Stark Warning on Atlantic Cooling

Climatologists say there is an almost 50% chance that the Labrador Sea in the North Atlantic Ocean will cool rapidly within the next decade.

For thousands of years, parts of north-west Europe have enjoyed a climate around 5°C warmer than many other regions on the same latitude.  But new scientific analysis suggests that that could change much sooner and much faster than thought possible.

Climatologists who have looked again at the possibility of major climate change in and around the Atlantic Ocean, a persistent puzzle to researchers, now say there is an almost 50% chance that a key area of the North Atlantic could cool suddenly and rapidly, within the space of a decade, before the end of this century.

That is a much starker prospect than even the worst-case scientific scenario proposed so far, which does not see the Atlantic ocean current shutdown happening for several hundred years at least.

Extreme climate change
A scenario even more drastic (but fortunately fictional) was the subject of the 2004 US movie The Day After Tomorrow, which portrayed the disruption of the North Atlantic’s circulation leading to global cooling and a new Ice Age.

Read more at Stark Warning on Atlantic Cooling