The Old Man and the Sea -- Ocean currents -- March 18, 2023

 We have our new map of the ocean currents, and it looks about the same as always.  I haven't detected a major change for the last couple of years.

What is the mechanism of the Pacific Ocean cycles?  The conventional influencer explanation is all hot air, or wind changes.  They will tell us that the Pacific ocean currents are driven by the winds, and the cycles are a change of the wind direction.  However, the water has 1000 times the heat energy density of the air, and physics is not happy with this explanation.  In fact, the whole climate thing violates all the laws of physics.

But I am not here to bury influencer explanations, but to praise them.  Who else would give us such joy?  Anyway, they have gone out on a limb and have declared the Pacific Cold Phase is dead, and we'll have a Hot Phase within a month or two.  This is their first explanation that can actually be measured.  Although, they endless discuss the 1.5C limit, they present no way to measure it in an acceptable way (to them).

We still have a very strong current coming from Antarctica.  This makes the current very cold.

We have that lovely cold water down the middle of the Belt.  The warm wedge to the East is dying.  

The Gulf Stream continues to leave the area north of UK.  They might be feeling a bit cold.  

To be serious, there are two views of the world, one is popular, and the other, with physics, is not.  The influencers must live with a world that is getting colder, while they try to convince people that they are warm.  It becomes more difficult each year.  The hard physics view looks at the charts, and the physical mechanisms, and proposes a hypothesis that we are entering, either a 20 year cold cycle (like the 70's) or a long cold cycle, like the Little Ice Age.

It is possible to construct a full 'game physics' model of the Earth, using physics first principles.  This has been done, but they are very quiet about it.  Apparently, you can't get published if you go against the popular opinion.  With the Pacific ocean shut down, the Earth's poles will run out of residual heat.  We will just have shorter summers, and long, cold winters.  However, there will always be heat waves, getting hotter, but shorter, all due to the lack of moderating ocean air.  I am confident that the popular opinion can be stoked for another few years.

ps  A prediction -- A year from now, the Pacific will be colder than ever, and nooa would never dare to call it '4th La Nina in a row'.  The only people who will cry will be Australia.  Everybody else will ignore this inconvenient situation.  The reported heat waves will get hotter and hotter, but shorter and shorter, and nobody will report that.  In fact, division by zero may result in tinier specks of energy with the heat waves.  I expect the headlines "Death Valley has the hottest minute on record!"