A post hoc solution to the behavior of the ocean air land climate is a luxury we on the planet can't afford. Model on. . .

See below for my obligatory political-science statement. (3)

Carl Wunsch wants everyone to step back from thinking the deep ocean's behavior interface in Anthropogenic Global Warming has any solid data, or enough to draw conclusions.

http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2008/211/1

Wunsch suggests waiting until the "data is in" before even daring to see any models showing that deep ocean circulation has at all been impacted or changed by the recent trend most scientist see as Anthropogenic Global Warming from greenhouse gases.

Most scientists appreciate the sentiment of a true scientist -- not to jump the gun and read the events or predict events until it is post hoc certainty. Yea! these stolid voices.

However, we the species at the root of the problem, just do not have time for the post hoc certainty of a disaster -- to see if it was a disaster.

Image: NOAA

Cold water is known to sink to the region to the west and east of Iceland (dark blue arrows) and drives the deep ocean circulation around the world. It is thought that the volume of sea ice exiting the Arctic into the Greenland Sea influences the rate of sinking. This sinking and the returning surface waters (shown in red and orange) is referred to as the North Atlantic Overturning.

Shown in the image to the right are "the pathways associated with the transformation of warm subtropical waters into colder subpolar and polar waters in the northern North Atlantic. Along the subpolar gyre pathway the red to yellow transition indicates the cooling to Labrador Sea Water, which flows back to the subtropical gyre in the west as an intermediate depth current (yellow). In the Norwegian and Greenland Seas the red to blue/purple transitions indicate the transformation to a variety of colder waters that spill southwards across the shallow ridge system connecting northern Europe, Iceland, Greenland, and northern North America. These overflows form up into a deep current also flowing back to the subtropics (purple), but beneath the Labrador Sea Water. The green pathway also indicates cold waters--but so influenced by continental runoff as to remain light and near the sea surface on the continental shelf.

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Image: NOAA, GFDL

http://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/reference/AR00/5OceanicCirculation.html

NOAA: A recent study suggests that any theory which purports to explain the response of the ACC to the wind must consider the buoyancy forcing north and south of the ACC as it pertains to the north-south pressure gradient across the current. The figure above shows schematically that upwelling in the south forces a conversion of dense deep water into lighter thermocline waters. This leads to an increase in the depth of the light-water pool in low latitudes and a larger north-south pressure gradient in the upper part of the water column. This pressure gradient increases the overturning in the Northern Hemisphere leading to warmer and lighter deep waters in the north. Insofar as the density of deep water in the Southern Ocean remains basically unchanged, the result is a larger north-south pressure gradient at all depths across the ACC and an increase in the transport of the Circumpolar Current. (see entire text at site above)

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Everyone, except Carl Johnson in Illinois(1), agrees that the vast waters of the ocean have an overwhelming (or at least very large role) in moderation and delay of the inevitable catastrophic rise in global temperatures. Wunsch's argument follows one by J. R. Toggweiler and Joellen Russell discussing the overturning oceanic deep water at the end of the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), and wind as the primary driving force.

The LGM occurred about 21,000 years ago, and ice more than two miles thick lay over what is now Wisconsin, Minnesota and southern Canada. It was cold enough to kill all plant life in Canada's interior -- and glaciers gravitationally flowed and oozed across vast areas of the continent and kept the temperature in the North "cool."

And Toggweiler and Russell say the "truism" is the "winds blew" more fiercely in the ice age than during the times of warmth. Toggweiler and Russell agree with that truism, and open their supplement 17 Jan 2008 article in Nature, mentioning the data showing the temperature slope (gradient) from equator to pole to be much steeper and larger than in the warm of the present.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v451/n7176/full/nature06590.html

That, of course, does not mean the overall amount of energy contained in the Earth Climate system was as high then as it is now. The high temperature or latent heat, or thermal inertia gained by a "thing" when warmed, can of course, lead to what seems (and is as far as our data interpretation systems can tell us) -- is chaos. Well, it looks chaotic. The speed with which a viscous fluid traverses a distance should change with a change in the overall energy of the system. New orders and patterns will emerge -- chaos does not continue long in any long equilibrium condition -- it just looks that way.

As a species, we do not have the amount of time to wait for the new equilibrium -- or for the disaster bearing down upon us to tell us it is here after it arrives.

Can Past Cold or Warm Oceanic Temperatures even begin to describe the Present and the Future?

I think that is more than a "stretch" that the past can describe a future even indirectly. It will help, but it only implies the future -- but does not describe it. To wait til the future has passed is not a viable option. We are going to have to make a stab at it -- best by stopping what we are doing that can exacerbate the situation.

No matter how deep in the reasonably recent recent past you read (2 Mya - 5Mya)-- we have not been here before.

AGW has pushed the pattern to the unreadable, and correlations with past minima and maxima are irrelevant with respect to any reading involving CO2 then and CO2 now.

Image: NOAA, GFDL Note forcing, air temperature-obliquity correlation.

The LGM cold temperatures were approximately the same as the prior several glacial maximums stretching back nearly a million years. What is important to any characterization is that in the last several million years -- there has NEVER been as much CO2 in the atmosphere as man has emplaced therein in the last 100 years.

Historical records of the ebb and flow of climate are interesting but actually irrelevant, and largely useless to the dynamics we see opening before us now. We are past the point of normal warming the record gives. Nothing in the past can describe or circumscribe the consequences the current CO2 ppmv -- nor the growth business as usual portends. As a matter of fact, the temperature is now not quite as warm as past interglacial record levels -- but the CO2 atmospheric volume is clearly far above any possible past readable direct correlation.

Yes. We are entering "Dark Territory." Something terribly new, and reflections on the past are really no guide. Really, past a certain level, say 300 ppmv CO2 -- it is all dark territory. That is where we are now.

http://oceancurrents.rsmas.miami.edu/atlantic/gulf-stream.html

(2) see below this article for surface currents and data that supports their depictions.

There are Other Worlds. Strangely, Earth is becoming one of these "other worlds" with AGW.

Interestingly, the atmosphere of Neptune has and maintains the fastest winds in the solar system, faster than next fastest Uranus, or next fastest Saturn, or mighty and closest of the giants, Jupiter.

Image: NOAA, GFLD, Jupiter. Note. The Great Red Spot is about 8,000 x 25,000 miles.

See: http://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/reference/AR99/1ClimateDynamics.html

Why is it the colder and more distant the world from the Sun, the faster the winds?

It took a while, but it seems that the closer to the Sun the world is, the incidence of higher energy allows and supports more turbulence. The energy from the Sun, driving the upper atmosphere level of the outer planets, visible to our sensors -- shows winds in the outer gas planet worlds when energetic enough to produce turbulence -- disrupts a nice energetic fast fluid flow. For the nearer giant planets, this turbulence is breaking the gas giant atmospheric belts and bands into more turbulent regimes -- and faster winds can't organize or exist because the energy and turbulence that energy generates won't allow it. The energy allows and supports turbulent interactions -- and that turbulence prevents high velocity winds from organizing.

Granted that there is a Venus exception where axial rotation does not contribute in the same general way. What if Venus had a sensibly "fast" prograde rotation?

Carl Wunsch is wanting us to wait until the data is in to have a "slam dunk" scientific certainty. Only problem is -- our species likely has much less time left than to allow for a post hoc answer to present the complete answer. My suggestion: Keep intergrating current observational data into the models and see what it predicts. The past won't tell you a thing about 390 ppmv and higher CO2 levels.

Carl Wunsch is right. Our data and models are incomplete. We do not know where deep ocean circulation is going. All of us would like to know, but the rate is apparently ponderous.

What we need to decide immediately is where we want it to go -- to what ever level we can determine -- and then act accordingly. A doubling of CO2 is preventable, or may be. We really are facing a big Die-Off, and we are part of the Die-Off. We can minimize it by stopping the use of fossil fuel, and removing every molecule of CO2 from about 1/4-th of the volume of the atmosphere and sequestering it permanently. Big, big machines will have to suck clean the CO2 from 1/4 of our air. Soon.

Give Carl Wunsch a nod for pointing out the obvious. And thanks. Model on . . .

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(1) See the scary future here: (well, one of them)

http://mb-soft.com/public3/global.html

Carl Johnson lives within 700 km of the LGM's thickest ice -- a long way from the moderating
ocean's influence. . .

(2)
This site is quite useful and will be more so as it is fleshed out and completed for the entire planet.

http://oceancurrents.rsmas.miami.edu/atlantic/gulf-stream.html

If you sail or traverse ocean water this (above) site will help you and you will learn from it.

(3)
I wanted to illustrate this posting with things you and I paid for through NOAA -- but the Bush Administration helots and minions have destroyed the NOAA websites along with those of every other government science agency - -by removing and hiding relevant data or simply making it impossible for the public to easily access. See the abominations of websites at NASA.gov, USGS.gov, DOE.gov, DOI.gov, etc., to see the damage this Bush administration has done. It is not "no child left behind" it is "everyone left behind." It is theft from the people on the grandest Orwellian scale. These people should be held responsible and prosecuted. I mean criminally responsible. Bush has not served America. Bush has plundered and done his best to damage America. America should serve Bush and cronies to our Justice system, for time and damages to the national infrastructure, and the lies concerning Big Carbon's damage to our future. These sites have all been diminished to prevent you from knowing the extent of the damage and the responsibility for it.