At http://phys.org/print364132548.html … for a long time the prevailing view has been that climate variations in the Atlantic region are due to ocean circulation, the so called Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation which carries warm water north in the upper layer of the ocean and cold water south in lower layers of the ocean, part of the so called ocean conveyor belt. In text books you will find graphics describing how it works and numerous peer review articles have been written on the subject. It has been used to account for cool and warm periods of climate, even Ice Age anomalies and the Younger Dryas event. It is a well established consensus theory – with the emphasis on the latter word.
The mechanism is fairly well known but it is what causes changes to the system that is least understood. Merely showing something can change is not all a theory requires as we should be asking ourselves why the changes happen – what is the vector to cause changes to the system. In an important new study in the journal Science (see www.sciencemag.org/lookup/doi/10.1126/science.aab3980) and a press release issued by the University of Miami, the standard theory is challenged. They have been looking at the atmosphere and discovered this plays a pivotal role. This is not surprising to a Catastrophist as the atmosphere is open to space. It is relentlessly bombarded by the solar wind, and ultra violet rays and cosmic rays from further afield, and all this apart from meteors and cosmic dust streams, volcanic aerosols, or aerosols of soot from fossil fuels, or even just cloud formation and the like, and you name it and the atmosphere has an obvious role on climate.
The article is CAGW sympathetic, as it would have to be to get published, and reproduces ideas such as increased hurricane activity and so on. They do produce a cycle – which can be explained as the research was done on a computer simulation leaving out the ocean circulation bit – just to see what might cause the changing weather pattern. We can assume that the solar wind played a trifling role in the input but the cycle they found, 80 to 60 years, is not that far from the 60 year solar cycle. Still a long way to go yet.
At http://phys.org/print364144045.html … a paper in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society claims the rise and fall of civilisations in Peru and Mexico were related to climate change – stable periods of warm and moist weather interspersed by less stable weather with droughts and other problems. Nothing particularly new about that apart from a specific link to rainfall levels (the monsoon track and tropical rain belt).
At http://phys.org/print364131307.html … in Scientific Reports (part of Nature) we have a 35,000 year long record of climate in Catabria during the Late Pleistocene. This shows a series of warm and cool periods that correspond with climate variations elsewhere.