Gulf oil spill cleanup shuts down Gulf Stream

Soapy Sam

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I don't know if this belongs in CT or Humour.
I just had an email from a friend (which he copied to at least 40 other folk),
attaching a pdf claiming the Corexit dispersants used after the Macondo blowout have shut down the entire north atlantic drift and are about to trigger an ice age in Europe.

That this is total drivel goes without saying, but I wonder where it started and if there's a clear debunking I could refer these people to?

The pdf is entitled "Life on this Earth just changed.pdf"

I have no idea how to copy a pdf and can't be bothered typing the nonsense here. Google shows some discussion of it at one forum, but a website of the same name tells me my ISP is banned. So I guess it must be real and the CIA are doing it.

(Yawns). It's getting hard to keep up with all the end-of-the-world conspiracies. Of course giving up is what THEY want us to do. I give up.
 
Soapy Sam said:
(Yawns). It's getting hard to keep up with all the end-of-the-world conspiracies. Of course giving up is what THEY want us to do. I give up.
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Not to worry. Perpetual growth on a finite planet just can't go wrong.

And who cares about mass extinction? There are plenty of species to go round.
 
Jane- the issue in this thread is not that oil blowouts kill people and fish. We know that. The issue is that someone is spreading lies that scare people. The man who sent me this was scared by it.
Crying "wolf" desensitises people to the reality of environmental damage. This helps nobody.
 
I googled that site, and got in. It's hilarious, with links to David Icke and Rense.com and all that sort of thing.

I was particularly taken with a page entitled "Drockton, Rense, Others, Force Scotland’s Attorney General To Resign!" Scotland doesn't even have an "Attorney General". We do have the post of "Lord Advocate", currently occupied by a 24-carat bitch called Eilish Angiolini, who yesterday announded that she was going to step down at the next election. Here's a sane report on her resignation.

You can see from the Herald report that if she's stepping down for any other reason than having come to the end of her shelf life, the fingers are pointing about the human rights case involving when people arrested in Scotland have a statutory right to legal representation.

Scotland’s senior law officer has announced she is to stand down – just weeks before a UK Supreme Court ruling that could see thousands of criminals freed from jail and cost millions of pounds in compensation.
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However, that woo-woo site says

Angelioni [Angiolini] was brought down through the efforts of this website and radio show, Jeff Rense, David Icke (who brought this story to light), Robert Green, Anne Greig, The Drum Newspaper (which bravely reported the cover-up), “Can of Worms” website and Hollie’s Army on Facebook among others. Of course, I would be remiss if I didn’t recognize Peter Eyre and his excellent articles on Hollie Greig as well.
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Er, Hollie who???

Rolfe.

ETA: Well, maybe even a stopped clock is right twice a day....

LORD ADVOCATE OF SCOTLAND ELISH ANGIOLINI YOU ARE A LIAR AND A BLOODY DISGRACE – YOU SHOULD BE IN JAIL YOURSELF!
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I suppose, looking at the google returns, the story is appearing on kook sights by the dozen - the one I went into (The Philosopher's Stone) was just the first on the list.

Where did the story actually originate, does anyone know?

Rolfe (off to buy winter wheels for the car....)
 
 
Soapy Sam said:
Jane- the issue in this thread is not that oil blowouts kill people and fish. We know that. The issue is that someone is spreading lies that scare people. The man who sent me this was scared by it.
Crying "wolf" desensitises people to the reality of environmental damage. This helps nobody.
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There's no mention in the OP of this being "the issue".
 
JihadJane said:
There's no mention in the OP of this being "the issue".
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That's true.

My own reaction to the claim was to find it funny- a bit like the "Mars will be as big as the Moon" one. After I replied to the sender (and after I posted here), he replied saying it had really scared him and his wife.

I'm curious to know who starts stuff like this and what they hope to gain from it.
 
Soapy Sam said:
(Yawns). It's getting hard to keep up with all the end-of-the-world conspiracies. Of course giving up is what THEY want us to do. I give up.
Click to expand...
Yep, pseudo scientific BS. The gulf stream is a product of large-scale winds generated by the rotation of the earth. Respected Professor of Oceanography Carl Wunsch responded, in no uncertain terms, with a letter outlining our scientific understanding of the gulf stream when some AGW advocates tried to ratchet up this particular scare story some years back. Letter here:

http://ocean.mit.edu/~cwunsch/papersonline/naturegulfstreamltr.pdf

Extract from the letter:

Carl Wunsch said:
(...) the Gulf Stream’s existence is a consequence of the large-scale wind system over the North Atlantic Ocean, and of the nature of fluid motion on a rotating planet. The only way to produce an ocean circulation without a Gulf Stream is either to turn off the wind system, or to stop the Earth’s rotation, or both.
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ETA: Although I have a lot of respect for Carl Wunsch (a very capable scientist), I think he missed one other way the gulf stream could be shut down: rearrange the continents. That said, I don't think the oil spill will cause that either.
 
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Soapy Sam said:
My own reaction to the claim was to find it funny- a bit like the "Mars will be as big as the Moon" one. After I replied to the sender (and after I posted here), he replied saying it had really scared him and his wife.


I'm curious to know who starts stuff like this and what they hope to gain from it.
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I don't know but you appear to be assuming Machiavellian intent. Perhaps whoever started it believed what they were saying and were scared themselves.
 
Machiavellian, no. I'm assuming childish and thoughtless. But it's a lot of trouble to go to for a silly prank. Of course, to someone more computer savvy, it may be the work of minutes. It would take me a while.
 
CoolSceptic said:
Yep, pseudo scientific BS. The gulf stream is a product of large-scale winds generated by the rotation of the earth. Respected Professor of Oceanography Carl Wunsch responded, in no uncertain terms, with a letter outlining our scientific understanding of the gulf stream when some AGW advocates tried to ratchet up this particular scare story some years back. Letter here:

http://ocean.mit.edu/~cwunsch/papersonline/naturegulfstreamltr.pdf

Extract from the letter:



ETA: Although I have a lot of respect for Carl Wunsch (a very capable scientist), I think he missed one other way the gulf stream could be shut down: rearrange the continents. That said, I don't think the oil spill will cause that either.
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\What? With all that oil lubricating the plates, you'd expect them to slide easier and faster!
 
rwguinn said:
\What? With all that oil lubricating the plates, you'd expect them to slide easier and faster!
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True, I never thought of that! :D

On reflection, I think I'm being a little unfair to Dr. Wunsch as well - he alludes to the possibility that plate tectonics could change things by reference to tens of millions of years. I suspect Nature has a very strict word limit on their letters which prevents spelling everything out in detail.
 
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