted with ideology, no matter how ridiculous that ideology. Iraq and Afghanistan, for example, painted with a War on Terror, but people in the USA are orders of magnitude more likely to die from police shootings, sugar, lack of access to healthcare, etc. The ideology comes in when selling the war to the 99%. The resources are for the 1%. That's why we should stop speaking of conflict over global warming. It won't solve global warming, and it won't help most people.
  - kobeya 9y ago
    > And with a warming globe overall, there will definitely be no new ice age. That's bullocks. That's not how "global warming" works, which is why scientists are typically careful to call it "climate change." The temperature of a region is predominantly affected by ocean and air currents. Sunny Marseille in France with its Mediterranean climate is the same latitude as New England. Montreal gets bitter cold for 5 months of the year but London, a full 5deg further north, gets a few days of snow and a lot of rain. These differences in regional weather at the same or similar latitudes are waaaaay bigger than the few degrees global average increase we see in world-is-ending predictions, and are entirely due to these ocean currents. If they slow down significantly or stop or change direction, it'd be a big freaking deal. If the English Midlands started getting winters like Winnipeg, Canada, that'd be a pretty big deal. While not a glacial period per se, it'd be worse than Europe's Little Ice Age, so I'm going to go ahead and call it what it is.
- wallace_f 9y ago
  Yep, it's there, but buried in noise and superflous info. Being neatly concise in journalism seems unfortunately nearly unvalued. I'd appreciate any media that valued a simple information/words metric. In other words, I shouldn't have to skim read articles like this; the journalist should have efficiently managed the info already. Not to say long-form journalism is bad, but that's a different style.
  - swombat 9y ago
    The Economist tends to be very good at this, particularly in the first couple of sections of the weekly, where it summarises the key news of the week, one short paragraph each.
bhouston 9y ago
This is 2 years old and is based on 6 months of data. Any updates?
DanielBMarkham 9y ago
Not such a good post for HN. Two years old, flamebait title, a thin shell on top of better, more comprehensive coverage, and muddy prose that leaves the reader more befuddled than educated. It also appears to be FUD about something that never actually happened as far as I can tell. Yet it got 30 votes in the first hour.
missbit 9y ago
Soon Europe will need to expend more energy to heat during winters. Currently this is done with coal & Russian Gas (& French nukes) Dacian has a better way that is actually cheaper than burning gas. Solar power used to directly heat a big thermal mass. He moves generated electricity into big resistors within the concrete block & there is a controller that turn on / off those resistors. Concrete heats up by day & radiates heat at night. Another cheap way is to heat a barrel of water using the resistance of wires running into that barrel. http://electrodacus.com/ http://electrodacus.com/ He also offers some great, cheap solar <-> lithium battery controllers. Sweet, huh?
- missbit 9y ago
  PS. I'm amazed he has received only 58,000 CAD. This is one seriously underfunded genius dude. Any VCs out there reading this should be beating down his door. Here in Hungary I often see a sign saying that this beer stand or hot dog stand was funded by the EU & received about 60,000 euros. Somehow Europe does not have priorities straight or nobody in Europe have located Dacian (from Romania.. EU country) to give him more money than the average Hungarian hot dog stand receives.
- monk_e_boy 9y ago
  How is this different to a normal storage heater? Most homes in the UK have them. They turn on when energy is ceap, the electricity heats concrete, the heat is radiated out. So, he invented something that uas been commercially available for decades?
  - missbit 9y ago
    Good to hear the UK is already doing this. He made a controller that allows solar panels to directly heat the concrete. I'm not sure if he invented anything. He made a controller, open sourced it, and produced & sold them near cost.
- yxhuvud 9y ago
  > Soon Europe will need to expend more energy to heat during winters We will see. I trust you noted on the map that the whole of Europe is also reaching higher temperatures than before. We do not know if a slowing Gulf stream will offset the rising temperatures due to global warming, or not. A big reason for uncertainty is that we don't have any long term records of measurements of how much energy is actually transferred by the stream - good measurements only go back less than 20 years or so which is not really enough.
cerved 9y ago
2-year old, shallow and short article. Disappointing
ComputerGuru 9y ago
@dang could you please add (2015) to the title? The title is misleading as-is (and thus flagged) since it makes it seem like breaking news.

44 points by G8WyaX 9y ago

Citation points to this more detailed article: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2015/09/24/why-some-scientists-are-worried-about-a-cold-blob-in-the-north-atlantic-ocean/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/20...

doublerebel 9y ago
And that article points to this follow-up article: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2015/09/24/why-some-scientists-are-worried-about-a-cold-blob-in-the-north-atlantic-ocean/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/20...

padonews 9y ago

this is very very old news of 2015

hedora 9y ago

The issue is that the Atlantic currents may be shutting down. If that happens, Western Europe will become drastically colder. The article doesn’t make this point very coherently.

TheSpiceIsLife 9y ago
There's a linked Washington Post article at the bottom, that links to an updated Washington Post article that says: I also quoted two prominent researchers who think this pattern reflects a much feared slowdown in Atlantic ocean circulation, a scenario made famous by the film The Day After Tomorrow. Granted, even if they’re right, what’s happening here will be nothing like the movie. At most, the circulation may be slowing, not stopping abruptly. And with a warming globe overall, there will definitely be no new ice age.
- StudentStuff 9y ago
  While there might not be a new ice age caused by temperatures decreasing in Europe, this will reduce the growing season for certain crops, increase energy usage, and potentially set the stage for conflict. In the distant past for most of us (WW2 & prior) Europe was a powder keg, with wars and turmoil. Only in the past few decades has the continent acted as more of a singular entity, though with Brexit and potentially Grexit this seems to be unraveling.
  - wallace_f 9y ago
    >Potentially set the stage for conflict. I sincerely hope this idea becomes politically incorrect. There is huge potential for conflict with resources either becoming scarcer, or at least industry and agriculture needing to at least reorganize. Further, Russia is probably the only country to significantly gain from it. However, I don't want a "holy war" over global warming because that won't solve global warming. It will just create war, just as all our wars after WWII have done nothing but that.
    - swombat 9y ago
      I read StudentStuff’s post as implying it will set the stage for conflict over resources, not over ideology.
      - wallace_f 9y ago
        In today's world, it will always be about resources, and painted with ideology, no matter how ridiculous that ideology. Iraq and Afghanistan, for example, painted with a War on Terror, but people in the USA are orders of magnitude more likely to die from police shootings, sugar, lack of access to healthcare, etc. The ideology comes in when selling the war to the 99%. The resources are for the 1%. That's why we should stop speaking of conflict over global warming. It won't solve global warming, and it won't help most people.
- kobeya 9y ago
  > And with a warming globe overall, there will definitely be no new ice age. That's bullocks. That's not how "global warming" works, which is why scientists are typically careful to call it "climate change." The temperature of a region is predominantly affected by ocean and air currents. Sunny Marseille in France with its Mediterranean climate is the same latitude as New England. Montreal gets bitter cold for 5 months of the year but London, a full 5deg further north, gets a few days of snow and a lot of rain. These differences in regional weather at the same or similar latitudes are waaaaay bigger than the few degrees global average increase we see in world-is-ending predictions, and are entirely due to these ocean currents. If they slow down significantly or stop or change direction, it'd be a big freaking deal. If the English Midlands started getting winters like Winnipeg, Canada, that'd be a pretty big deal. While not a glacial period per se, it'd be worse than Europe's Little Ice Age, so I'm going to go ahead and call it what it is.
wallace_f 9y ago
Yep, it's there, but buried in noise and superflous info. Being neatly concise in journalism seems unfortunately nearly unvalued. I'd appreciate any media that valued a simple information/words metric. In other words, I shouldn't have to skim read articles like this; the journalist should have efficiently managed the info already. Not to say long-form journalism is bad, but that's a different style.
- swombat 9y ago
  The Economist tends to be very good at this, particularly in the first couple of sections of the weekly, where it summarises the key news of the week, one short paragraph each.

bhouston 9y ago

This is 2 years old and is based on 6 months of data. Any updates?

DanielBMarkham 9y ago

Not such a good post for HN. Two years old, flamebait title, a thin shell on top of better, more comprehensive coverage, and muddy prose that leaves the reader more befuddled than educated. It also appears to be FUD about something that never actually happened as far as I can tell. Yet it got 30 votes in the first hour.

missbit 9y ago

Soon Europe will need to expend more energy to heat during winters. Currently this is done with coal & Russian Gas (& French nukes) Dacian has a better way that is actually cheaper than burning gas. Solar power used to directly heat a big thermal mass. He moves generated electricity into big resistors within the concrete block & there is a controller that turn on / off those resistors. Concrete heats up by day & radiates heat at night. Another cheap way is to heat a barrel of water using the resistance of wires running into that barrel. http://electrodacus.com/ http://electrodacus.com/ He also offers some great, cheap solar <-> lithium battery controllers. Sweet, huh?

missbit 9y ago
PS. I'm amazed he has received only 58,000 CAD. This is one seriously underfunded genius dude. Any VCs out there reading this should be beating down his door. Here in Hungary I often see a sign saying that this beer stand or hot dog stand was funded by the EU & received about 60,000 euros. Somehow Europe does not have priorities straight or nobody in Europe have located Dacian (from Romania.. EU country) to give him more money than the average Hungarian hot dog stand receives.
monk_e_boy 9y ago
How is this different to a normal storage heater? Most homes in the UK have them. They turn on when energy is ceap, the electricity heats concrete, the heat is radiated out. So, he invented something that uas been commercially available for decades?
- missbit 9y ago
  Good to hear the UK is already doing this. He made a controller that allows solar panels to directly heat the concrete. I'm not sure if he invented anything. He made a controller, open sourced it, and produced & sold them near cost.
yxhuvud 9y ago
> Soon Europe will need to expend more energy to heat during winters We will see. I trust you noted on the map that the whole of Europe is also reaching higher temperatures than before. We do not know if a slowing Gulf stream will offset the rising temperatures due to global warming, or not. A big reason for uncertainty is that we don't have any long term records of measurements of how much energy is actually transferred by the stream - good measurements only go back less than 20 years or so which is not really enough.

cerved 9y ago

2-year old, shallow and short article. Disappointing

ComputerGuru 9y ago

@dang could you please add (2015) to the title? The title is misleading as-is (and thus flagged) since it makes it seem like breaking news.