‘Climate Chaos’ – Warming In Eastern Canada And Cooling In Northwestern Europe

MessageToEagle.com – A new study shows that the two melting ice sheets will have on ocean temperatures and circulation patterns as well as on air temperatures by the year 2100.

“Under current global government policies, we are heading towards 3 or 4 degrees of warming above pre-industrial levels, causing a significant amount of melt water from the Greenland and Antarctic Ice Sheets to enter Earth’s oceans. According to our models, this melt water will cause significant disruptions to ocean currents and change levels of warming around the world,” Associate Professor Nick Golledge from Victoria University of Wellington’s Antarctic Research Centre in New Zealand, said in a press release.

Based on simulations, the researchers from Canada, New Zealand, the UK, Germany and the USA have been able to create more reliable and accurate predictions of what will occur under current climate policies.

Professor Natalya Gomez, from the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at McGill modelled changes to water levels around the globe as ice melts into the ocean. The ice sheet simulations suggest that the fastest increase in the rise of sea levels is likely to occur between 2065 and 2075.

The process will affect Melting ice sheets will affect water temperatures and circulation patterns in the world’s oceans, which will in turn affect air temperatures – in a complex ice-ocean-atmosphere feedback loop.

“Water levels would not simply rise like a bathtub,” says Gomez. “Some areas in the world, such as the island nations in the Pacific, would experience a large rise in sea level, while close to the ice sheets the sea level would actually fall.”

However, the effects of ice sheet melt are far more widespread than simply leading to changes in sea levels. As warmer melt water enters the oceans, for example in the North Atlantic Ocean, major ocean currents such as the Gulf Stream will be significantly weakened. This will lead to warmer air temperatures in the high Arctic, Eastern Canada and Central America, and cooler temperatures over northwestern Europe on the other side of the Atlantic.

“Sea level rise from ice sheet melt is already happening and has been accelerating in recent years. Our new experiments show that this will continue to some extent even if Earth’s climate is stabilized. But they also show that if we drastically reduce emissions, we can limit future impacts,” says Golledge.

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