Scientists warn Atlantic current at risk of shutting down

https://e360.yale.edu/features/amoc-climate-change

by ambigious7777 • 2 months ago

171 223 2 months ago

e360.yale.edu

kocsonya3• 2 months ago

Hot take on HN, but techno-optimism sounds so stupid when it comes to climate change... You can't engineer macro climate/ecology, since capital has no interest in human and it's surrounding environment balanced cohabitation.

john_alan2• 2 months ago

Climate also doesn't change in macro over a lifetime.

It's very real, but the notion that it's changing over a 5 year period is nonsense.

things aren't "shutting off".

hiddencost• 2 months ago

Wishful thinking...

I wonder how people like you end up so hostile to experts.

jaapz3• 2 months ago

Climate has changed over a lifetime though.

adrian_b• 2 months ago

I am old enough to have witnessed how the climate has completely changed in Europe, where I live.

In the same place where I live now, when I was young there was permanent snow cover for 3 to 4 months.

During the last 10 years, there have been years with no snow and in the others a little snow has been present for 3 or 4 days of a year, when it melted the second day after falling.

I have not used again my winter boots and my winter jackets for the last 15 years or more.

This is really a huge change during less than a human lifetime.

wongarsu2• 2 months ago

Looking back at the amount of snowfall I saw as a kid and the amount of snowfall I see now in my 30s, or at the number of hot summer days ... I find it hard to claim that climate is not changing over a lifetime. 20 years isn't even a lifetime, that's like 1/4th of a lifetime

Maybe climate is more stable wherever you live

water-data-dude• 2 months ago

I refer you to: https://xkcd.com/1732/

Descon• 2 months ago

Huh? Sudden events are a very real part of larger processes like evolution and climate change. A volcano eruption, a meteor impact, or a drought year, or the ceasing of a current can absolutely have massive implications on larger systems.

jedimastert2• 2 months ago

capital has no interest

Selfish humans. "Capital" is a mental model, it's not some force of nature or hand of god.

thrance2• 2 months ago

Selfishness has nothing to do with it. Capitalism rewards anti-social investment strategies and capital accumulation, so that's what we get. "Capital" is not a force of nature, it's an emergent force from our economic system. It behaves sort of predictably and can be described: that's economics.

EDIT: got to love how anytime you write something even remotely critical of capitalism you get auto-downvoted. Fine, "climate change is only because of bad, selfish people". Is this explanation more palatable?

MSFT_Edging2• 2 months ago

The forest where the community hikes has no value unless the trees are turned into paper.

All to say, Capital at large seeks out the profit. Until climate change effects the profit considerably, mitigation will be the path less traveled.

The only real way to approach this problem is to reduce consumption across the board which as you might guess, isn't profitable.

hashmap• 2 months ago

reducing consumption across the board isnt just unprofitable, it would mean everyone agreeing to overcome our biological gradients. i do not think it is possible for us to do, and evolution has not equipped us to do that as far as i can tell.

my semi-superstitious take is that the race to achieve ai is grounded in needing something that knows whats going on and is able to make decisions aligned to generational time horizons. whether that works out or not time will tell, but i get the sense a "good enough" ai is probably our best shot at saving us from ourselves. it's clear we can't do that on our own.

unethical_ban• 2 months ago

Which is why, to be blunt, libertarians and conservatives are wrong to demonize government without being equally or more skeptical of the corrupting power of money.

Government is the only apparatus that can govern unregulated motivations of capital, and we need regulations on pollution and investments in clean energy and waste creation/collection to stop things like climate change.

Gen X and forward grew up in a world that by default was cleaner due to regulations like the Clean Water Act, better for seniors due to things like Social Security and Medicare, and safer due to things like food regulations and vaccine mandates. The people who rail against these things are railing against the very things that made their world safer and in some instances kept them alive.

GolfPopper• 2 months ago

The only real way to approach this problem is to reduce consumption across the board which as you might guess, isn't profitable.

We need a human civilization that is run for the benefit of human beings, not paper-clip maximizing overlords.

zurfer2• 2 months ago

Techno optimist here who expects the following to make a big contribution to reducing human made future climate change: better batteries+solar/wind, nuclear fusion, self driving cars (we'll need to manufacture less cars for the same amount of miles humanity drives), AI helping with better resource allocation in general (hopefully).

The answer can't be, let's just consume 10x less. We have to engineer our way out of it.

cassepipe• 2 months ago

The answer can't be, let's just consume 10x less. We have to engineer our way out of it.

We will have to do both I am afraid

giwook2• 2 months ago

These are all helpful contributions, but ultimately we need buy-in from decision makers (i.e. rulers/heads of nations).

And at least in the US we do not have it and are actively going in the opposite direction, mostly in the name of money.

pier25• 2 months ago

Ironically what is pushing many countries to a faster adoption of renewables is not climate change but the recent Iran conflict.

Yes tech can help but implementation depends on human nature.

bix63• 2 months ago

I’d be embarrassed to call myself a techno optimist and associate with someone who thinks empathy is bad.

I love technology but optimism about it is incompatible with the current capitalist system. Tech is exploited to make capital not to further our optimism.

Edit: if you’re gonna downvote at least offer a counter. lol pathetic.

cuu508• 2 months ago

These awesome things will enable a higher human population. We are like a virus taking over the host organism and overdoing it.

kocsonya3• 2 months ago

To make energy requires not only a lot of time to be produced, but also a lot of energy to get it done. Industrial society is based on these "oil reserves" from the Mesozoic Era. All the stuff made in factories from the 19th century all the way to iPhones 17s relies on these diminishing EROI — which, instead of being underground, is now in our atmosphere. It's not like a jar on a shelf we can just take off because by the time the energy transfers through the ecosystem all the way it hits where the ecosystem the most fragile, melting the taiga and lowering the albedo.

bix63• 2 months ago

Techno optimism is bullshit created by power hungry VCs to ostracize anyone who argues against their myopic world view and further fill their own coffers at the expense of others. Anyone want to argue against that? I’ve yet to see a compelling counter.

hgoel• 2 months ago

I don't get the impression of much techno-optimism here lately, it's mostly just incessant whining about how they think everything's AI generated.

jandrewrogers• 2 months ago

The singular input for every plausible avenue for mitigating and addressing climate change is energy. And an astronomical amount of energy at that if you want to make a measurable dent over the next 100 years. You can't cheat thermodynamics.

Energy absolutely is something that you can engineer. It is one of the most fundamental things engineering is about. Nothing we can do will make a difference without serious investment in carbon-free power systems. There is a lot of money being invested in energy technology, the real question is if we will build enough of it.

senordevnyc6• 2 months ago

We engineered ourselves into this, and we’re actually making good progress in engineering ourselves out. Not without some serious upcoming pain, but it’s not all doom and gloom. We as a species have accomplished many things that weren’t profit-motivated.

rob_c3• 2 months ago

Wait I've seen this... Day before the day after tomorrow right?

AlecSchueler3• 2 months ago

Generally in science when your see the same results being reproduced by different researchers your certainty should increase.

fnordpiglet• 2 months ago

Don’t look up, 2026 is the midterm campaign slogan for MAGA

rob_c3• 2 months ago

regardless of a reproduction science is repetition and verification yes... is there a point beyond that?

nickserv3• 2 months ago

Yes the movie was vaguely inspired by the science.

The AMOC has been studied for a long time, including the effects of its possible weakening.

Where the movie is firmly in fantasy land of course is in the timeline, where the effects are nearly instant rather than likely over decades in reality.

rob_c3• 2 months ago

Yes the movie was vaguely inspired by the science.

I.. _sigh_, my comment was satire I'm well aware of the "science", the modelling, the failures of large amounts of models, the ones that work, the...

AndrewKemendo2• 2 months ago

“Scientists” have been warning the world about this since Stommel issued his paper in 1961:

https://tellusjournal.org/articles/10.3402/tellusa.v13i2.949...

It’s going to shut down

The ice caps and antartic ice are going to melt entirely

The Gulf Stream is going to collapse

Global emissions have skyrocketed with no brakes since then

1.5C target was a joke. 2.0 target is a joke. There is no world where humans can coordinate in a way that reduces global emissions

MAYBE by accident with enough selfishness around not wanting to die. I don’t see it though

howmayiannoyyou• 2 months ago

The archeological and geological records strongly suggest we've been down this road before. There's as much arrogance in assuming we can prevent this, as there is in assuming we caused it (perhaps hastened it). Best use of national or global resources is preparing for the outcome, not trying to prevent it.

lisper2• 2 months ago

preparing for the outcome

How exactly do you propose to prepare for Europe becoming uninhabitable?

jaapz3• 2 months ago

Wheres the research that shows this has happened before at the same timescale?

4ndrewl2• 2 months ago

Citation needed

epohs• 2 months ago

Tough to tell exactly what you’re referencing, but you might be thinking about the Paleocene–Eocene thermal maximum, which was a natural increase in carbon in the atmosphere that led to higher temperatures. So, in some ways very similar to what we’re seeing now, but if my understanding is correct, even the PETM which was “dramatic” on a geological timescale took thousands of years to ramp up, and played out over 200,000 years. What we’re seeing now is happening much quicker, and is highly correlated with human influence.

Tyrubias4• 2 months ago

This is incorrect. There’s no evidence global CO2 levels and average temperatures have ever increased this fast outside of mass extinctions. On the other hand, there is plenty of evidence we’ve caused the current conditions.

Studies of ratios of carbon isotopes in the atmosphere show that there has been a relative increase in carbon-12 and a relative decrease in carbon-13 and carbon-14 consistent with the burning of fossil fuels, which contains no carbon-14 due to radioactive decay and low levels of carbon-13 because plants preferentially fix carbon-12. Research the Suess effect for more information.

We’ve known since John Tyndall’s research in 1859 that CO2 is a greenhouse gas. Besides countless other studies since, we also have satellite evidence that the Earth is reemitting less infrared radiation at the exact wavelengths that CO2 absorbs. CO2 as the driver of a greenhouse effect is not in doubt either.

There is also plenty of observational evidence that the oceans now trap more heat, that nights are warming faster than days, that winters are warming faster than summers, and these are all consistent with models of anthropogenic climate change.

lisper2• 2 months ago

The problem is that by the time it becomes incontestable that the scientists were right, it will be much, much too late to do anything about it.

mapkkk2• 2 months ago

I think the reality is much more grim. I believe we are now firmly in the territory where it is incontestable. (My opinion was cemented after reading Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown by Andreas Malm, Wim Carton)

We will be spending much of our upcoming years trying to get people and capital to accept that fact, before we can even start thinking about what little we can even do. By which point, we may actually just be having to scramble to mitigate the immediate sequelae of the changed climate, rather than focus our efforts to fix the underlying cause.

jmclnx• 2 months ago

Sad to say, with AI, crypto mining and now Trump/GOP, it is already too late.

Depending upon timing, if the AOC shuts down, Europe may not be a bad place to live. I am not sure how the AOC will impact NE US and Eastern Canada. But between the 40th parallels could be borderline uninhabitable for humans.

Way things look now, we seem to heading straight to +3C and maybe even +4C.

jedimastert2• 2 months ago

There is no world where humans can coordinate in a way that reduces global emissions

They seem to have cooperated rather effectively on increasing them, so I wouldn't say "no world"?

AndrewKemendo2• 2 months ago

People don’t need to coordinate to ignore externalities

amanaplanacanal2• 2 months ago

We burned fossil fuels because they were the cheapest form of energy. We will stop doing that when it becomes too expensive.

We are moving that direction, but a lot of damage will be done before we get there.

andyjsong• 2 months ago

Time to deploy sulfate aerosols in the stratosphere https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/73f7f362-9890-4375-9a92-1...

luxuryballs3• 2 months ago

not to diss the science and the work involved around it but this kind of alarmist stuff makes me wonder how many similar things have happened in the past but nobody noticed because nobody was looking or even knew how to track such a thing, the environment is so complex, seems unlikely that we can make heads or tails of this, and in 50 years some new understanding will flip all of our current models (no pun intended!), so what’s really the value of such “warnings”? money went into this, where does it ultimately go?

AlecSchueler3• 2 months ago

how many similar things have happened in the past but nobody noticed because nobody was looking or even knew how to track such a thing

We can actually make petty good estimates because of things like carbon layers in the ice. It's happened in the past, you're right, and usually it precedes large scale extinction events.

luxuryballs3• 2 months ago

so because a current in the ocean is changing we should tell everyone they might be about to die or what’s the goal here

4ndrewl2• 2 months ago

De be sure to let us know when you've completed your research into this topic.

gmueckl• 2 months ago

There are a couple of things wrong here. First off, there is a historic climate record that goes back centuries and is fairly accurate. Second, the climate prediction models are tested against this historic record. They reproduce the historic climates quite well. The error margins are generally shrinking due to model improvements.

But when making actual predictions, the models need to make assumption about anthropogenic parameters like CO2 and methane emissions. That's the largest remaining uncertainty at this point. Given the same assumptions, climate models generally agree on the outcome.

mapkkk2• 2 months ago

I agree with your sentiment, but I have a hard time imagining any alternative action scientists could take besides publishing and warning.

Science is best when it’s purely that, I’ve seen plenty of living examples and read about past ones where science mixed with politics or overt profit motives don’t end well. Surely there must be examples where the contrary has been the case, but I am biased, and I would wager that it ended poorly more often than well.

I would much rather have politicians that heed scientific results than scientists springboarding into politics.

luxuryballs3• 2 months ago

it’s opportunity cost at least

namenotrequired• 2 months ago

Isn’t calling AMOC “the primary source of warmth for northern Europe” wildly overstated?

jaapz3• 2 months ago

Not really, look at what's on the same latitude in Amerika as northern europe. Then compare their climates.

wongarsu2• 2 months ago

The comparison only really works for the West coast though. The East coast is dominated by continental climate carried over from the interior by the prevailing winds. Meanwhile Europe is surrounded by water on three sides, plus the Baltic and North Sea in the middle. Just having this much water nearby (plus prevailing winds coming from an ocean) moderates temperature swings a lot

card_zero• 2 months ago

Yeah, I was doing a variation on this recently (wondering about the same question). Reversing the latitude of the island of Jersey ("extreme weather is rare due to the island's mild climate") takes you to the Kerguelen Islands ("snow throughout the year as well as rain"). But the contrast there is to do with the Azores High and the Roaring Forties. Local climates are complicated.

ahartmetz• 2 months ago

It would be correct if it said "Abnormally high temperatures for the latitude". Most of Europe would be 10 °C colder or so without. We'd be really screwed over here.

Ekaros• 2 months ago

So how much coal we need to burn to compensate that 10C?

pjmlp2• 2 months ago

As if war mongers, and AI tech bros would care.

After COVID it feels doom is unavoidable.

fmkamchatka3• 2 months ago

I can’t believe there are people in our industry who turn a blind eye (or worse) to these problems. They say that climate scientists are fearmongering and argue there is not a single truth.

giwook2• 2 months ago

People do weird things when there's a lot of money involved.

fmkamchatka3• 2 months ago

But how do you deal with that? How can they ignore the future suffering of our children?

causal• 2 months ago

I think climate change is a compelling crisis but I find these types of “could maybe happen according to some models” type of catastrophic scenarios a little frustrating because they soak up a lot of attention with scary headlines, reinforcing hopelessness in those who care while providing ammunition to skeptics when the catastrophe doesn’t materialize.

It’s also easy to question methodology for anyone who has done academic modeling and knows how easy it is to get the result you want. Much harder to argue against the basic first principle that injecting trillions of barrels of oil into the atmosphere is literal geoengineering and it’s gonna have consequences.

stouset2• 2 months ago

What, exactly, do you expect scientists researching these things to do? Bury their findings?

9rx7• 2 months ago

I suppose they could refrain from injecting their feelings into it. The science doesn't change if it is presented as simple information and not as a warning.

bastawhiz5• 2 months ago

The scientists aren't journalists. Convince a politician to start planning for national security considerations. Tell them how it'll affect supply chains. Frame it in a way that literally anyone who has a vested interest in doing something would care about.

grey-area4• 2 months ago

The risk was 5% and is now above 50% according to experts in the field.

Given the significant consequences this is worth paying attention to.

Eji17002• 2 months ago

Which the average person doesn’t know because this is the 50th headline they’ve read on how we’re screwed today that hasn’t happened.

They’ve blown their attention budget for the layman and aren’t getting it back unless someone serious guides their attention.

bastawhiz5• 2 months ago

The GP didn't say not to pay attention to it. Clearly people are.

The point is that it's unactionable. The people who care could all pour their life savings into climate action and commit suicide to cancel all future carbon footprint and it still wouldn't move the needle. Even if the Democrats in the US took over both branches of Congress, the white house, and the supreme court, they wouldn't move the needle. There isn't any practical action any ordinary person could take.

So why are we writing about it for general consumption? Convince billionaires, politicians, oil execs, other scientists, literally anyone with the ability to do anything. If we're at the point the research claims, trying to get people to go vegan or fly less often isn't even shaving off fractions of a percent.

astahlx• 2 months ago

In the past, these climate models were mostly on the conservative side. So I would stop questioning them and ask for more actions to take toward implementing existing climate solutions.

bix63• 2 months ago

Except the catastrophes are materializing now so those fools are increasingly wrong.

The solar panel install stats give me hope. It’s unfortunate the US is burying its head on new alt energy projects but our grifting culture is just too strong.

jmward012• 2 months ago

So many of those 'could maybe happen' are, in fact, happening right now. The researcher is also quoted as saying 'more likely than not' which is pretty big when it comes to something like the AMOC shutting down. This really is catastrophic and really should be causing governments to take immediate, massive, steps to avert it including steps to sanction countries that are causing it.

spwa45• 2 months ago

The big consequence here is for the EU. And the only way to deal with this is for the EU to force US, India and China to seriously reduce energy use, and with that, their economy.

This is not going to happen. The EU can't even convince itself to stop buying from China.

joquarky11• 2 months ago

The government entities that can actually do anything are only reactionary now.

t0bia_s5• 2 months ago

I guess all those goverment actions should limit freedom of individuals more and more. Excellent strategy for tyranny.

watwut2• 2 months ago

providing ammunition to skeptics when the catastrophe doesn’t materialize.

This would be compeling if they were actual sceptics who care about evidence. We are talking about people who will bad faith deny everything.

Censoring yourself is exactly what they wanted to achieve and did achieved.

mlhpdx3• 2 months ago

Agreed. This kind of provocative story gives many people the sense that science is unreliable, full of shifting narratives and unmet prophesies. That undermines the confidence we need in it as a society.

runarberg6• 2 months ago

I would argue the opposite. The number one frustration I have with climate change is the continued and persistent inaction by our world leaders. I would argue that modeling out worst case scenarios is more likely to reach our leaders and finally break this decades long inaction.

I think generally the effects climate skeptics have over climate policy is overstated. And corporations with vested interest in being able to continue releasing massive amounts of CO2 into our atmosphere have much more say over climate policy then climate skeptics. Now these companies often do weaponize climate skeptics in order to lobby government into continued inaction, but that behavior will continue regardless of how scientists frame their climate models.

joquarky11• 2 months ago

Paying off debts is too politically unpopular.

We can't even balance the budget in the US.

Orchestrating climate change mitigation is likely an order of magnitude more difficult than balancing budgets.

scoofy2• 2 months ago

You don’t like honesty?

Effectively everything in life is a balance of uncertainty. Surgeries can do more harm than good. Drugs have varying efficacy. Investments are uncertain. Careers can disappear.

Nobody can tell you the future, but nearly all the scientists freaking out about a potential major issue should me worrying.

joquarky11• 2 months ago

As long as it doesn't interrupt the next season of Love Island, few will care.

t0bia_s5• 2 months ago

Frightened mind is easily manipulated. For limit freedom of individuals, control masses and so on.

RijilV• 2 months ago

This is the study which is behind the recent news articles on the AMOC collapse:

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adx4298

Basically newer modeling has shown a stronger weakening of the system. Lots of uncertainty, but 1/3rd loss by 2100. There's a lot of unknowns with feedback loops and tipping points where the whole thing might collapse if a threshold is crossed.

frm88• 2 months ago

For those who prefer visual information, James Stewart on Astrum Earth made a video detailling the changes. Please ignore the somewhat sensationalist thumbnail, the video itself is pretty accurate in its graphs and animations: https://www.youtube.com/live/GDy7Q8iAtFg

metalman2• 2 months ago

watch it happening in real time here

https://www.ospo.noaa.gov/products/ocean/sst/contour/

I am seeing changes, unprecidented changes, in my decades of watching, and they do not match any predicted scenario.

ijidak• 2 months ago

What changes are you seeing? When I look at these images, it shows me what sea surface temperatures are today, but I don't have context as to how it's changed.

I would love someone to stitch years of these images together in a video to help me get better context.

metalman2• 2 months ago

stich them together as an "endless" scroll that can be played, l8ke you say as a video or looked at with all the same days on one screen, which would be the tool I would use to show someone what I have watched for years. observations: there appears to be more heat in the system. there appears to be more mixing. right now the labrador current has been stronger, and reaching further south than I have ever taken note of and the gulf stream is struggling to push past it the current that transports heat around the southern tip of africa is and has been, very strong for the last 6 months. where the SST and the sea ice extent converge, is another way of looking at the same data, and there is more here

https://climatereanalyzer.org/

ck22• 2 months ago

two absolute facts:

1. even if there was something humans could do about it, we won't, ever

2. insurance rates are the only "control". they will skyrocket and thereby the only change to select behavior

human society allows "privatize the profits, socialize the costs"

so that scales from the smallest to the largest models

SoftTalker6• 2 months ago

Pretty much agree. Nature will fix the climate, after it eliminates (a large number of) the humans that are causing the problem. That's really the only way.

Tyrubias4• 2 months ago

This is a cold-hearted way to think about it. The countless people who will suffer are not the ones causing the problem. The problem is caused by the billionaires willing to sacrifice human life and the environment for profit. They actively sow climate skepticism and encourage defunding of climate research to protect their bottom line. When extreme weather events kill millions, those billionaires will be safe in their bunkers. We can’t just condemn millions or even billions to death without trying to do anything about it.

ericjmorey• 2 months ago

The defeatist mindsets expressed in these comments seem more like a way to shed any sort of personal accountability for participating in a solution that doesn't kill billions of people than a reflection of reality.

There are many solutions.

keybored3• 2 months ago

Then the misanthropes of HN will have their way. And can gloat in their graves.

senordevnyc6• 2 months ago

We will never, ever see a reduction in the amount of energy that humanity uses. The population might dip slightly from climate change (highly unlikely actually), but that won’t be what solves climate change. Clean energy is the solution, and it’s already happening.

gib444• 2 months ago

Worth clicking just for that absolutely gorgeous photo of the church.

Tyrubias4• 2 months ago

The probabilistic nature of predicting how likely any given climate change event like the AMOC shutting down is creating a false sense of security and skepticism.

Many climate change skeptics like to claim that Earth’s climate has been radically different at various points in its history, therefore current anthropogenic climate change is fine. Other climate change skeptics like to claim that we’re currently in an ice age, therefore warming the planet is not a bad thing. Yet others claim that this is natural and humans shouldn’t try to stop it.

What these arguments miss is that all available evidence suggests that CO2 levels and global temperatures have never changed this fast outside of mass extinctions. All available evidence strongly supports the ideas that humans released the excess CO2, that CO2 is a powerful greenhouse gas, and that human-produced CO2 is causing the planet to retain more heat. There are competing theories on how catastrophic anthropogenic climate change will be and how fast it will happen, but the broad consensus is that these drastic changes will impact both humans and the broader environment.

People argue against preventative measures to slow down anthropogenic climate change because it can harm economic growth. The attitude seems to be “we shouldn’t sacrifice profits for the polar bears”. I argue that it’s not a matter of trying to save other species, it’s about saving our own species. Given the overwhelming evidence that humans are causing climate change and that the results will involve drastic changes in climate patterns, I don’t think we’re panicking enough. For the vast majority of us who are not ultra wealthy capitalists, faster economic growth won’t matter if extreme weather events threaten our lives every year and large areas of agricultural land become unusable. We need to slow down our production and consumption and study climate change more carefully, not defund climate research and charge blindly into a future we can’t control or predict.

jules-jules• 2 months ago

Considering that we're already approaching a Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum analog at up to ten times faster than the onset of the PETM (one of the largest mass extinction events) [1], I’d say it’s pretty much game over.

[1] "Atmospheric Methane: Comparison Between Methane's Record in 2006–2022 and During Glacial Terminations" (Nisbet, Manning et al. 2023)

bhouston• 2 months ago

This is an ongoing warning which I first read about in university in 1997.

One of the issues with slow moving catastrophes is that we get used to it and then we stop worrying about it.

I believe this is because humans are not good generally at long term planning past a couple years when there is no clear feedback (or it is purposely muddied.)

So essentially we are likely screwed.

photochemsyn• 2 months ago

Just to list some uncertainties:

(1) Gulf Stream is a wind-driven western boundary current and the equatorial Atlantic is getting warmer and warmer so heat delivery is probably stable;

(2) Greenland melt rates are real and fresher ocean water won’t sink as much and could push northern surface currents south;

(3) Wind-driven upwelling (other end of the AMOC) is likely to stay stable so you have the suction pump effect;

(4) Atmospheric warming and overall climate conditions today are very different from that 12,000 ya system the article cites;

Regardless, dumping all this fossil CO2 and CH4 into the atmosphere is definitely changing the climate system; but rather than cooling Europe and the UK I’d guess this will just reduce the warming rate in that region over the next 100 years, and it might cause problems with ocean hypoxia due to slower rates of deep water formation, impacting fish populations.

P.S. If you want to vet these claims, plug it into an LLM with this header: “ As an expert in global planetary science, give me some critiques with positive/negative paper references that both support and push back against each point (eight papers total please, prefer recent, then critique summary).”

jaybrendansmith• 2 months ago

Europe needs to start taking this seriously. If they are really science-led and fact-based, they need to fund a series of additional studies to absolutely confirm a 37% loss by 2100, and run clean estimates and projections of the cost to heat Europe and replace shorter growing seasons as the AMOC slows over 25, 50, 75, and 100 years. They can then project the the total cost of the loss, and speak to the insurance and reinsurance companies to determine the cost of remediation. Money will move this needle, nothing else.

insane_dreamer• 2 months ago

But the Dow is over 50,000! Who cares about the AMOC?

dasKrokodil• 2 months ago

Great, I live in coastal northern Europe, so the question will be whether I'll freeze to death from AMOC shutting down, or drown from the rising sea levels. Maybe I should move to Switzerland or something.

darkmarmot• 2 months ago

As someone in the Venn diagram intersection of "software engineer" and "studied climate/astrophysics/planetary science" in school, reading comments here is painfully disheartening. Virtually everyone highly engaged in this field is anticipating multiple, systemic apocalyptic scenarios that will end modern life as we know it. I'd assume that most of the people reading have enough of a calculus background to understand some of the underlying math. I implore you to find a good book or course on it.

orwin• 2 months ago

I like like the discourse changed over my lifetime from "climate change does not exist, those scientist are catastrophists" (200X) to "climate change is not primarily anthropogenic, those scientist are catastrophists" (201X) to "Climate change is real and caused by us, but the consequence won't be as hard as predicted, those scientist are catastrophists" (202X).

Truly a wonder. It's always the same people too.

Scientists warn Atlantic current at risk of shutting down

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