Scientists warn Atlantic current at risk of shutting down

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Insert cool and collected thoughts about mounting evidence that you might have a catastrophic future ahead and there might be nowhere to run.

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).”

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

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.

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.

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

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

After COVID it feels doom is unavoidable.

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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?

“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

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

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

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