More Environmentalist Fallacies -- Don't Worry About the Gulf Stream

Remember all those scare stories in the MSM, with quotes from environmental activists and "scientists" on the heat transfer mechanisms in the North Atlantic? They've been ubiquitous for years. The idea is that melting ice caps will reduce the salinity of the ocean and bring the "thermal conveyer belt" of the Gulf Stream to a halt, ending its warming effect on Europe and precipitating rapid and disastrous climate change. This idea is what led "scientists" a few decades ago to announce that we were on the verge of a "New Ice Age!!!!" Today that mechanism is an important element in Al Gore's seemingly endless traveling scarefest.


Well, as it turns out, there's really not much to worry about. Even if the Gulf Stream ceased to flow, it would have miminal impact on Europe's climate.

Here's Richard Seager writing in the American Scientist:

[T]he still-tentative connections investigators have made between thermohaline circulation and abrupt climate change during glacial times have combined with the popular perception that it is the Gulf Stream that keeps European climate mild to create a doomsday scenario: Global warming might shut down the Gulf Stream, which could "plunge western Europe into a mini ice age," making winters "as harsh as those in Newfoundland," or so claims, for example, a recent article in New Scientist. This general idea been rehashed in hundreds of sensational news stories.
....
[But] any slowdown in thermohaline circulation would have a noticeable but not catastrophic effect on climate. The temperature difference between Europe and Labrador should remain. Temperatures will not drop to ice-age levels, not even to the levels of the Little Ice Age, the relatively cold period that Europe suffered a few centuries ago. The North Atlantic will not freeze over, and English Channel ferries will not have to plow their way through sea ice.... Instead of creating catastrophe in the North Atlantic region, a slowdown in thermohaline circulation would serve to mitigate... expected anthropogenic warming!

The evidence repudiating the doomsday scenarios has been readily available in published studies for a long time, so why did the "scientific community" continue to support the doom-mongers?

Why had these collective studies not already led to the demise of claims in the media and scientific papers alike that the Gulf Stream keeps Europe's climate just this side of glaciation? It seems this particular myth has grown to such a massive size that it exerts a great deal of pull on the minds of otherwise discerning people.

This is not just an academic issue. The play that the doomsday scenario has gotten in the media—even from seemingly reputable outlets such as the British Broadcasting Corporation—could be dismissed as attention-grabbing sensationalism. But at root, it is the ignorance of how regional climates are determined that allows this misinformation to gain such traction.

The blame lies with modern-day climate scientists who either continue to promulgate the Gulf Stream-climate myth or who decline to clarify the relative roles of atmosphere and ocean in determining European climate. This abdication of responsibility leaves decades of folk wisdom unchallenged, still dominating the front pages, airwaves and Internet, ensuring that a well-worn piece of climatological nonsense will be passed down to yet another generation.

[Emphasis mine]

Read the whole thing here.

Indeed, the abdication of responsibility by careerist, publicity seeking, and ideologically driven members of the "scientific community" is about par for the course. And in the absence of scrupulous intellectual rigor from scientists, the myth mongers run rampant.