With this Fall's powerful hurricanes building energy over warm waters and causing extensive damage upon reaching land, many people are wondering about the future effects of global warming.
The big chill of recent winters in the Northeastern U.S. and near-record warmth globally seems like an early warning of the most dire predictions of climate change. As most of the world gets toastier, average winter temperatures in Northeastern America and Western Europe could plunge 9-degrees F, according to an article in The Wall Street Journal of March 7, 2003.
Two of the worst repercussions of climate change: the Gulf Stream no longer conveying warmth from tropical to northern latitudes and Antarctic glaciers breaking off and surging into the sea, bringing a catastrophic rise in sea level around the world.
The ice around Antarctica already is setting off alarms. A couple of the massive, floating ice shelves that fringe the Antarctic Peninsula have collapsed. One broke off a few winters ago and a piece the size of Rhode Island moved into the southern ocean. Ice shelves act like corks in a bottle: Remove them, and the glaciers behind accelerate toward the sea. The usual estimates of sea-level rise (between 4 and 40 inches by 2100) don't include the effects of surging glaciers. Doing so would at least double the low-end estimates.
When the warm, salty Gulf Stream current reaches its Northern terminus, the arctic air cools it, causing it to sink (cold water is denser than warm). The Gulf Stream's plunge pulls warm tropical water up to the Northeastern U.S. and Canada and Western Europe. That makes these regions at least 9.5-degrees F warmer than they'd be without the Gulf Stream.
If the cold, salty North Atlantic waters didn't sink, the current would weaken or stop. Land temperatures would fall 5.5 to 9-degrees--resulting in winters twice as cold as the worst on record. Which indicates that global warming doesn't result in more warmth for everybody in the world.