How many towns do we need to see burned into oblivion? How many Greenvilles and Paradises in California? How many Detroits, Blue Rivers, Vidas, Phoenixes, and Talents in Oregon? How many Maldens in Washington state? How many Gatlinburgs and Pigeon Forges in Tennessee?
How much more ice must melt from the Greenland ice sheet? Just last week NASA reported that a new heat wave that began on July 28 spurred Greenland’s biggest melting event of the 2021 season so far. Researchers explained that enough water melted to cover all of Florida with two inches of water.
All of Florida. Two inches of water.
There’s more. There’s the ocean. You likely remember the 2004 climate science fiction disaster movie, “The Day After Tomorrow” about catastrophic climatic effects disrupting of the North Atlantic Ocean circulation and causing extreme weather events that ushered in global cooling and lead to a new ice age.
On Thursday, a new analysis published in the journal Nature Climate Change, drew on more than a century of ocean temperature and salinity data that show significant changes in eight indirect measures of the Atlantic Ocean’s Meridional Overturning Circulation. That circulation, sometimes called the “conveyor belt,” transports warm, salty water from the tropics to northern Europe and then sends colder water back south along the ocean floor.