The May 8, 2005 Sunday London Times ran an innocent enough looking article on a topic that has the potential to radically change the course of history of the British Isles and Western Europe.
They have found that one of the “engines” driving the Gulf Stream — the sinking of supercooled water in the Greenland Sea — has weakened to less than a quarter of its former strength.
The weakening, apparently caused by global warming, could herald big changes in the current over the next few years or decades. Paradoxically, it could lead to Britain and northwestern and Europe undergoing a sharp drop in temperatures.
Such a change has long been predicted by scientists but the new research is among the first to show clear experimental evidence of the phenomenon.
A disruption in the Gulf Stream sounds like science fiction (it is actually the theme of the recent motion picture The Day After Tomorrow), but Dr. Wadhams is a professor at respected Cambridge University and he is quite serious about his concerns. If the Gulf Stream were to cease completely, Western Europe's climate could begin to look at lot like that of Siberia or Labrador, which could present an existential challenge for the heart of Western civilization just as a serious energy crisis is in the offing.
Somewhat reassuring is the article's mention that there are two other huge columns of sinking water in the North Atlantic that help drive the Gulf Stream, and there is no evidence to date that those have been affected by the reduced winter sea ice accretion as the Greenland Sea has been.
Whether it is attributable to man-made causes or not, evidence continues to mount that global warming is for real and that it has the potential to be much more than an inconvenience to human settlement around the world. My hope is that Dr. Wadhams' discovery will first promote further study and discussion of the issues of global warming, and that it will ultimately amount to no more than a false alarm.