Tipping point in Gulf Stream may be reached as early as mid-century(agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com) |
Tipping point in Gulf Stream may be reached as early as mid-century(agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com) |
Basically, the gulf stream is a conveyor belt that grabs nice warm water from southern latitudes (carribean, southeast atlantic ocean) and slowly moves it up the east US/Canadian coast, when it then gently arches past the tip of Greenland and Iceland before splitting and arriving in northern Europe.
To get an idea of how big of a problem the gulf stream going away would be, look at the comparative latitude of the UK and the Nordic countries compared to north America. The UK is aligned with Newfoundland in Canada, where it gets more than a little chilly. The UK is currently nice and toasty because of the gulf stream. It would be an extremely uncomfortable place without it - no more agriculture as the UK knows it now, no more nice weather. Fishing grounds destroyed, etc. The general public doesn't seem to really understand the massive impact of a potential gulf stream shutdown.
It's the beginning of the process of ocean de-oxygenation, ultimately creating a lifeless ocean that emits hydrogen sulfide instead of oxygen. It would completely disrupt the planetary food change, make the ocean poisonous, and fundamentally alter life on this planet in unimaginable ways.
For a more detailed look at the issue I highly recommend Peter Ward's "Under a Green Sky".
https://www.americanscientist.org/article/the-source-of-euro...
Large bodies of water like the Atlantic or the Med keep us cool in summer and warm in winter. Climate change in general leads to more extreme weather events and weather just simply being a lot more volatile.
Just as apparently sulfur emissions from global shipping fleets helped offset some warming and eco-friendly fuel actually caused problems, the climate is complex, and there are definitely going to be the collision of interesting trade-offs.
Unfortunately, most likely, the answer is there won't be anything beneficial here. Remember, the key here isn't average global temperatures, but rather the temperature range. Life likes a temperate climate in a narrow range of degrees. Not just humans, but agriculture too.
If you lower the winter temperatures by 10 degrees, and raise the summer ones by 10, your crops still die either from the frost or from the fire. And humans likewise either freeze on the street or overheat in the sun.
This is the main thing climate change denialists can never seem to grasp. It's not the specific temperature numbers, it's the SPEED at which it's happening. Humans, in their current biological form, have been around for a million years, and survived much larger climate swings. But...the climate also changed slower. And they migrated. And they still almost didn't make it several times, barely surviving.
A world where hundreds of millions of people from the indian subcontinent are trying to escape murderous heat one season while tens of millions of people in Europe are freezing in the winter, and putting up walls to protect what they already have, is not one where humanity thrives.
In the long term we'll probably be fine. A few billion will die. Demographics and politics will shift. The human spirit will persevere, and we'll innovate our way through and adapt to a new world.
But it might take a century and our children and our children's children will not be better off than us.
> If the AMOC starts to collapse, it takes more than 100 years to reach a substantially weaker state.
Better title would be “Simulations of Atlantic Meridonal Circulation Collapse Due to Climate Change”
>The Gulf Stream acts like a giant conveyor belt, transporting warm water from the tropics to the North Atlantic, which gives Western Europe its unusually mild climate. A collapse would disrupt this heat transfer, causing average temperatures in regions like the UK and Scandinavia to drop by as much as 10-15°C (18-27°F) in a short period. This would lead to much colder, harsher winters and potentially widespread crop failure due to freezing conditions and a shorter growing season. Ironically, while the rest of the world continues to warm, Europe would experience a rapid cooling.
It's romantic to imagine populations slowly moving to where life is better, haven't we always done that since out of Africa. I doubt it'll be like that when land becomes uninhabitable within decades due to changes to the experienced temperature range, rainfall, drought, fires, etc. We can't even figure out how to make space for a couple million Palestinian people. The Russians are still expanding their empire to restore their glory days. We need to figure out the whole living next to each other thing before we can resettle large populations.
I don’t want to break your fantasies, but models predict the Middle East to be come more hot and hostile, not less.
However, the lack of rainfall could be the real killer. As the warm humid air would stops coming it's not clear if the precipitations would be enough to sustain crops in Mediterranean countries.
Also, the US east cost and the Caribbean countries would be fucked as well. All that energy would stay there supercharging hurricanes as they cross the gulf of Mexico. That area of the world would basically be subject to both the precipitations and thermal energy that is now keeping northern Europe livable as it wouldn't spread over.
But given the quite impressive track record of 100% failed predictions in the climate doom department I'm betting on the false vacuum imploding before the climate memes manifest.
These simulations are the best we have to predict the future, and even if it's 2076, once it happens, it's going to be a huge deal.
Hard to think we should just YOLO and take a gamble models were wrong and all will be fine for centuries more.
It may take long to significantly weaken, the article also states that effects of a weakening AMOC can occur much sooner than that.
Our models are based on what we can measure. We're continually finding that we are under measuring.
Chances are that children born today will feel the effects of AMOC collapsing.
So this mentality of "omg they're over reacting, we have time" is really dumb.
It's very easy to nitpick and dismiss this kind of stuff instead of giving a shit because giving a shit means we have to accept we screwed up. Can we finally start giving a shit and be cautious?
The contention that our models systematically underestimate reality is incorrect, and defies logic: if it were true that we were systematically failing in one direction, we’d make the models bias in the other direction.
The inter-glacial periods are 10K to 20K years. We are currently around 12000 years into it. "AI overview" keeps telling me human induced climate change may lengthen it, but the collapse of the AMOC might just end it.
What happens then to, say, the Mediterranean at +10 C average temps? Seems quite bad, eh?
It's possible for such biases to persist for a long time: In general, older climate models tended to overestimate the amount of CO2 that would be emitted but underestimate the effects it would have. The latter especially tends to persist because climate scientists are under a lot of pressure to not overstate their claims, given the very well-funded and active work to discredit claims about climate change (as well as a very human desire, given the lack of action, to be optimistic).
(You can also see a similar effect with the growth in adoption of solar power: even the most optimistic sources have and likely still continue to underestimate how much new solar will be installed in the next few years, because it's just growing so mind-bogglingly fast)
I didn't want to get into this because it clouds the topic at hand and makes it sounds like I'm debating the quality of the models, but you're just objectively wrong -- it's well-known that some of the major climate models have "run hot":
https://www.science.org/content/article/use-too-hot-climate-...
In addition, every publication (including this one) that use modeling results show a wide dispersion around the mean.
That's the official and much hyped past predictions, but this time it's different? Who's really the one crying wolf here?
Maybe you boomer-brained types would get scammed a little bit less often if you tried thinking just a little bit for yourself instead of uncritically swallowing the pre-chewed fecal mass that media spits into your mouth on a daily basis.
Can't handle counter battery because you grew up in a homogenized echo chamber? Boohoo reality don't care and neither do I.
When you've wipes your tears perhaps you should go read the actual reports you dearly advertise, and then you too could know they predict lukewarm bullshit indistinguishable from weather.
But nah, you'll keep being a fecal ruminants smugly chewing on your genAI-slop-level massmedia headlines while thinking your insults are clever.
If it was linear I’d be concerned. But it’s not. So yeah let’s solve other more realistic problems.
Most of the high profile climate models have been wrong… but in underestimating the speed of global warming. So things generally are worse than research suggests.
I think you underestimate how well the models are doing.
1. Logarithmic effect of CO₂ • The warming effect of carbon dioxide grows logarithmically with concentration, not linearly. • This means the first 100 ppm of CO₂ caused a much larger temperature impact than, say, an increase from 400 → 500 ppm. • Each additional molecule of CO₂ contributes less extra warming because much of the infrared spectrum it absorbs is already saturated.
2. Geometry of “forcing” • Scientists describe this as radiative forcing, measured in watts per square meter. • Roughly, each doubling of CO₂ concentration produces about +3.7 W/m² of forcing, which translates (with climate sensitivity) to ~1.5–4.5°C warming. • So it takes geometrically more CO₂ to achieve each additional degree of warming. For example: • Going from 280 → 400 ppm may give ~1°C warming. • Going from 400 → 560 ppm (another 160 ppm) gives another ~1°C. • Going from 560 → 840 ppm (280 ppm more) gives another ~1°C. • And so on — the increments needed get larger each time.