Eric Schwartz of Arizona Daily Star:

The scientific community has long believed that as global warming continues and large amounts of freshwater ice melt into the ocean, the ocean's circulation will slow.

This would have a catastrophic impact on the environment as vividly, if somewhat overdramatically, portrayed in the film "The Day After Tomorrow."

But a paper published last week in Nature magazine, the result of several studies of past and possible future weather, says that in fact the very opposite is true and ocean circulation will become stronger as the icecaps melt.

"We missed what was right in front of our eyes," said Joellen Russell, an assistant professor of geosciences at the University of Arizona and co-author of the paper.

And:

Evidence from the most recent ice age, which reached its coldest 21,000 years ago, shows that the ocean had very little movement and exchange of deep water and surface water until the warming of the Earth about 18,000 years ago. "The evidence is piling up," that those models predicting a weakened ocean circulation in the coming decades are wrong, Russell said.

The increasing speed of the westerlies and their movement toward the poles "should stir the ocean's salty and fresh waters around and minimize the effect of the polar freshening," [co-author] Toggweiler said.

Still, the idea that the ocean's circulation will increase as the Earth warms is not fully accepted by scientists.

"It's controversial, but it explains what happened in the past and what is happening now," Toggweiler said.

The mounting evidence has won the new theory a lot of converts, Toggweiler said.

"We were lucky to publish first," Russell said.

"This is what science is all about," Toggweiler said. "Looking for where the common wisdom is wrong."

Here's the actual paper, published in Nature on 17 January 2008.

I have noticed a trend in science magazines recently. It seems to me that more and more researchers suggest that human-made global warming is not as big a threat as many (leftist) environmentalists would like us to believe.

(Seen in picture is a schematic outline of the world's ocean currents.)