Key Atlantic current could collapse soon, 'impacting the entire world for centuries to come,'

[Bayard]

Key Atlantic current could collapse soon, 'impacting the entire world for centuries to come,' leading climate scientists warn: Leading climate scientists ring alarm bell on key Atlantic Ocean current collapse in open letter


Leading climate scientists signed an open letter warning about the collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), which includes the Gulf Stream. (Image credit: NOAA)

Forty-four of the world's leading climate scientists have called on Nordic policymakers to address the potentially imminent and "devastating" collapse of key Atlantic Ocean currents. In an open letter published online Monday (Oct. 21), University of Pennsylvania climatologist Michael Mann and other eminent scientists say the risks of weakening ocean circulation in the Atlantic have been greatly underestimated and warrant urgent action. The currents in question are those forming the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), a giant ocean conveyor belt that includes the Gulf Stream and transports vital heat to the Northern Hemisphere. Research shows the AMOC is slowing down and could soon reach a tipping point due to global warming, throwing Earth's climate into chaos.

"Such an ocean circulation change would have devastating and irreversible impacts especially for Nordic countries, but also for other parts of the world," the scientists wrote in the letter. The Nordic countries include Denmark, Iceland, Norway, Finland and Sweden. An AMOC collapse would lead to major cooling and extreme weather in Nordic countries, according to the letter. This would enlarge and deepen a strange "cold blob" that has already developed over the eastern North Atlantic due to the slowdown of heat-carrying currents. Collapsing ocean currents are also likely to precipitate climate impacts across the Northern Hemisphere, threatening agriculture in Northwestern Europe, according to the letter.

Other regions would feel the effects, too, the scientists said. Should the AMOC grind to a halt, it would trigger a southward shift in tropical monsoon systems — with catastrophic consequences for agriculture and ecosystems. Halted ocean currents could also further heighten sea levels along the American Atlantic coast and send marine ecosystems and fisheries into a state of "upheaval." Without urgent climate action, the AMOC could collapse in the next few decades, although there is huge uncertainty in predicting the timescales, according to the letter. The latest report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) states that "there is medium confidence that the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation will not collapse abruptly before 2100," but the scientists say this is an underestimate.

The IPCC estimate is not only imprecise but also worrisome, according to the letter. "The purpose of this letter is to draw attention to the fact that only 'medium confidence' in the AMOC not collapsing is not reassuring, and clearly leaves open the possibility of an AMOC collapse during this century," the scientists wrote. "Even with a medium likelihood of occurrence, given that the outcome would be catastrophic and impacting the entire world for centuries to come, we believe more needs to be done to minimize this risk."


A map of the ocean currents in the Atlantic. (Image credit: Peter Hermes Furian via Shutterstock)


https://www.livescience.com/planet-earth/rivers-oceans/key-atlantic-current-could-collapse-soon-impacting-the-entire-world-for-centuries-to-come-leading-climate-scientists-warn

[malaise]

1. K & R

For visibility

[Moostache]

2. But...but....Kamala did not give interviews...and Hillary had e-mails...

The disturbing reality we inhabit is that Trump, with a list of reasons he should be in jail or restrained in a mental institution instead of a serious candidate for POTUS, is STILL polling dead even at all. Reality has checked out and America's voters (who will STILL likely be less than 60% of all citizens again - 160M total in a nation of more than 350M people) are either not getting true information, don't care about truth or are willing to accept lies instead.

Climate change? They don't care...
Dead women who went septic waiting for life-saving care? They don't care...
Voting rights extinguished and Constitution shredded? They don't care...
A dictator imprisoning 'enemies' and starting detention camps? They don't care...
The end of 248 years of democracy and a representative republic? They don't care (nor do they know what that means)...

Well, I care.

I am keeping score and when the wars start, I will be in the resistance.
I will fight them in the fields, on the streams and rivers and from sea to sea.
I will aid guerillas and harbor fugitives.
I will subvert Trump and his evil Nazi minions at every turn and every day.

I will hide behind my 54 year old white male face and gain their confidence and succor.
I will smile at them to their faces and stab them in the back.

I will then gleefully testify at their war crimes tribunals and I will personally pull the hangman's lever to drop them to their deserved deaths.

I will not go back, I will not go quietly and I will not be alone.

[LisaM]

5. And people would rather have a beer with George Bush than with Al Gore.

The farther removed we are from the 2000 election the more upset I am that people didn't enthusiastically vote for Gore. Anyone who cared about the climate and had two brain cells to rub together should have embraced his candidacy.

[hadEnuf]

19. And despite this information the MAGA and GOP assholes keep merrily dancing around saying

it's all a hoax and build Al Gore snowmen.



This is what happens when the lunatics take over.

[RandomNumbers]

41. Sigh ... and I would have always preferred that beer with Gore.

(as many here would)

But do remember that part of the rap against Gore came from "the left", in the personages of Michael Moore and Ralph Nader. Remember "not a dime's worth of difference"?? I will never forget that.

To be fair to the idealists, our system sucks. We need something like ranked-choice voting where people can honestly vote "I like Nader better but Gore is a helluva lot better than Bush". Now, M. Moore, according to his pronouncement, would not have done that. But if RCV were in place, even Moore probably would have worked, and spoken, more strategically.

[Klarkashton]

51. The price of eggs is too high.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

3. I've been muttering for years that

if any of those major currents goes away, the entire planet is in deep doo-doo.

Which makes me wonder if planetary scientists have any clue what the major currents were before the continents separated.

[Magoo48]

12. More accurately perhaps, life as humanity knows it will be in deep doo-doo.

We will continue to change the climate. The first world will not, and in some instances, cannot be inconvenienced.

The drastic nature of the sacrifices required to make any real impact at this juncture can only come from a massive paradigm shift and its resulting upheaval from Earth’s “first world”, grassroots. This demographic is unfortunately still looking to political leaders at the top to lead. It can’t/won’t happen.

Politicians are entangled so tightly with economies, economies controlled by billionaires, that they are rendered impotent, and therefore irrelevant, where climate catastrophe is concerned.

Begin now teaching adaptive sciences, both physical and theoretical, at every level of education to help our next generations. Currently, all our next generations can see is an atmospheric tall, CO2 inflated , middle finger.

[orthoclad]

39. The obscenely rich are addicted to profits,

which are enabled by widespread use (and waste) of energy.

For example:
First world manufacturing was off-shored to countries without regulation, with cheap labor. First world unions took a big hit. It's more profitable now to build giant cargo ships burning huge amounts of oil to ship the manufactured products back to the first world. Ships like the giant one which destroyed the bridge in Baltimore, killing workers on the bridge. And the ship that grounded and blocked shipping in the Suez.

Fortunes are spent on psyop-type ad campaigns to convince USians that they can't be complete people without the new improved XYZ. Consumption gets amplified.

The Bangladeshi fisherman gets caught between floods from melting glaciers, rising sea levels, and amplified storms.

One third of Pakistan gets flooded.

[OMGWTF]

20. I'm worried about all of the methane gas that will be released when the Arctic permafrost melts.

It will exasperate the global warming problem by a big multitude.

[Metaphorical]

26. They have some

The AMOC is pretty much responsible for the relatively temperate climate that the Atlantic experiences, as well as being a major driver of weather systems. It serves as something of a thermostat - when the temperature gets too high, glaciers melt and sea ice evaporates, causing the AMOC to slow down. This in turn causes arctic air to descend farther south in winter, bringing with it fresh snow and ice with high albedos, cooling the planet. We call these ice ages, and they can last for as much as a couple of millennia, depending upon many factors. This is why I'm not that worried about global warming long term - we exceed a specific tipping point and we're back into a cooling period. This is an anomaly - when the continents were last together (around 150 million years ago) we had massive circulatory systems that were fairly simple, with the coasts periodically seeing hurricanes with 250-300 mph winds, temperatures 8 to 10 degrees Celsius above current levels, and inland areas that were completely arid. So it could always be worse.

Mind you, an ice age would likely push human civilization back to the bronze age within a couple hundred years.

[LiberalArkie]

35. Do not need to worry about the planet. The planet as you mention will take care of itself.

[ananda]

4. Wow. This is probably the most important article of the year.

It's going to get very very bad very soon.

[BattleRow]

13. And I'm ,out of respect,not gonna make a smart ass remark.

[Delphinus]

6. There is another

story in Environment & Energy that goes with this:
https://www.democraticunderground.com/1127177201
44 Scientists Sign Off On Warning That Atlantic Current Shutdown Risks Have Been "Greatly Underestimated"

[c-rational]

7. K&R x 1,000,000

[relayerbob]

8. This has been known since the early 2000s

We’re almost out of time to stop it, if it isn’t already too late

[Coexist]

9. Is it finally time for the carbon eaters?

https://www.wired.com/story/is-it-time-for-an-emergency-rollout-of-carbon-eating-machines/

In a recent paper in the journal Nature Communications, a team of researchers crunched the numbers, arguing that it’s feasible for humanity to embark on a wartime-style crash deployment of a global network of machines that sequester carbon. “We think there's sort of a dearth of conversation generally, but also in the academic literature, around emergency responses to the climate crisis,” says Ryan Hanna, an energy systems researcher at the UC San Diego and lead author on the paper.

Typically, climate scientists run big, complicated models about the most economically optimal ways to decarbonize. “That envisions this very technocratic, manicured, highly granular transition,” Hanna says, “which doesn't really reflect the way transitions actually occur in reality.” So Hanna and his colleagues sketched out an alternate vision: Imagine what would happen if humanity invested in DAC like we’d invest in another world war.

The researchers broke their modeling into three parts. The first was an estimate of how much governments would need to pay for DAC plants. This would include appropriating crisis-level funding to pay private firms to build the facilities, and to pay the companies for storing the carbon they’d be capturing. The second piece of the modeling looked at how fast the plant rollout could scale using already-existing energy supplies like hydropower. (You wouldn’t want to use fossil fuels to run them, obviously.) And the last part was a climate model, representing the entire Earth system, including oceans and the atmosphere. This showed how global temperatures would change if a mass deployment of DAC facilities turned down the amount of CO2 hanging around in the atmosphere.

The researchers found that with an annual investment of between 1 and 2 percent of the global gross domestic product, humanity could scale up a DAC network to remove around 2.3 gigatons of CO2 annually by the year 2050. (For perspective, total global emissions are currently around 40 gigatons a year.)

That’s about 400 times the amount of CO2 humanity currently sequesters, so we’re talking about a massive scale-up. Still, “relative to what the integrated assessment models tell us we should do by 2050, it's actually quite small,” says Hanna. We need to remove something like 5 to 9 gigatons of CO2 per year by 2050 to meet the Paris agreement’s 1.5 degrees C goal. “What that tells us is that we need more than just a single means of negative emissions,” Hanna adds. For instance, we could also bolster wetlands and plant trees to naturally sequester carbon.

The DAC facilities themselves will need to scale as quickly as possible. To be able to remove a mere 2 to 2.5 gigatons of carbon a year by 2050—a fraction of the amount that will help get us to the Paris goals—we’d need around 800. But to truly make a dent in the skyrocketing CO2 levels, we’d need to build them much faster. We’re talking 4,000 to 9,000 plants by the year 2075, and beyond 10,000 by the end of the century, at which point we could theoretically be sequestering up to 27 gigatons of carbon a year. “It shows, in effect, that you have a really long, slow, gradual scale-up as the industry grows through 2050,” says Hanna. “Then once it sort of grows to a massive size, then it's really easy to add a lot of plants quickly, because you have this huge industrial base for the industry.”

[mopinko]

25. ppl cd kill their lawns.

seems small, but it WOULD add up to a significant amount.

there’s a lot of small but significant things that cd b done. i’m an evangelist for hugelkultur. rn, when u cut down trees, in cities anyway, they haul the waste off to b chopped up and composted. it shd b buried instead. it will still turn to soil, but slowly and w fungi instead of bacteria, so less co2. if farmers ringed their fields w hugelpiles, they’d stop the runoff of both soil and fertilizer. after 5-10 yrs, they spread black gold on their fields. they cd get paid to take the waste, too.

it seems dumb to me to stand up a whole huge industry that will b obsolete if we do the other things we need to do. we need an- every little bit helps- strategy. some tech like this will def b needed, tho.

[orthoclad]

40. It takes energy to remove carbon

Carbon removal will be seized on by the oiligarchs as an excuse to keep polluting.

It's far more effective to just leave it in the ground.

[live love laugh]

10. Sadly this will not get the attention it deserves. The world will suffer.

[et tu]

11. we are saying goodbye

to our goldilocks planet. stupid us

[Stuckinthebush]

15. Maybe it is getting ready to say goodbye to us

It'll reset. We won't

[et tu]

18. true nt

[Warpy]

14. The current has been slowing for some time now

but we don't know enough to know if it's a cyclical event and that the current will speed up later on its own or if we're looking at a potential disaster for western Europe. We know from the geological record that the current has been stopped, but usually in connection with a massive flood event as glaciers melted. Other than that, little ice ages have occurred in the past, which might be associted with a periodic weakening of the current.

We're all fumbling around in the dark here, able to track changes in ocean climate by plamkton and other creatures but just a little befogged when it comes to cause and effect.

[et tu]

17. the fog may clear

when greenland is all green again-
too late for most life on earth~

[Warpy]

21. Oh, I'm not that gloomy

Civilizations, even multiple civilizations, have fallen but people seem to persist.

[moniss]

33. Yes but extrapolating a collapse from thousands of years ago

and the ability to migrate to survivable areas is not really useful in thinking about today. The times in the past did not have the density of population, the weapons technology regarding battles for resources, the degradation of water resources or the instant worldwide communication and awareness of moves for survival. That last one may be one of the most important regarding survival then versus now.

Those previous civilizations did not have to deal with others instantly knowing that a "survivable area" was inhabited or obtainable. So today if a particular area of countries are looking far more "survivable" the communication of that fact to the billions of people on the planet will be immediate and the stampede will be on along with whatever political/military pressure is employed against the "survival countries" to allow the influx. If we try to curtail the influx to areas where people can survive better then we are basically enacting extermination policies perhaps dressed up under nicer labels. Not too unlike some of the resistance to efforts to migrate that we see today.

We can't just feel we can just "move somewhere else" because, other than the Arctic/Antarctic, pretty much has population and claim/governance by others. Our ability to provide clean fresh water for ourselves is constantly going in the wrong direction for all the known reasons while the ancients did not have this struggle of having diminished so much of the world's water quality.

But it goes even beyond that because there are far more things that happen when civilizations collapse and survival attempts take place. It is not just a matter of immediate survival things like food, water and shelter. Huge changes happen within people and social dynamics as well. Far too often when we read items about climate change, environmental degradation of species etc. we usually are seeing climate scientists, biologists etc. talking about the physical impacts. Rarely do we see anywhere near the amount of "ink" given to sociologists, psychologists etc. talking about the changes in the social dynamic and in us as people when these "change scenarios" are discussed.

A good book to read about the question of "us" is "Commander One" by Peter George from 1965 and was a "sequel" of sorts to "Red Alert" which Kubrick used as the basis for "Dr. Strangelove". In "Commander One" Peter George tells the story of a world in which China plots to get the US and Russia to destroy each other so that China can take over the world. The story also is about the US having prepared for the scenario of "doomsday" and potential survival by having a plan for "survivors" to go on board a submarine to an area in the South Pacific that would be the least impacted by fallout. The scenario becomes all too real. But the storytelling ability of George is nothing short of monumental and what happens is not what one might expect one way or the other or for reasons we might have thought. The ending of the book is one of the most extraordinary things in literature I've ever seen an author do. I won't give it away because to say it is to negate experiencing it and George wrote this to be experienced rather than described or recited.

[Warpy]

36. First, you can't predict it

Second, you can't control it.

Third, you can't plan for it.

The more wedded you are to any of these 3 things, the less likely you are to survive any big collapse, no matter the reason. You need to be adaptable, to be able to cope on the fly,

[moniss]

37. You miss the point entirely.nt

[orthoclad]

43. Humans might revert to lithic hunter-gatherers

Industrial civ is too interdependent to absorb massive blows. Failures will cascade. I could see a tech consisting of flint-knapping and scavenging metal surviving.

The death toll could be in the billions. There will be a mass extinction - we're in the middle of one already. So far, the poorer countries are taking the brunt of global heating. And they're getting angry.

[Warpy]

44. That's usually who manages to survive any major collapse

The skill set is unspecialized and it tends to be enormous. Such people tend to be enormously resilient.

While thee are isolated pockets of hunter-gatherers on all continents, my money's on the San people in the Kalahari. If you can manage to live there, you can manage to live anywhere. They're one of the oldest cultures on earth, survivors of thousands of years of climate change.

[orthoclad]

45. Usually? The spcies has never seen a collapse like the one approaching.

And the skill set is highly specialized and takes a long time to learn. Stalking, knapping, re-learning edible and medicinal plants. I've tried knapping. No way will I get a Clovis point before I starve. Many will starve before regaining the ancient skills.

[Warpy]

46. The one around 1177-186 (the date changes constantly) BC comes very close

There were multiple advanced states around the Mediterranean with overaland and upriver trade routes to the interiot, some stretching all the way to China. In a few short years,ever seemingly stable and prsperous civilization had collapsed and no one is sure why. Some contamporary messages from one to another talked of famine and begged for food. Others talked of the Sea People, now thought to be more refugee than armed force. The whole known world just collapsed and vanished, most for hundreds of years, the sole exception being Egypt, and even they had a prolonged periiod of civil instability, famine, and delayed recovery.

What makes the Bronze Age Collapse equivalent are both its totality and rapidity. We have no idea what started it, where it started, or even where a lot of the abandoned civilizations listed later by the Egyptians had even been. It would be like driving 500 miles to Grandma's house for Thanksgiving, topping up the gas and eating lunch halfway there, then noticing there were no other cars on the road, the gas stations were all shut down, gas food joints had their doors wide open and were dark, and Grandma's town was deserted, houses standing open and looking like people had packed and left in a huge hurry. No Grandma, no note, no nothing, and not enough gas to get home. No bodies, either, which is how we know it wasn't large scale war or plague.

Humanity has been through major collapses before and likely will again and my money is still on the resilient San people if the rest of us die of our own stupidity. There are others, of course, but the San are the most numerous.

[orthoclad]

48. No comparison. The global biosphere didn't collapse.

What we face is comparable to an asteroid strike, spread out over a century instead of days.

[Warpy]

49. That's just it, we don't know what happened to erase civilizations over such a wide area

and so quickly. Some ruins suggest that temples and palaces were burned, others were simply abandoned, as people fled---wha

The joker in our deck is sequestered methane. If that is released, it will likely take several centuries, but it has the potential to wipe out land based life and bust sea life back to blue green algae and life around volcanic vents on the sea floor. Then Mother Earth will create her next iteration of life.

[orthoclad]

50. You miss my point

"Civilization" be damned, we're talking mass extinction. Dinosaur-killer level. 0.0001 % human survivors. Even language might be lost.

[Warpy]

52. You missed my last sentences.

We might or we might not. Your crystal ball is as cloudy as everybody else's is.

[orthoclad]

53. Mutual. Gotcha.

But I rely on science, not crystal balls. We're already losing species at a mass extinction rate. These are events best described in geologic time scales, rather than historic. We won't go back to cyanobacteria; it will more closely resemble the Chicxulub event, which replaced the saurians with mammals. Whereas that asteroid strike changed the biosphere in days, the Anthopocene extinction will spread out over a century or two. Big difference to our lifespan, but very little difference in a geologic time scale.

[Hermit-The-Prog]

16. Oct 23, south-central KY, 86F on my porch.

Should be chilly and wet, not hot and dry.

I don't like suicidal, global experiments.

[Bayard]

22. We're in the same neighborhood in KY

80 degrees here today. Last week, it was cold enough at night, 30's, to fire up the wood stove.

People think, "The Day After Tomorrow," movie could never happen. We're headed right for it.

[JanMichael]

32. Well that's terrifying.

[hatrack]

28. 89 the forecast high for 10/24 here in Missouri . . .

[Clouds Passing]

23. Just....

[Duppers]

24. Kick

Thank you so much for posting this❗

This most important issue get far too little attention.

👍

[Think. Again.]

27. K&R

[czarjak]

29. Stop Global Whining

Bumper sticker from the 80's. They're still singing it.

[Wild blueberry]

30. K&R

Thank you.

[surfered]

31. On the Gulf Coast....

The high temperatures are forecast to finally get out of the 80s around Nov 3rd with our first norther.. That is just much later than normal. Gulf of Mexico water temperatures set records.

[mn9driver]

34. If the system of Atlantic currents collapses

Temperatures may well plummet in Scandinavia and Northern Europe. But all that heat that is now flowing northward will need to go somewhere. Most likely, it will accelerate the heating that is already happening further south.

And yes, once the circulation stops, it won’t restart for a very long time.

[orthoclad]

54. Excellent point that gets ignored

The Gulf and Caribbean will get hotter and hotter.

Hurricanes balance excess energy from the tropical oceans to land and higher latitudes. If the AMOC isn't moving that heat, the atmosphere will. There will be storms the like of which has never been seen.

[Duppers]

38. Kick

I'd like my son to have a future on the planet.

We need to conserve & have fewer offsprings for the sake of future generations & all life in the planet.

[dalton99a]

42. Jesus will save us

He can do it without lifting a finger (or toe)

[Morbius]

47. There is also the danger of stagnation.

If the ocean becomes stagnant it stops absorbing oxygen altogether in some areas, creating aquatic deserts where nothing survives. Where pollution goes into the ocean, it will remain. Estuaries and wetlands would die out, as water recirculation is vital to their survival. There is absolutely no doubt that the death toll will be in the billions. The only question is if anyone can survive, and how many.

Another minor point no one ever seems to make even though it's so obvious that it's honestly painful:

The longer we wait, the more it will cost.