"The new study adds significantly to the rising concern about an AMOC collapse in the not-too-distant future," said one scientist. "We will ignore this at our peril."
“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.
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.
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.