An abrupt shutdown of Atlantic Ocean currents that could put large parts of Europe in a deep freeze is looking a bit more likely and closer than before as a new complex computer simulation finds a “cliff-like” tipping point looming in the future.
A long-worried nightmare scenario, triggered by Greenland’s ice sheet melting from global warming, still is at least decades away if not longer, but maybe not the centuries that it once seemed, a new study in Friday’s Science Advances finds. The study, the first to use complex simulations and include multiple factors, uses a key measurement to track the strength of vital overall ocean circulation, which is slowing.
A collapse of the current — called the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation or AMOC — would change weather worldwide because it means a shutdown of one of key the climate and ocean forces of the planet. It would plunge northwestern European temperatures by 9 to 27 degrees (5 to 15 degrees Celsius) over the decades, extend Arctic ice much farther south, turn up the heat even more in the Southern Hemisphere, change global rainfall patterns and disrupt the Amazon, the study said. Other scientists said it would be a catastrophe that could cause worldwide food and water shortages.
“We are moving closer (to the collapse), but we we’re not sure how much closer,” said study lead author Rene van Westen, a climate scientist and oceanographer at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. “We are heading towards a tipping point.”
This isn’t a new concern, just more specificity about how the shut down of global deep water convection currents is occurring. We’re fucked, but it’s not a “new” fucked - just another piece of the existing fucked humanity has largely decided isn’t as important as the match of capitalist profits.
i think it’s more we’re likely fucked much faster than we thought we were initially fucked. I personally suspect the positive feedback will result in us being fucked even quicker, reaching peak fucked in years rather than decades, the date of completly fucked has reliably moved forward over the past 5 years. chances are we’re already past the point of no return.
Do you remember back a decade or two ago when everything related to climate change was in regards to 2100? Then it slowly moved to 2070 and 2050. Now the last few years people are realizing, “oh hey… We’re gonna die soon aren’t we…?”
exactly