According to the New York Times climate change is helping make submarines invisible. Which is a mighty strange story since… it appears to be saying climate change will do something good? No. Because it believes there’s nothing climate change cannot do? No. Because it’s full of the usual nonsense from worthless predictions to inaccurate data to unquestioning faith in climate models.

Here’s the nugget of the story:

“The waters where many submarines lurk have been quickly warming, as humans pump out greenhouse gasses and oceans absorb the excess heat that gets trapped in the atmosphere. And that warming, according to a recent paper produced by the NATO Defense College in Rome, can have a powerful effect on how sound, the primary means of detecting submarines, behaves underwater. It could make large areas of the oceans impenetrable to submarine hunters.”

Bosh.

No, really. Don’t take our word for it. The story itself says so, almost immediately afterward. First it adds that the research team:

“modeled the way sound waves moved through the depths from 1970 to 1999. And they compared it with the way current climate modeling predicts they will move between 2070 and 2099. There were significant differences.”

And if you believe that modeling you’ll believe anything. But, it went on directly:

“The researchers found that in the North Atlantic, where Russian submarines play cat and mouse with NATO forces, the distances at which they can be heard will shrink significantly. This could be by almost half in the Bay of Biscay, off the coasts of France and Spain. There were similar dynamics in play in the western Pacific, where Chinese and American submarines operate and where detection ranges could shrink by up to 20 percent.”

Notice that shrinking detection ranges by up to 20 percent, when they are well over 100 km, does not “make large areas of the ocean impenetrable to submarine hunters.” Not by a hundred miles.

Nor is the ocean currently transparent to them. If you’re a Tom Clancy fan, which may be only slightly more common than a Tom Connors one today, you’ll remember that in The Hunt for Red October, and indeed in his neglected classic Red Storm Rising, a crucial aspect of submarine warfare is the way that a sudden sharp temperature change at the “thermocline” distorted sonar signals badly.

Still, let’s not get ahead of ourselves, with computer models saying what the ocean will do in 2080 to technology five decades away whose contours we cannot begin to predict. Because Tony Heller notes that these famous “quickly warming” ocean waters are, well, cooling. Something odd happened in late 2023 and 2024, a temperature spike which the models could not predict beforehand or explain afterward with their various algorithms for turning those dreaded “greenhouse gasses” that “humans pump out” into, um, temperature changes, though apparently they can precisely establish the behaviour of the thermocline in the Bay of Biscay in 2084. And everyone says it must be climate change causing the heat rather than the heat being climate change because um it’s like whatever.

Mind you, in 2025 the temperatures are going back down which the models also can’t explain any more than they can predict what will happen next or in 2099. Except the bit where Chinese submarines lurk undetected.

P.S. MSN says “The Ocean Is Becoming Heavier” which is of course (a) due to climate change not an example of it and (b) extremely very bad. However maybe it will make submarines more buoyant. We don’t know. We couldn’t get it onto our scale.