Future predictions

Although this short post is slightly off-topic, today I want to share my thoughts on something still pretty relevant. I want to talk about about abrupt climate change, and especially the future forecasts.

Last night I finally watched Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth". While it was definitely an hour and a half well spent and I recommend the film to everyone, I have been aware of the controversy surrounding some of Al Gore's statements. In particular, he claimed that global warming could shut down the Ocean Conveyor, throwing the planet into some sort of a Younger Dryas-like event. That is definitely not the point of view the British High Court shares and you can read the full story here http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthnews/3310137/Al-Gores-nine-Inconvenient-Untruths.html.

There are still scientists out there advocating the idea of the thermohaline circulation shutdown. In partucular, a paper by Schwartz and Randall (2003) gives a rather apocalyptic vision of the Earth's future climate and associated geopolitical issues. They predicted that the MOC collapse would begin in 2010, but I am pretty sure it has not happened yet.

The IPCC Fourth Assessment Report sounds slightly less dramatic. After reviewing current research in the field, IPCC states that the thermohaline circulation shutdown is very unlikely to occur for at least another century. The report also stresses the fact that there are "no indications of an imminent change in the North Atlantic THC".

List of references:

IPCC (2007) 'Fourth Assessment Report: Climate Change 2007' (WWW), IPCC (http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg2/en/ch12s12-6-2.html), 7/01/2013.