alt Hacker NewsAs others have said, it's already happening, and it'll only get worse. But since it's not western countries it's not highlighted much.
But when the AMOC stops and western Europe's winters get longer there will be huge changes too. If I recall correctly, the AMOC stopping is a trigger for an ice age, that is, ice sheets / the north pole going down way south. This would make anything above France uninhabitable, if not wiped off the map entirely.
But it'd be a steady process of increasingly cold winters, so likely in our lifetime it'd mainly mean we change how we build houses and buildings. But long term, people would move.
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Any source for this? Every source I can find speaks for three to eight degrees colder in longer winters. That's still very much survivable, most of Germany rarely gets in the negative double digits as of now.
This completely overstates the problem, is not supported by the evidence, and is exactly the kind of alarmism that undermines genuine climate science.
An AMOC slowdown or even collapse does not trigger an ice age. Full glacial periods are driven by orbital forcing, not ocean circulation alone.
The evidence points to regional cooling of a few degrees in parts of Western and Northern Europe, not rendering everything north of France uninhabitable.
Past ice sheets advanced over millennia under much colder global conditions than today, not on human timescales.
Even severe AMOC scenarios would be major and costly disruptions, not close to Europe being wiped off the map.
So did global temperature was higher during last ice age? Or is that only two related to Europe and more local dynamics?
>>But it'd be a steady process of increasingly cold winters
I was in Switzerland last summer, in Glarus Alps, and walking around I found a sign that basically said that the reason why all the mountains around it were "smooth" in appearance is because during last ice age all of it was covered in ice, and the rock got smooth as the ice started to shift and slide over the course of hundreds of years. It said that only the highest peaks would be free of ice, and even then just barely - and all of those were above 2000m above(current) sea level. It's crazy to think that an ice age doesn't just mean "it's very cold" - it means there is enough ice to bury europe under 2 kilometers of ice. That's not survivable in any way, we would just have to move south somewhere - but like you said, even if it happens again it will take thousands of years to get to that point.
I'm not sure I get why everything above France would be rendered uninhabitable? The coldest place inhabited by humans year round is Oymyakon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oymyakon
Temperatures are generally above 0°C in summer, -50 approximately in winter.
Will an Ice Age actually be worse than that?
I would expect somewhat better, although maybe not much. I might expect Denmark and Southern Parts of Sweden and England to reach 10 degrees in Summer, and -20 in Winter. But that is of course just a guess on my part so I am certainly willing to hear that I have guessed wrong.