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The cooling patch of ocean south of Greenland Credit:  Nature Climate Change By Michael Coppola and Nancy Lazar What drives a significant part of the planet’s weather and climate and is responsible for feeding a good portion of the world? It is the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation or AMOC. This is the movement of surface and deep ocean water by a convection cell between the warm equatorial Atlantic and the cold North Atlantic waters. It is part of the global thermohaline ocean circulation that distributes and mixes surface and deep water throughout all the world's oceans. These currents move as part of various convection cells within the ocean waters. Credit: Wikipedia Commons The circulation system of the global ocean Simply speaking, warm surface water in the tropics flows north; when it reaches the colder northern latitudes it becomes denser, sinking down when it reaches the glacial area of the Arctic . It then flows back south as a deep water current to again ri...

The effects of climate change may be much more severe and arrive much sooner than originally predicted. By Michael Coppola & Nancy Lazar According to a recently published research paper in “Nature Climate Change” our existing climate models underestimate how rapidly the Arctic is currently warming. They discovered that today’s rate of temperature increase – about one degree Celsius per decade – is similar to the rate that occurred prior to periods of abrupt warming during the last 100,000 year long Ice Age. This is a model that can shed light on our current global warming.  The geologic record shows that during the recent Ice Age temperatures tended to rise a few degrees globally over 50 or so years, and then the temperature rose very fast over just two decades. These periods of warming occurred at least 20 times and rose as much as 15 degrees. The new model will need to reflect the rapid warming that occurs when this condition of steady warming exists. It will also have to inc...