Atlantic Ocean currents weaken, signalling big weather changes: study

https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/atlantic-ocean-currents-weaken-signalling-big-weather-changes-study-2021-08-05/

by gmays • 5 years ago

262 153 5 years ago

reuters.com

scoofy2• 5 years ago

Other climate models have said the AMOC will weaken over the coming century but that a collapse before 2100 is unlikely.

And, lets bury the lede of why no one will care about this unless they are already on board for fighting climate change.

zamalek• 5 years ago

Exactly. Just like nobody cares about 1C. It's amazing that one specific party is ramming in amendments against green energy right now.

_Microft• 5 years ago

I'm not sure I understand correctly. Do you want to say that the author unnecessarily relativized what he wrote about so far or that the last sentence is the actually interesting part and everything else was sort of a preface (which seems to be what "burying the lede" means [0], from what I can tell (as non-native speaker))

[0] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bury_the_lede

scoofy2• 5 years ago

"Bury the lede" here was used semi-ironically. The article reads like something dramatic that we should be concerned about.

However, the effects are not felt for 80+ years, so, presumably, that concern will evaporate for most people alive today, as they will certainly not experience these externalities.

Thus at the end, the click-bait nature of this article is revealed, as the author notes at the end, that all this dire concern will simply not influence the vast majority of decisions, as concerns about climate change have for the last 30 years.

I use "bury the lede" ironically as someone who read this article as something that may, finally, change the idiotic production and development patterns we've been following in the face the climate change threat, when instead, the real part of the story is that, no, no one will care.

MauranKilom• 5 years ago

https://xkcd.com/2278/

macintux• 5 years ago

Other threads today:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28085342

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28078575

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28082887

swader9992• 5 years ago

Obligatory shout out to The day after tomorrow.

ben_w3• 5 years ago

Please don’t. Fiction isn’t evidence, and there are too many people who don’t want anyone to believe in reality who will mock those who are trying to create solutions to the real problems as if the fiction is the only thing which exists.

swader9992• 5 years ago

Because science fiction never becomes science fact?

chasd00• 5 years ago

All the climate change i hear about is a change for the worse. Are there any places on earth where the change will be for the better? We've had pretty mild summers in TX for the past 5 or so years. If that's due to climate change then great, i'll just live here.

whoaisme• 5 years ago

Yeah it's not as if Texas was frozen over helpless and without power not too long ago

oliv__2• 5 years ago

The freeze would've been pleasant if it weren't for the power failure

ornornor• 5 years ago

I doubt you’ll be able to comfortably watch the rest of the world burn from there.

jdavis7032• 5 years ago

Russia is supposed to be nicer. Some people believe it’ll become the bread basket of the world if climate change continues unabated.

tootie• 5 years ago

And it will likely open the Arctic ocean for much shorter shipping lanes from Russia to Canada.

dv_dt• 5 years ago

I think that’s a simplistic view of it. As far as I’ve followed along, Russia has been having droughts and mega fires which tend to be incompatible with high crop yields.

bserge3• 5 years ago

Yeah, "some people" being Russian. Fooling themselves like the rest of the world.

LargoLasskhyfv• 5 years ago

Do you think thawed permafrost is usable as arable land with the snap of a finger? Furthermore one could wonder what else will thaw and give us some nasty surprises.

Im thinking of the scene in Jurassic Park where Jeff Goldblum says: 'Life finds a way.'

kzrdude2• 5 years ago

People will complain if you put any change in positive terms. But of course there are upsides and silver linings.

I won't get into some contentious discussion, but let's just say it's more and more viable to grow and produce wine in Denmark, which is on its own a positive thing. So that's just one example of a positive change.

jdavis7032• 5 years ago

But at the same time it’s becoming impossible to grow wine in California due to smoke taint and increasing fire insurance premiums. When folks are loosing what was once a nice climate, it’s not of comfort that some foreign land with strict immigration rules is getting a better climate.

groby_b• 5 years ago

You're taking about destabilising a global-spanning system with tremendous energies. No, there's no "change for the better"

I mean, the cold y'all had this winter was possibly climate change, so you have that to look forward to. Likely worse wildfires, too. East Texas will get higher humidity.

So... probably not too nice.

gtfoutttt• 5 years ago

The issue is the warming planet isn't only causing a change in weather for various areas. Yeah for example the Arctic is getting a bit warmer. Which sounds like a good thing.

But the warming up of the sea and atmosphere is giving more energy potential to our weather systems. So every hurricane season, tornado season, fire season, monsoonal season, etc is getting worse and worse. And there's no such thing as isolated climate. That extra energy in the system is world wide, which is really bad for most of us.

There may be places that have slight benefits, sure. But the worldwide negative effects cancel those out IMO.

IntrepidWorm2• 5 years ago

Lets not forget that the thawing of the permafrost in the arctic has significant environmental impact on greenhouse gases such as methane.

refurb3• 5 years ago

Do you have data showing that every hurricane, tornado, fire and monsoon season is “getting worse and worse”?

treis5• 5 years ago

But the warming up of the sea and atmosphere is giving more energy potential to our weather systems. So every hurricane season, tornado season, fire season, monsoonal season, etc is getting worse and worse.

Global warming is adding somewhere between 0.3 and 0.5% more energy to the system. It's a neglible amount of energy for the overall system.

What it does is change the equilibrium of a complex system. Things are going to be different. Not necessarily more intense across the board.

trophycase• 5 years ago

Is this the new anti climate change meme? I saw nearly this exact post on the last climate change article about fires or something.

tuatoru4• 5 years ago

Not exactly new. It's the old misunderstanding/deliberately dense denier point of "global warming would mean everything will be just as it is now, just a degree or two warmer."

Yeah, nah. It doesn't work like that.

johnchristopher• 5 years ago

I used to have a personal list of stages but can't find it at the moment. Denying it's a problem/claiming it's a good thing is not the last one though.

But:

    1. Deny the Problem Exists
    2. Deny We're the Cause
    3. Deny It's a Problem
    4. Deny We can Solve It
    5. It's too Late
    5b. And it's the fault of doom prophets who scared us into denying it (it's a mechanism to resist stress) and should have communicated better.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97...

crackercrews2• 5 years ago

Yes, many more people die of cold than of heat. Global warming will likely save a couple hundred thousand lives per year in this regard. [1]

1: https://www.wsj.com/articles/climate-change-natural-disaster...

edit: added "in this regard". Did not mean to suggest that we know how all of the implications of global warming pan out.

IntrepidWorm2• 5 years ago

At the cost of horrific hurricanes in the tropical and subtropical regions. Locally there may be effects seen as beneficial, but globally it's looking to be a downhill slide.

freen• 5 years ago

Wet Bulb temperature above 35C is deadly no matter how much water or shade you have. If the global average increases over 1.5C, most of the tropics will experience prolonged deadly heat.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/mar/08/global-heati...

lamontcg• 5 years ago

Texas is predicted to go from 60 dangerous heat days per year to 115 heat days per year by 2050. I doubt that's a good thing. And 5 years isn't enough to establish what the trend is, a countercyclical trend for 5 year can happen by random or via any of the multidecadal climate cycles.

hncurious• 5 years ago

There is no way to predict that. We can't even predict how many there will be this year or the next 5 years, let alone decades from now.

theli0nheart• 5 years ago

Where’s your source for this?

Diederich• 5 years ago

Putting more energy into a meta-stable chaotic system will greatly increase the number of extremes across the board. Models and forecasts are currently mostly focused on how the various averages are trending, which is fine and useful.

It's most correct to plan around every location getting more wet, more dry, more hot, more cold, more storms and more droughts.

treis5• 5 years ago

Putting more energy into a meta-stable chaotic system will greatly increase the number of extremes across the board

This doesn't really track. We're talking about adding less than 1% increase in energy.

mjfl• 5 years ago

So the best climate is an ice age then?

mempko2• 5 years ago

Texas Power Grid laughs.

mempko2• 5 years ago

Texas Power Grid

long_time_gone• 5 years ago

==We've had pretty mild summers in TX for the past 5 or so years.==

The same Texas where hundreds of people froze to death in February? Seems like there has been some extreme weather.

cableshaft4• 5 years ago

Texas is most likely fucked long-term. You can probably get away with living there another 10-15 years (total guess, some things could happen which could kick off some positive feedback loops sooner than that), but I wouldn't buy any housing there and maybe start looking further north before everyone else does and housing prices skyrocket.

refurb3• 5 years ago

Makes perfect sense when Arizona is 20F warmer on average than TX during the summer and yet people seem to live there fine.

JKCalhoun2• 5 years ago

Fortunately (?) people are dumb and the rush will happen at the last minute.

elevenoh4• 5 years ago

Shill me your housing bag, whereabouts?

v77• 5 years ago

The Canadian Prairies are getting warmer and forecasted to have a longer/more productive growing seasons although a bad drought this year isn't encouraging.

marcosdumay• 5 years ago

Our society is highly optimized to the current climate. Any change is for the worse.

ClumsyPilot2• 5 years ago

This what people fail to grasp - if you move where deserts, forests and rivers are, even if you loose nothing 'net', now your city is in in the desert, has no fresh water, the suer system doesnt work because the ocean level is higher, and all you infrastructure needs to be rebuilt

jopsen• 5 years ago

Nature general adapts though evolution... So any large scale changes to our eco-system will likely have negative effects short term.

Notice that "short term" in nature is probably a very long time for a human :)

usrusr• 5 years ago

Long even for a humanity

cproctor3• 5 years ago

Climate resiliency was a primary factor in our decision to move last year to western New York. Farmland, fresh water, and not too hot. Check out Figure 10 in the linked report...

http://uploads.oneregionforward.org/content/uploads/2015/01/...

mikewarot• 5 years ago

Looks like you'll be growing peaches, pecans and Vidalia onions in a few decades, yikes!

foobiekr• 5 years ago

How's the groundwater contamination? I was looking at Minnesota but the PFAS/... contamination is rampant, just terrible.

elevenoh4• 5 years ago

Great Lakes area (Toronto etc.) supposed to benefit.

HWR_14• 5 years ago

pretty mild summers in TX for the past 5 or so years. If that's due to climate change then great, i'll just live here.

There have been two weather related massive grid failures in Texas this year so far. I would not want to live there as climate change intensifies. The winters are going to suck.

TeeMassive• 5 years ago

Yes. Nordic countries like Russia and Canada will benefit the most, especially considering the opening of maritime routes and the easier exploitation of natural sources that were usually locked up under ice or permafrost.

prawn3• 5 years ago

Would mosquitoes become a major hassle in those areas? I understand they're already bad for part of the year.

BiteCode_dev• 5 years ago

Extreem changes in a system deeply adapted to a current situation is always a problem, that's why you hear mostly about the down and not the up.

Slow or local changes are ok because life adapts nicely.

Brutal or global changes will also see adaptation, but will cause much pain and damages.

Moving a cristal glass on a few yards or meters at the average speed of 4 miles or km an hour may be fine for the glass or not, depending if your speed is mostly constant, or not.

If you move the glass excrucingly slowly first, of throw it brutally at the last inch/cm, it will be bad for the glass. You won't hear about the good stories about this, because there are not aligned with the nature if the situation.

TurningCanadian• 5 years ago

Let's say the weather gets better in one place due to climate change. Isn't that nice. You have that on the one hand.

On the other hand, there are big risks inherent to change. You don't get to pick just the good parts of climate change. Spitballing here: risks to food stability from droughts, fires, etc. Some areas no longer economically support farming. Other areas open up but aren't as productive, so food is a bigger part of your budget and might be subject to disruption. Political risks: displaced people start eyeing the habitable places and find ways to make life miserabile unless they're let in. Costs of the disruption while everyone tries to adapt weigh on the economy and make the products/services you take for granted today more expensive or unavailable. Your children (or others that you care about) will have to deal with even worse. And things don't stop getting worse until greenhouse gas emissions are dealt with.

The mentality of looking at the silver lining while ignoring the rest is wrong on so many obvious levels.

throwaway888abc• 5 years ago

There is movie about this. Watched few days back, surreal to see the headline on Reuters.

The Day After Tomorrow (2004) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0319262/

2 minutes summary - trailer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ku_IseK3xTc

eganist• 5 years ago

Worth noting that TDAT took the concept of the AMOC collapsing and turned it into one of the most absurdly unscientific science-based films short of Armageddon.

But it was pretty entertaining if you could find a way to stay plugged into the movie and not feel disenchanted by the concept of polar cyclones icing things with tropospheric air. Still, there was that initial kernel of truth to it, which is what we're reading about now.

(not a climate guy; I'm probably getting some parts of this wrong)

hindsightbias• 5 years ago

James Burke was doing it 1989:

After the Warming: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfE8wBReIxw

awb• 5 years ago

From Amazon's info about the movie:

Twentieth Century Fox invited a group of scientists to preview this movie, to test their reactions to the "science" used in it. None of the scientists were impressed with what they say, although most conceded that the movie was enjoyable nonsense.
The consultation by N.A.S.A. scientists was requested before the filming of this movie, but N.A.S.A. stated that the events in this movie were too ridiculous to actually occur, and denied the request.

sn41• 5 years ago

That's really funny. It almost reads like The Onion.

spideymans• 5 years ago

If the AMOC collapsed, it would increase cooling of the Northern Hemisphere, sea level rise in the Atlantic, an overall fall in precipitation over Europe and North America and a shift in monsoons in South America and Afria, Britain's Met Office said.

Have the other major climate models accounted for this? Most I've seen have predicted rapid warming in North America. Not sure how to reconcile the difference. Perhaps the cooling effect is more concentrated over the oceans and coasts?

tuatoru4• 5 years ago

North America is a minor fraction of the northern hemisphere.

Yes, models have consistently predicted warming and drying of the western US at least since I was running climateprediction.net HadCM3 models (through BOINC) in the 00s: the return of the Great American Desert, basically everywhere west of the Mississippi and south of British Columbia.

Secondly, the cooling is an average, and relative to the situation without collapse of the AMOC. In most places, it still gets hot; but in Northern Europe, not so much. It even cools relative to the situation in 1900, IIRC.

And yes, you are right about the location. The visible part of the AMOC is called the Gulf Stream, and it's the reason London does not have the same climate as Labrador.

Teknoman117• 5 years ago

Maybe it's a bad idea to be currently thinking about buying a house in southern California.

It's just so depressing. No one cares, no one is willing to do anything about it. All the politicians say that it'll get fixed at some point in the future (i.e. after their careers) so that their current donors don't get mad.

You also have the people who see the evidence for a warming climate, and just say "well that still doesn't mean we humans have anything to do with it". Even if it was a completely natural process, the result is going to be bad for us. We should do something.

laurent923• 5 years ago

The slowing of the Gulf Stream, at least, which keeps Europe warm despite cooler temperatures at the same latitude in Canada, has always been one of the discussed scenarios. I don’t know whether IPCC made models, though.

bilekas2• 5 years ago

If the AMOC collapsed, it would increase cooling of the Northern Hemisphere, sea level rise in the Atlantic

This seems somewhat counter productive, if the northern hemesphere is cooling, how would that result with sea levels rising? Or they're not related ?

This really seems strange, would a new `current` not naturally establish based on the temperature relocations ?

laurent923• 5 years ago

Another funny item is, icecaps attract water by gravity, so if they melt, sea would lower by ~7m around the caps, and rise around the tropics. Anyway, with so many parameters and effects, I don’t venture into predictions anymore ;)

tuatoru4• 5 years ago

This seems somewhat counter productive

I'm guessing you mean counterintuitive.

That's one of the great things about the scientific method, that it tells you things you never would have guessed.

how would that result with sea levels rising?

The Gulf Stream (part of the AMOC) brings warm water north, Evaporation happens (and the evaporated water rains out over land, where some is absorbed or flows south). The remaing sea water on the surface is now saltier and denser so sinks.

Without the AMOC, the surface water is less dense. The local mean sea level rises due to gravitational effects. Precipitation also happens more over the sea, freshening the surface sea water. Fresh water is most dense (compact) at 4 degrees Celsius. Salt affects this, but the less salt there is, the smaller the effect.

I guess when you crunch the numbers you get the result they state.

would a new `current` not naturally establish

Last I checked, some years ago, I think it was believed that no new large-scale overturning current would establish for some thousands of years, which means the sea stratifies (settles into non-mixing layers), with a top relatively fresh and light layer over dense anoxic deeps.

bilekas2• 5 years ago

That's both crazy interesting and terrifying.. Thanks for clearing it up!

jb19912• 5 years ago

Wasn't this a big part of An Inconvenient Truth, how global warming could actually usher in a new ice age or something like that?

typon• 5 years ago

It's depressing to think that when that documentary came out, the general reaction of the public was ambivalence to outright laughter. Al Gore really was a visionary, even if he was 30 years late compared to the climate scientists.

AuryGlenz2• 5 years ago

Thats’s funny, Florida isn’t underwater and Mt. Kilimanjaro still has snow.

That movie was nothing more than modern day, “the end is nigh” doomsaying. Is man made global warming real? Almost certainly, but it’s hard to call a documentary visionary when basically none of its predictions have panned out.

yosito• 5 years ago

TL;DR this article is about a model, which differs from many other models. It is not about new evidence or a dramatic event that has been recorded.

Deadsunrise• 5 years ago

So the only thing to do is keep emissions as low as possible. The likelihood of this extremely high-impact event happening increases with every gram of CO2 that we put into the atmosphere.

blueblisters• 5 years ago

It's unlikely we will be able to achieve our emissions targets. We need a combination of CO2 scrubbing, non-intermittent renewables, and even geoengineering to restore Earth's energy budget.

brendanmc6• 5 years ago

Before any of that we need a heavy carbon tax. "We" being every developed country. A tall order... but absolutely vital.

Atlantic Ocean currents weaken, signalling big weather changes: study

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