Yes that's right, what the Gulf Stream is doing now, or will be doing in the future, has, (and will have) little bearing on how cold or warm Britain and western Europe is or will be, or any number of other doomsday scenarios it is thought to harbinger. Perhaps you are aware of this claim already, since it is now nearly ten years old. But more likely, as with myself, this comes as not just news to you- it strikes one as a bizarre if not downright preposterous claim.
However, since I have now been apprised of this fact, I will no longer worry about what the Gulf Stream, (or for that matter what any of the thermohaline currents are doing) because of my most recent conversation with Richard Seager, the climate scientist (he prefers the title oceanographer ) most responsible for debunking the myth that the Gulf Stream is what warms the British Isles and western Europe.
I see Richard on occasion through mutual friends, and I've always known him to be intelligent, erudite, and frightfully confident in his pronouncements made in a classic English academic accent. One has little doubt that Richard Seager knows what he's talking about!
This particualr conversation was initiated when his wife mentioned how he had "debunked" the "myth" that the Gulf Stream is what warms Britain and Europe. I was naturally confused on hearing this and incredulously asked "what are you talking about?" Richard scoffed/pshawed in response, saying that the commonly held notion is akin to an "urban legend", and began with a summary of his findings: "The winds move 10 times the heat that the ocean does"...
... and lo and behold, if you look at the Ocean Heat Transfer (OHT) graph cited below, you will see that this statement is true as concerns anywhere between 40 and 60 degrees latitude.
Richard's paper was presented in a more digestible format in 2006 by American Scientist, and rather excellent graphics accompany that article and helpfully illustrate why Richard's conclusions are correct. The most important graphic is this one: OHT graph and encapsulates the bulk of his argument.
From that article, the germ for Richard's idea as to what in fact are the actual physics of ocean heat transfer lies here:
After completing my Ph.D. at Columbia University in New York City, I took a temporary postdoctoral position at the University of Washington in Seattle, where I should have immediately realized that something was wrong with the Gulf Stream-European climate story. Seattle and British Columbia, just to the north, I discovered, have a winter climate with which I was very familiar—mild and damp, quite unlike the very cold conditions that prevail on the Asian side of the Pacific Ocean. This contrast exists despite the fact that the circulation of currents in the Pacific Ocean is very different from the situation in the Atlantic.
The analogue of the Gulf Stream in the Pacific Ocean is the Kuroshio Current, which flows north along the coast of Asia until it shoots off into the interior of the Pacific Ocean east of Japan. From there, it heads due east (unlike the Gulf Stream, which heads northeast) toward Oregon and California. As such, there is almost no heat carried northward into the Pacific Ocean at the latitudes of Washington and British Columbia. Hence oceanic heat transport cannot be creating the vast difference in winter climate between the Pacific Northwest and similar latitudes in eastern Asia—say, chilly Vladivostok.
With that example, and a further discussion of how the peculiar
dynamics of tropospheric winds over the continent and over the Atlantic actually do the nearly all of the work in moving the ocean's heat, the whole argument seems quite sound and irrefutable. Still, the current wikipedia entry on the Gulf Stream leaves the findings of Richard Seager et al. relegated to this mention:
the extent of its contribution to the actual temperature differential between North America and Europe is a matter of dispute as there is a recent minority opinion within the science community
Richard and his colleagues' paper
Is the Gulf Stream responsible for Europe’s mild winters? will be ten years old next month, and in October, it will have been ten years since it was first published in the
Royal Meteorological Society's Journal.
This specific idea has been mentioned and cited here at dkos only once before that I can find, but this challenge to the conventional wisdom seems to have been ignored by the public at large. I am not sure how accepted it has become within the scientific community, but I really wanted to share this since it was indeed quite an eye opener for me.
And of course, none of this is meant to imply that the oceans and their relative temperatures are not affecting climate change- they are indeed the primary factor- they hold nearly all of the heat on the planet's surface- and indeed they are getting warmer. It's just that which way the water is moving, if it is moving at all, is not in the end all that important. As we have seen with the recent bizarre twists of the Jet Stream- it is the winds which actually manifest the weather we experience. The oceans hold the heat. The winds move it.