AMOC/Atlantic Ocean circulation is nearing devastating tipping point - New Study

We're all fcked.........I'm ordering my doomsday poster boars.

How many of us will be around to see it?

Probably none, barring an amazing breakthrough in gerontology to extend lifespans. From AMOC shutting down to the end of summers seems to take around 400 years. However there have been some suggestions glacial period onsets can happen in less than a decade, but I seem to recall there was some push-back against that claim.

If there is a curve involved, we could already be at the beginning of that shutdown given that the strength has already weakened significantly in recent decades

Is it wrong that, notwithstanding the existential risk this poses to humankind, my big take-away is that it might snow in Ireland? Snow, yay!

A comment on fb in reply to an Irish article on climate change which said Jan 2024 was the warmest on record for the globe as a whole. These are the kind of idiots we are dealing with. The scientists and models and facts and figures etc are all wrong, her cat knows the score.

I'm hoping that someday in the future, Eamon Ryans descendents decide to take a bike tour of Connemara, and that they get eaten by the Polar bears.

If people lived for 300 years they might actually care about the future and have some kind of long term vision.

The culture is so focussed on self and short term gain that anything outside of this window is irrelevant and not valued.

So, a person who plants a native wood is seen as a crazy person, whereas someone who makes a lot of money reviewing mobile phones on YouTube is seen as some kind of Messiah.

So that explains the funny looks. I thought it was just my dress sense.

mate you'd go nuts if you read twitter and facebook comments all day. take solace in the fact that smart, busy people out there, don't have time to be commenting on facebook articles, it's mostly just numbskulls.

Oh I think I understand climate science fairly well. It's about distortion of truth and making observational data fit a narrative. A good example would be the curent ludicrous claim that the current slowing and possible tipping of the AMOC is due to anthropogenic climate change, despite the AMOC likely slowing for at least the last thousand years, possibly 2.

If I were to construct a climate hysteria intelligence test, I'd include the above graph - all the lurid green bits are my additions and I have erased the axies labels for fun. The question is: what would you think would be the most likely direction the green line on the right will follow next, if time is measured from left to right?

A) Continue upwards on it's current trajectory

B) Continue horizontally to the right

C) Change direction and descend steeply at -40 -- -60°

You believe in climate science, so the obvious answer is A, right?

Another question based on the same graph:

If the green dots represent AMOC shutdown events, is the one on the right:

A) Completely unexpected, time to panic

B) I'm colour blind, are you sure it's green

C) To be expected, no reason to panic (yet)

You of course will pick A, which is exactly what the climate scientists have picked also, so at least you are in good company.

I think the banning of CFC's may well have done the job and prevented an increase in the hole in the ozone layer. That could be why it didn't get worse, so since something drastic was done about it, scepticism of the original warnings is probably misplaced.

In the 00s the planet wasn't cooling was still getting warmer. From 98 - 2012 the RATE of warming decreased but has since sped up again.

I corrected that to atmosphere which I should have said rather then climate.

https://www.irishtimes.com/environment/climate-crisis/2024/02/16/ireland-must-prepare-for-atlantic-meridional-overturning-circulation-collapse-ff-senator-warns/

Containing the usual political bollox:

"He said he was encouraged by the Government’s ongoing work on climate adaptation, preparing for inevitable impacts from climate disruption."

Yeah, like the grand plan to get everyone off kerosene fuelled CH and force them onto heat pumps, which don't work terribly well at sub zero temperatures.

Houses built to passive standards is an all-round good idea.

But the usual climate change BS of attributing a change in the AMOC to anthropogenic global warming, when that graph I posted a few posts back clearly shows this has all happened before, time after time, when humans were dressed in furs and the height of their CO2 output was the open fires they cooked on.

This one seems a bit tricky. I have seen claims of evidence that glaciation onset only takes a few years, as in less than a decade, and others that it takes 400-450 years. The latter does seem more believable in that a given cubic metre of sea water supposedly takes about 400 years to circulate the Atlantic back to it's point of origin, and since that current is what transports the heat to Europe, and is an immense moving mass that simply could not just stop dead suddenly.

Completely irrelevant to the truth of the matter, but I like the near instantaneous onset theory more. Though one shouldn't like the prospect of an end to the interglacial period we are in because what comes next is many billions of humans dying.

Isn't it amusing how we've gone from 'if we don't stop generating CO2 and limit global temperature rise to 1.5°C, we are all doomed' to if the AMOC shuts down, we are all going to freeze and are doomed, in less time than it takes a climate scientist to change a light bulb.

I'm still waiting for:

The new ice age

Nuclear Armageddon

Peak oil

Acid rain

Nuclear Armageddon

The hole in the ozone

Nuclear Armageddon

Melting of the poles

I'm not denying that humans are altering the planet, but there just seems to be some global catastrophe, that will happen, but never does.

And Y2K is in there somewhere as well

There are a lot of people working on this field of research and they all seem to disagree by orders of magnitude on what is going to happen, so I can't really draw any conclusion, this thread happens to quote one of many studies, others say changes will be less dramatic or in some cases more dramatic. Nobody today really knows what is going to happen, if indeed anything significant actually does happen. I am not trying to dismiss concern about it, just a reality check that the scientists involved in the research have many different perspectives and there is no "settled science" in this area yet.

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aaf5529

We have been in an ice-age for about 3 million years. This has been characterised by long glacial periods, interspersed by short, warm, interglacial periods, such as the one we have been experiencing these last 12,000 years or so.

No one knows what modulates these interglacial switching events, and it's not Milankovich cycles (look up the 100,000 year problem). What ice core data and sediment proxies do show is that there appear to be 4 notable events that occur right at the end of interglacial periods, just before their end and the transition to the next glacial period:

1) There is a rapid rise in average global temperature

2) There is a rapid rise in global atmospheric CO2 levels

3) The AMOC shuts down

4) Large icebergs break off Antarctica and travel much further north than normal, as in New Zealand kinds of latitude.

The thing is, there is no understanding of what caused these temperature and CO2 rises at the end of previous interglacials.

But climate scientists are absolutely certain that this time it's different, this time it's solely due to Anthropogenic CO2, despite not knowing what caused CO2 levels to rise so much, at fairly regular intervals, over the past 400,000+ years. One thing seems certain, it wasn't due to anything the Neanderthals were doing.

5,000 years ago a large flotilla of icebergs reached NZ, but as we all know that is quite impossible because it would suggest Antarctica warmed up a bit, and as we all know, that couldn't possibly have happened because it's never been as warm as it is now.

I don't think so, but I could be wrong. An iceberg did reach NZ in 2006. My thinking is that icebergs melt as they drift, so to reach higher latitudes they might have to be bigger than normal in their initial form and so sourced from larger than normal breakups of ice shelves or increased calving from glaciers, which likely are triggered by higher temps. Perhpas being bigger they tend to hook up with the circumpolar current more readily and that gives them a northerly impetus due to the centripetal force, which is large enough that the Earth isn't sperical but bulges at the equator slightly.

Looks like I was mistaken in thinking that the icebergs were wholly an effect of warming, one paper at least suggests they could also be a major trigger. Still, sometheng else needs to happen to get them further north so I'd say they are more likely to be a coup de grâce than a trigger.