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EnhanceTV :: Educational TV :: Geography & Nature :: Future Focus: The Gulf Stream And The Next Ice Age

Future Focus: The Gulf Stream And The Next Ice Age

"In the battle against climate change there is no enemy to fight, just our attitudes." (Nicolas Koutsikas, Director, The Gulf Stream & the Next Ice Age)

Climate Change is hot on the political and social agenda internationally. Our climate is changing, with industrial production, habitat, transport and everyday human activities acknowledged as causes of global warming.

The Gulf Stream and the Next Ice Age is a one-hour documentary which explores the results of a recent American government report that believes the collapse of thermohaline circulation will take place around the year 2010 and impose a minor ice age on Europe. Could Dublin acquire a climate like Spitzberg, and London like that of Siberia?

The Gulf Stream is a powerful surface current, driven by the Trade Winds. Its origins lie in the Gulf of Mexico and it carries the tropical waters from the Florida Strait to the great banks of the United States, where it heads eastward, carrying its warm waters to the borders of the North Atlantic. As soon as the tropical waters hit the Arctic Ocean, they cool abruptly and plunge towards the abyssal zone to form a loop, known as "thermohaline circulation." Then, like an immense conveyor belt that slows down in the ocean depths, it sets out again southward to rejoin the beginning of the Gulf Stream.

Are we going to face a catastrophe if the Gulf Stream stops? Recently we have become more aware that changes to our climate systems are not necessarily gradual and predictable but that they can be large and abrupt. An accident in the climate system could be compared to an accident at a power station.

Pentagon scientists and authors of the report, Peter Schwartz and Doug Randall, predict the collapse of thermohaline circulation would also result in increased scarcity of water resources, unprecedented food shortages for Europe, along with the southward migration of Scandinavian and Northern European populations.

Whilst many in the scientific community see this report as alarmist, German climatologist, Stefan Rahmstorf - one of the world's specialists in predicting future climate scenarios - believes the shutdown of ocean circulation could take place in the second half of our century, causing a cooling of northern Europe if there is melting of a major portion of the Greenland icecap, the source of 70% of the planet's fresh water reserves.

"I think that the politicians haven't quite grasped the urgency of the problem yet. They pay lip service to it, but the measures that are taken are pretty half-hearted.....we have perhaps another 10 years to start this fundamental transition in our energy system towards a much higher efficiency, towards renewable energies. But if we lose another 10 years and do very little, then I am very worried about the future," said Stefan Rahmstorf (From Greece, in English, French and Polish, English subtitles