Ac-clim-ate the positive

Since I have spent the large part of the morning and afternoon wandering around the streets of Jersey City in shorts and flip-flops—today’s high temperature was 72ºF; it’s January—I thought today would be an appropriate time to delve into some recent musings on climate change from the international media.

On time and on cue, The Financial Times of London reported yesterday that the European Commission is close to signing off on a study of climate change produced by the Commission’s environment directorate with help from a satellite monitoring service in Brussels. The article begins:

Chilly northern Europe could reap big benefits from global warming, while the Mediterranean faces crippling shortages of both water and tourists by the middle of the century, according to the first comprehensive study of its effects on the continent.

Ah, wonderful, balmy Copenhagen in January! Winter sunbathing beside the Gulf of Bothnia! The article continues:

Fewer in the north would die of cold, crops there would boom and the North Sea coast could become the new Riviera, an analysis to be approved by the European Commission next week shows. But the annual migration of rich northern Europeans to the south could stop – with dramatic consequences for the economies of Spain, Greece and Italy.

Before you cancel those long-range travel arrangements to Corfu, however, you should consider this bit of bad news, courtesy of The Economist:

There are good reasons to be nervous about the Gulf Stream’s future, because it has not been reliable in the past. Since the most recent ice age 20,000 years ago, it has packed up several times—most recently, it seems, around 8,200 years ago, when a sudden flood of fresh water from a North American lake tipped into the North Atlantic. The fresh water seems to have diluted the Gulf Stream’s saltiness and thus weakened its flow.

That, fear climate-change watchers, is what could happen as the Arctic ice melts. But the models did not predict that it would start happening yet, which is why the climatological world sat up when a paper was published last year claiming that the flow appeared to be slowing.

As the article, published this past September as part of a survey on climate change, points out, any reduction in the Gulf Stream’s flow might have severe negative affects on northwestern Europe, exposing the region to the much colder waters of the Arctic and thereby reducing surface temperatures substantially.

Such diverging opinions and projections are nothing new for weather watchers. After all, it was only a few decades ago that folks were concerned about global cooling. Perhaps the public square is not the most appropriate place for climatologists, many of whom reflect poorly on the field merely by opening their mouths. But there are scientists out there who seem capable of avoiding hubris, who are content to keep studying the data, but who in the meantime are not undone by simply asserting ignorance as to what climate change might actually do to the planet. The Economist’s survey struck a similar tone by stating that “nobody knows for sure what is happening to the climate.” This would seem to be the long and short of it.

More study is needed; in the interim, enjoy the weather.