It's troubling that a scientific paper that says "AMOC is collapsing" will get on the cover of the Guardian and tons of social media, while one that says "No, it's not, but we should still watch..." gets...crickets.
Media coverage has a bias towards sensationalism, and we must be careful.
Media coverage has a bias towards sensationalism, and we must be careful.
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https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2023/08/the-amoc-tipping-this-century-or-not/
"We know from paleoclimatic data that there have been a number of drastic, rapid climate changes with focal point in the North Atlantic due to abrupt AMOC changes..."
The point: it is a risk we should keep to an absolute minimum..."
https://bsky.app/profile/thimbles.bsky.social/post/3lfqhvyuzbc2b
(please excuse the seals)
But what we have evidence for is that the AMOC has collapsed the past due to climatic shifts..
This means that we can infer the effects of an AMOC collapse on our global civilization would also be quite dramatic.
Which means that we should keep a worrying eye on any signs that a process of AMOC collapse may be occurring.
Often lost are nuance and qualities, which editors generally dislike.
I was the editor on that story; thought the author was very attentive to respecting the uncertainties and unknowns.
The precautionary principle has to apply here, and I don't mean the media. The work that needs doing is to speed the transition to clean energy, to defenestrate the vested interests that do not care about tipping AMOC into an irretrievable collapse, that turn a blind eye to the possibility.
Those interests lie and spread misinformation to line their pockets and keep their cancerous industries going. Yes the press needs to be balanced, but that includes fact checking the liars and it doesn't happen enough. The whole point of the 1.5⁰ goal is not to initiate irretrievable collapses.
So no, we can't wait until we know AMOC is collapsing. There is already a 15% reduction in flow, and every point higher brings us closer to collapse. The precautionary principle says we must change energy and social systems so we stop the reduction in strength of AMOC as soon as we can.
My oceanographer friends tell me the thing is hard to observe -- and time series are still too short to say much.
we don’t know what is causing it but it certainly doesn’t seem to be caused by the people who claim the AMOC isn’t weakening - and that’s the key concern.
If it’s cooling because of AMOC weakening then winds and gyres cannot explain why it’s cooling either.
So the explanation of winds and gyres seems to be noise rather than signal.
The only sensible explanation seems to be that deep ocean currents are responsible.
By doing this, if humans wanted to, they could shape, redirect, even block, entire ocean currents!!
“All evidence suggest a decline that is going to start very soon or has already started.”