Scientists Warn Gulf Stream Slowdown Could Begin as Early as 2025

https://oilprice.com/The-Environment/Global-Warming/Scientists-Warn-Gulf-Stream-Slowdown-Could-Begin-as-Early-as-2025.html

by moritzwarhier • 2 years ago

56 42 2 years ago

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toomuchtodo2• 2 years ago

Anyone familiar with how this will impact climate in Western Europe, from say Portugal to western France?

XorNot• 2 years ago

The Gulf Stream is responsible for the temperate climate of Europe which enables the swathe of farmland that it has.

A slowdown is expected to lead to a temperature drop from artic air being able to circulate further down, which would shorten growing seasons and probably change farmland distribution.

The effect of this happening over individual human generations in an environment where established farmland is hundreds to thousands of years old would be considerably expensive to adapt to.

non-chalad2• 2 years ago

How did humanity respond the last time this happened?

VelesDude6• 2 years ago

It isn't so much that the overall temperatures will change too much when averaged out, that would relate more to the slow down/stopping of the AMOC.

First order effect, this would mean that you get less predictable weather events. Essentially, heat domes and artic blasts become much more persistent, sticking around for weeks or even months (worst case) rather than just brief periods.

Second order, A month long heat wave can kill a lot of crops followed by a month low wet spell that can completely flood the same area.

Third order effect, In metropolitan areas this is an inconvenience. For the food system, this is deadly.

Forth order effect, a fragile food system that feeds the metropolitan areas - things get dicey fast. Tough times, tough leaders, rise of authoritarianism etc. May you live in interesting times.

hackerlight• 2 years ago

The fourth order effect is overlooked and it's my biggest short-term concern. In particular the destabilizing of low income countries near the equator in the face of precarious wet bulb temperatures, indirectly leading to the destabilizing of the global north in response to climate refugees fleeing the equator.

magicalhippo2• 2 years ago

From the paper:

While the entire globe has warmed, the subpolar North Atlantic has resisted and even cooled. This is exactly the region where the AMOC delivers much of its heat, and exactly the region where climate models have long predicted cooling as a result of the AMOC slowing down.

[A] cold subpolar North Atlantic correlates with summer heat in Europe (Duchez et al., 2016).

For example, in summer 2015, the subpolar Atlantic was the coldest since records began in the nineteenth century— while Europe suffered a strong heatwave. Subsequent study has shown that heatwaves are increasing three to four times faster in Europe than in other regions of the Northern Hemisphere [...]

dogma11384• 2 years ago

Western Europe is a misnomer.

Most of it should be all called Northern Europe and North of Northern Europe.

Paris sits between Vancouver and Seattle.

London is the same latitude as Calgary.

Hamburg is at the same latitude as Edmonton.

If the golf stream slows downs or gets diverted north towards Greenland much of Europe will freeze.

toomuchtodo2• 2 years ago

Indeed, this was the intent of my inquiry: what will climate look like for the next 100 years between certain latitudes in Western Europe (Porto vs Lisbon, Madrid and Bilbao vs Valencia, Malaga and Sevilla, Bordeaux vs Toulouse, etc).

lm284692• 2 years ago

That's not how geography works...

Do you consider Sao Polo to be in north America because Johannesburg is more southern?

fire_lake• 2 years ago

One way to get rough idea is to compare regions that are similarly far north but without a Gulf Stream. E.g. UK and Canada.

magicalhippo2• 2 years ago

Link to paper (open access): https://tos.org/oceanography/article/is-the-atlantic-overtur...

euroderf• 2 years ago

Highly recommended. The paper is an excellent overview and exploration of the topic.

EnigmaFlare4• 2 years ago

Clarification because the headline is written to mislead:

"Their model suggests that the current could begin collapsing anywhere from 2025 to 2095."

VelesDude6• 2 years ago

Oilprice.com is always like that. Everything always sounds urgent regardless of the actual content.

The 2025 date while possible, is much less likely than a middle of the range date.

That said, with the rate that dates relating to climate issues keep getting moved forwards, I would be surprised if in 5 years we dates like between 2030-2060 being proposed.

Guthur• 2 years ago

And when it doesn't harken well move on to some other hyperbolic doomsday, this has literally been going on for thousands of years. Humans have constantly, hubristically , predicting the end of the planet and humanity based on the existence of humanity for millennia. They are selling, always selling.

schiffern2• 2 years ago

dates relating to climate issues keep getting moved forwards

Funny how when the exact same thing happened measuring the charge of the electron (ie not deviating around the ultimate value, but systematically moving in one direction), it became the quintessential example—literally taught in schools—for detecting confirmation bias in scientific data.

https://scipython.com/blog/measurements-of-the-electron-char...

If the climate numbers are always being revised upward, it strongly indicates that the original predictions were being systematically fudged downwards. It's not hard to see why: governments and institutions don't want to be accused of "alarmism."

moritzwarhier• 2 years ago

I don't think that "as early as 2025" is dishonest regarding the measurements and facts.

Sure, the headline is written in a way that draws attention, but it is not dishonest clickbait or written to mislead, IMO.

Others here have hinted at the so-called "hot-model" fallacy, which is relevant to the timeline. [^1]

Apart from that, the article does make clear that "collapse" can be a gradual process.

Even climate change effects that hit very suddenly in a climatological sense can easily spread out over hundreds of years.

This does not in any way rule out tipping points with extreme changes that wreck ecosystems, e.g. average temperatures dropping or rising by 10 degrees Celsius over 20 years in some regions.

[1] Sabine Hossenfelder has a great video on this topic, should be findable by querying "climate sensitivity".

The search results I find are mostly (affirmative) statements of that "hot model Problem", such as this article: https://www.science.org/content/article/use-too-hot-climate-...

I am not a climate scientist, but I have heard the claim that the models that best model 2020-2024 (especially 2023-24) disprortionately often fall into the category of having been dismissed for being "too extreme" before.

anonymousiam• 2 years ago

Some good questions from this year-old article:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/new-simulations-q...

Hock88sdx• 2 years ago

The Day after Tomorrow? We have a decade of public warning.

mapt• 2 years ago

I don't know whether the article is especially relevant, but sea surface temperatures have gone absolutely nuts for the past year and so anything we would have called a crazy model five years ago is now on the table.

https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/sst_daily/

We spent most of 2023 (April to December) 4 to 5 standard deviations above the mean for 1981-2011. This year has been higher than Q1 2023's figures by a considerable margin.

This might have something to do with decreasing sulphur dioxide concentrations from switching shipping over to cleaner fuel, or it might not.

silverquiet• 2 years ago

I look at that chart too often for my own good. I don't know how people can look at that and think that we can continue as usual, though I do understand that at the end of the day, what's an individual supposed to do?

Scientists Warn Gulf Stream Slowdown Could Begin as Early as 2025

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