The Day After Tomorrow  

Anyone who's into doom and gloom will have no shortage of fears to stoke if they cast their eyes over the news stream.

I managed to overlook this particular ominous portent until The Oil Drum made it impossible to ignore - the gulf stream is slowing down. I read a prediction of this in London in 1996 (in The Independent) which was actually the genesis of my interest in global warming. How many crises are going to pile on top of one another ?

Dramatic news does not always appear on the front pages and in the network news. Yesterday there was a story by the science editor of the London Times, on the slowing of the Gulf Stream. Essentially one of the engines that drives the stream of warm water from Florida over to Northwestern Europe has shut down. The engine is the annual melting of the Odden ice shelf. For the past few years the shelf has not formed as the North Polar ice cap has grown thinner.

The article reminds us that this was the basis of the film The Day after Tomorrow. Naturally, the article being written in the UK, the theme is the loss of heat that this will bring to the continent, and the resulting drops in temperature. It is a subject that The Guardian covered earlier in the year, though their conclusion was that this was not likely to happen for a long time.

But there is another concern, for if the heat is no longer drawn out of the Gulf, and sent north, then it may just stay where it is. And the steady build up of more heat in the Gulf and around Florida will not make those any more pleasant places to live, regardless of the effects of the heat on global weather patterns.