c/climate · by silence7@slrpnk.net · 129d

Critical Atlantic current significantly more likely to collapse than thought | Scientists say finding is ‘very concerning’ as collapse would be catastrophic for Europe, Africa and the Americas

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/apr/15/critical-atlantic-current-significantly-more-likely-to-collapse-than-thought

The paper is here

105 points · 15 comments · view on lemmy.world

15 Comments

grue@lemmy.world · 35 pts · 129d (3 replies)

Every few years there's a headline like this.

...

Not because people are dredging up old news, but because the collapse estimate keeps getting revised to be sooner.

silence7@slrpnk.net · 13 pts · 129d (2 replies)

Not sooner so much as more likely. We're into the 40% to 50% range now

grue@lemmy.world · 13 pts · 129d (1 reply)

It's kinda the same thing. The curve of probability over time is shifting closer to the present (faster than we approach it through the normal passage of time).

benjirenji@slrpnk.net · 1 pts · 129d

And the model gets refined making the predictions more accurate and reliable.

lowspeedchase@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 18 pts · 129d

The research combined real-world ocean observations with the models to determine the most reliable, and this hugely reduced the spread of uncertainty. They found an estimated slowdown of 42% to 58% in 2100, a level almost certain to end in collapse.

Rahmstorf, who has studied the Amoc for 35 years, has said a collapse must be avoided “at all costs”. “I argued this when we thought the chance of an Amoc shutdown was maybe 5%, and even then we were saying that risk is too high, given the massive impacts. Now it looks like it’s more than 50%. The most dramatic and drastic climate changes we see in the last 100,000 years of Earth history have been when the Amoc switched to a different state.”

Yikes.

boatswain@infosec.pub · 15 pts · 129d (6 replies)

Anyone have any good sources for predictions of effects of this? It sounds like AMOC is a particularly complex system, and I'm sure the ripples from it collapsing are at least as complex, but it'd be nice to have some idea of where might be a good place to move to, if this is as inevitable as it sounds.

CapuccinoCoretto@lemmy.world · 14 pts · 129d (2 replies)

it'd be nice to have some idea of where might be a good place to move to, if this is as inevitable as it sounds.

Not as nice as you think. You could dodge harsher winters, an energy crunch and crop failures, just to move to somewhere with heatstress, drought and cropfailures.

We must not view climate as the thing to watch. It's one part of a larger complex system of systems. Changes in the AMOC can trigger changes elsewhere, and more importantly, elsewhere is changing on its own too. Not just because of emissions.

It's a lot to digest, especially if you don't have a background in ecology, biology, environmental sciences or systems theory. But a solid easy framework is planetary boundaries.

It's all 9 boundaries together (plus any new ones discovered) that's going to pickle us. We are exceeding 7 of the 9 identified so far and there are and will be severe consequences for having exceeded our planet's limits.

I worry about climate change A LOT. I worry about Ecological Overshoot and Collapse due to Planetary Boundaries even more.

grimpy@lemmy.myserv.one · 4 pts · 129d (1 reply)

the all new EPA will abide, no doubt

CapuccinoCoretto@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 129d

True. True. But to be fair, the old one wasn't fit for purpose either. Lovely science, but still couldn't do anything about it.

njm1314@lemmy.world · 10 pts · 129d

There was a documentary about it made once I think it was called The Day After Tomorrow.

zwerg@feddit.org · 7 pts · 129d

I doubt anywhere would be a 'good' place to move to in this scenario. Maybe there would be better places than (southern?) Europe, but things will still be tough even before you factor in everyone moving to exactly those places and the fact that food will become scarcer globally. My recommendation is avoid having children at all costs - they will have to live through this.

mech@feddit.org · 2 pts · 129d

The country projected to profit the most from climate change is Russia.

cyberpunk007@lemmy.ca · 10 pts · 129d

That's fine. Get rid of the "windmills" because they're ugly and keep firing up datacenters left and right.

fairyfuzz@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 129d

BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today · 2 pts · 129d

"It's not our problem, the Liberals did it, and it's a hoax anyway" - MAGA