Big Freeze In Asia

The Scotsman has an article today about the unusually low temperatures in much of Asia. In Japan 63 people have died and over 1,000 people have been injured due to heavy snowfalls in the past month. In Bangladesh, 20 people have died of exposure. New Delhi's temperature was the lowest in 70 years. And in China's Xinjiang province, cattle left in the fields were dying from the cold.

The article didn't mention global warming, which surprised me. Nearly every time there are unusually high or unusually low temperatures, the scientists blame it on global warming. And I'm still mystified about how global warming brings about freezing weather.

My friend, the astrophysics major, and her two left-leaning friends tried to explain it to me, using the scenario from the movie The Day After Tomorrow, but I wasn't convinced. Later, I saw an article in The Guardian about how global warming is slowing down the Gulf Stream, and this article gave a convincing explanation of what drives the Gulf Stream and how global warming can slow down and someday even stop the Gulf Stream.

Here is how The Guardian article described the Gulf Stream currents:

The current is essentially a huge oceanic conveyor belt that transports heat from equatorial regions towards the Arctic circle. Warm surface water coming up from the tropics gives off heat as it moves north until eventually, it cools so much in northern waters that it sinks and circulates back to the south. There it warms again, rises and heads back north. The constant sinking in the north and rising in the south drives the conveyor.

Global warming weakens the circulation because increased meltwater from Greenland and the Arctic icesheets along with greater river run-off from Russia pour into the northern Atlantic and make it less saline which in turn makes it harder for the cooler water to sink, in effect slowing down the engine that drives the current.

Good enough. Until you look at a map of the ocean currents. After the description from the Guardian article, I expected the Canary Current (the one that heads southward from the north end of the Gulf Stream) to be cold, but it's warm. How does it stay warm if Greenland and the Arctic circle are feeding it cold water? Or is the warm water that affects Great Britain actually the arrow heading northeast from the top of the Gulf Stream? Is that the warm water that is in danger of turning cold from too much melting of Greenland's ice? It doesn't sound like it, from the way the article talks about a south-to-north-to-south circuit of surface water.

So if we melt too much of Greenland and the whole Gulf Stream conveyor belt comes to a screeching halt, then would the Northern Hemisphere get colder and colder, farther and farther south? And would the tropics get hotter and hotter without the circulating cold water to come back down (which it doesn't seem to do in the Atlantic anyway, judging by the currents map)? And what happens when all the southward-migrating cold water meets the northward-migrating warm water? Do we get lots of tornadoes and hurricanes?

And what about Asia? The North Pacific currents seem to fit the conveyor-belt model better than the North Atlantic, but nobody's talking about that one slowing down. And even if it has slowed down, that slowdown wouldn't explain this year's low temperatures.

India and Bangladesh and Japan and China don't have the same kind of circulation effect as Great Britain. While Britain is at the north end of the Gulf Stream, China and Japan are in the solid warm water section of their current. And India and Bangladesh are in an area of warm water as well.

How could Asia's cold weather possibly be explained by global warming's effects? It has to be able to be explained by it, because global warming is global. And if Asia is just experiencing year-to-year weather fluctuations (which is my personal theory), then why do the global warming enthusiasts, like my friend's friends at the party last year, insist that last year's horrible hurricane season was explained by global warming and not as just a year-to-year weather fluctuation?

Scientists like to explain that a theory (like the Theory of Evolution) is not just some wild idea that someone has come up with. It's a model of how things work that scientific observation of all the different facts and factors has confirmed over time, until the theory becomes as good as fact. The global warming theory has been accepted as fact by a large portion of the scientific community, but for myself, there are still too many questions unanswered and too many phenomena unexplained for me to accept it as fact just yet.

In the meantime, it looks like Asia may need our help.