Is it just me, or does anyone else who sees temperatures in degrees Fahrenheit (without a Celsius conversion) in a summary of a scientific report like this just automatically consider it an American fluff piece and click-bait to be ignored?
You should read the actual report https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adk1189.
It might be my naive reading, but it seems that flooding the ocean with 4-5% of the gulf stream flow with fresh water from glacier melt (I think that’s a lot) will cause a shut down in the year 3700 or so. Even I, as a climate change believer, think that’s a little too far out there to be considered germane.
no i am one of those people. No serious science article uses anything but metric.
It might be my naive reading, but it seems that flooding the ocean with 4-5% of the gulf stream flow with fresh water from glacier melt (I think that’s a lot) will cause a shut down in the year 3700 or so.
I’m curious where you got the year 3700 from. What I read is that they call into question current early warning signals, while offering a more robust indicator instead. This provides a new timeline of slowdown, but there is not enough data to tell us where we are on that timeline. Current estimates of 2025-2100 were not invalidated, while we were confirmed to be on route to the tipping point at present.
Graph A (https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adk1189) just has model year and not the actual year in the common era. I just assumed all of it was extrapolation from today, which shows a cliff in about 1700 years, so give or take 3700CE.
Actually, probably not
Oh good. It won’t be like a disaster movie because it was never going to. It’s still going to be bad, but with less bad acting and more starvation.
“This sounds alarming, but it’s important to note that this is not the same as saying collapse is going to happen imminently.
The paper never says AMOC shutdown will happen imminently, and it even casts doubts on current 2025-2100 predictions from other research. A strawman is not a good basis for a scientific argument.
They have to run their model for a long time (1,700 years) and push it quite hard to make the collapse happen.
A long run is not a bad thing. The reason they pushed it hard is because that was the whole point, to see where the shutdown occurs. That’s also why they did not include climate change in the simulation - that warming is not relevant for what they were analyzing. The paper explains all of this. What should be concerning is that they had to push the model so hard to get it to line up with observations.
The scientists quoted appear to have a problem with modeling science, not with this paper.
Yepp, nothing to worry about here.
It feels like governments have just seen this as a foregone conclusion and are trying to position in an “every person for themselves” kind of deal. Sure, we’ve finally done something to cut emissions, but it’s the slowest possible move they can make.
I have thought about this for a while now. it just seems that some countries have gamed this out and decided… “sure, ‘we’ all might die, but you’re gonna die first - so screw you!”
the maxim of “he who dies richest, wins” seems to be the only ideal at play here.
Wait, if we have an ice age during global warming… Won’t they kinda cancel each other out?
No, but this kind of reasoning is why it’s referred to as climate change now. We don’t just get higher temperatures, the defining feature is unpredictable weather.
So does that mean you can’t say because we don’t know the actual effects? They’re unpredictable?
…but isn’t the main theory about the AMOC shutting down that it may bring on an ice age?
We can’t say because there are interconnected complex systems that will react to each other as they change, and climate science is not mature enough to understand these interactions fully. We are also experiencing conditions with no paleoloclimatic equivalent.
The paper did not include global warming in the simulations - it explores the direct effects of the AMOC system, but not how these interact with climate change. So it does not attempt to answer this question.
AMOC is a heat transport system (basically cooling the SH while warming the NH) and will have few effects on Earth’s Energy Imbalance, meaning there will continue to be a net increase of heat in the system. Paired with AMOC shutdown, this will likely fuel more climate change (such as changed rainfall patterns) and weather volatility.
the idea of northern europe ending up in a deep freeze while much of the rest of the world bakes is not new. these scenarios have been modeled for decades. I remember over 20 years ago, while naively considering “escape options”, learning about the AMOC, the great conveyer and other modeled outcomes.
long story short… there is no escape. we either fix the fundamental problems in our societies (and adapt to the damage we have already done) or it all collapses into a probable species ending spiral.
