Whither the warmth

Today’s title is not about the rapid fading of the summer’s heat—though thank goodness for that—but instead about the unpredictable ways climate change will continue to destabilize our world. While we often associate climate change with global warming (and we’ll certainly have, on average, hotter summers), the massively complex system that is our earth will sometimes do just the opposite.

Consider the Gulf Stream.

Intuitively, moving north from the equator, temperatures get colder. (At the northernmost distances, there’s ice year round, so I think our intuition is good on this one!) But it’s not just distance north that affects temperature: proximity to the coast, and to which coast in particular, can make an area much warmer than it’d otherwise be.

Take, for example, northern areas of the UK or Europe. They’re roughly on par, in terms of latitude, with northern Ontario, yet the winters tend to be much milder. This is thanks to a variety of circulatory systems, including the relatively well-known Gulf Stream, but also lesser-known ones, like the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC).

Anyhow, updated modelling suggests that the AMOC could be at a crucial tipping point in the coming decades (if that), at which point it could slow or even collapse. This’d lead to even more sea level rise, but also to colder, wetter winters—with potential for massive social changes as a result, as seen during the Little Ice Age. (Whether our response will be more in the vein of frost fairs or the March Across the Belts, well, that’s still TBD.)

If the prospect of colder winters is too frightful, rest assured, we’ll also have warmer summers. 😎 ***

• We were at the National Arts Centre Orchestra (NACO) performance earlier in the year when it was announced that Alexander Shelley would step down as music director. While I’ve never known a NACO without Shelley’s influence, it’s clear the energy and enthusiasm he brings to the task. I’m heartened by Paul Wells’s reflection on the appointment of John Storgårds to the post, and look forward to what future years bring. (In the meantime, I’m ever grateful for the NACO’s archive of excellently produced performance recordings.)
• Now, from Winnipeg, data-informed reporting on changes to the city’s transit system? Why yes, please. (via SB)
• One of the oldest posts on this version of my blog is about colour names and “the folly of subjective references”. Well, some folks have undertaken an interesting project to give “definitive” colour values for over 30,000 different colour names. Impressively, this only covers 0.18% of the ~16 million colours that can be expressed in the 256-bit RGB colour space. David Aerne built a tool to visualize this distribution of named colours, and you can toggle between different models (RGB, HCL, etc) to see the different “shapes” these distributions take.

Mm, that’s enough inside time for now—sunny skies are beckoning me for a bike ride! All the best for the week ahead!

Lucas