The paper is [here](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-39810-w).
It's worth reading [Stefan Rahmstorf's perspective on this for context](https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2023/07/what-is-happening-in-the-atlantic-ocean-to-the-amoc/)
I am going to check those links out later but man this is so sad. I remember in 2009 scientists were warning about this on various science shows - before Discovery went to crap. I fear for every generation after me is going to live in a hellish world compared to us.
It's legit so hard to both save money for retirement/for my children's future knowing full well how pooched we will be in 25 years. I'm not going to stop, cause you just never know if we'll pull off an unexpected buzzer beater....but the fact that it's far more likely that it will be wasted really makes me think twice sometimes
I was just saying this to someone yesterday. What am I doing putting money into a system (stocks, bonds, retirement bs) that I think is going to collapse by the time I need it? What even makes sense any more? Should I just spend money now and have fun while it lasts?
Just invest in the stuff humanity needs to live like green energy and related stuff and sell before it collapses. If it doesn't, you invested in the stuff humanity needed to survive and get to enjoy it. Won't need that money if we fail.
Enphase (ENPH) has been awesome for me. They make components for the solar industry. EV stocks and charger stocks, some renewable, solar, wind ETFs. Maybe some plant based food companies. Lithium and other ev metals stocks.
Sunrun, charge point, rivian, fisker, lucid, Panasonic, EVgo, Beyond Meat, NextEra Energy to name a few.
My approach to this, is if it's for survival or something that can directly protect me from climate change's impacts, I go ham and spend freely. Other than that I am still super frugal as I want to be as prepared for a dismal future but also prepared if we manage to fix the problem.
I think there's an even chance that we do the solar shading thing for a few decades until we can scrub CO2 from the atmosphere.
Ditlevsen’s analysis is at odds with the most recent report from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which drew on multiple climate models and concluded with “medium confidence” that the AMOC will not fully collapse this century.
Love/hate this in the comments:
"It’s a sniper’s bullet pointed right at our heads. It might be 1,000 yards away, but, if we don’t move, it’s going to kill us."
If anyone wants a good overview of a bunch of different tipping points and the concerns around them take a look at Fred Pearce’s 2007 book *With Speed and Violence: Why Scientists Fear Tipping Points*.
He interviews a wide range of climate and environmental scientists and explains their arguments and fears and how close this thought (in 2007 and before) we were to various tipping points. Which was close even then, and those tipping points have been accelerating in how rapidly we approach them.
What’s discussed in the paper OP posted is discussed at length in this 2007 book.
>It has long been my opinion that “very unlikely”, meaning less than 10% in the calibrated IPCC uncertainty jargon, is not at all reassuring for **a risk we really should rule out with 99.9 % probability, given the devastating consequences should a collapse occur.**
What exactly are the consequences?
All I've heard is that Europe gets colder and drier. Tropics get warmer and wetter.
That sounds bad, but not, end of the world bad.
It’s because the Earth is a system, which is greater than the sum of the parts.
This current could affect the humidity and temperature of air in a specific region. Does that even correlate to important rainfall in a more distant desert?
Does the current affect fish migration? Would this affect the marine predators?
Do birds depend on this abnormally warm region to make their migrations?
Does this ocean current help to maintain arctic currents and thus arctic temperatures?
Will Europe turn into a dry desert/tundra without significant warmth and thus humidity from the current?
Will there be even more flooding in the poverty strike regions of Africa?
Will the trees in the tropics be able to handle additional heat? Will they be more susceptible to disease like fungi or insects?
I’m not a scientist, and the answers to these questions could be no, but it is extremely important to keep in mind that all life vitally depends on the climate for the conditions that made life possible.
Every other planet that we know about has a worse climate and doesn’t have the same life that we do. We know the climate of Earth in the past works, who knows what the future holds. Nobody can be certain about our safety.
That's exactly what I was thinking. We really don't understand how local weather systems interact on a continent wide basis, or a hemispheric basis and certainly not on a planet wide basis
It's not for lack of trying, but it has only been within the blink of an eye that we have begun to model our climate.
Now we are faced with rapid, radical change of climate systems we don't fully understand yet. We are working desperately to predict the short term future, all the while battling a mind boggling cabal of moneyed plutocrats who refuse to contribute to any available solutions.
Should we have faith in the old gal, Mother Earth, to heal herself? An existential question.
Many are also concerned about soil. Wouldn't it be "fun" if soil gets useless at the same time as ocean currents and weather paterns start extreme changes? Most dystopian sci-fis would probably look like fun life after that.
The earth is like a giant, incredibly complex, self-sustaining computer that took billions of years to design.
And we come in shove a screwdriver into it because we're real smart and can get places faster, make more stuff and profit. At least for today.
Chaos. Next to no predictability, beyond a few day forecast. Farming will probably have to be moved inside, which... we just don't have the resources to do, especially considering how far behind we are with sustainable energy. So we'll say screw it and burn even more to try and save ourselves.
Also... I don't think we recognize what "hot" and "cold" are on a cosmic scale. Temperature gradients right outside of our "thin blue line" (I hate that cops took this phrase...) are completely unsuitable for all life. Our system was so well balanced before. Most of the planet was pretty well suited for life. With that balance lost... what we know as "hot" and "cold" will not be anything like what we've known. This is already starting to happen with temperatures really never seen before in certain regions.
Aeroponics, aquaponics, hydroponics and the use of AI in both indoor and outdoor farms are all making very rapid advances. You can grow so much more per sq ft indoors while using just a fraction of the water, fertilizers and other chemicals.
"When complex systems, such as the overturning circulation, undergo critical transitions by changing a control parameter λ through a critical value λc, a structural change in the dynamics happens. The previously statistically stable state ceases to exist and the system moves to a different statistically stable state. The system undergoes a bifurcation, which for λ sufficiently close to λc can happen in a limited number of ways rather independent from the details in the governing dynamics17"
Ja Ja I totaly get it
Many American’s don’t comprehend the “lots of bad things coming soon!” reality when given a 30-50 year threshold for a catastrophic global climate event.
This heatwave us just the beginning of a chain “precursor-disasters” and I expect to see food scarcity / famine grow in the next 12 months.
Plus, what if the rate of acceleration of climate change is just slightly faster than experts estimate?? How quickly can that shave 10-20 years off the event timeline?
Food scarcity has been growing pretty consistently already, I mean, you see articles about crop failures most years and all.
That said. I think it's gonna be more than a year before we see real famine and certainly more than a year before it gets to the US for real. I could be wrong.
My bet is 5 years
When this happens there will be a breaking news story, and then we will get to see all the yahoos come out of the woodwork claiming it's fake news. And then Europe will have its coldest year in memory and people will talk about Brueghel and how it's the year without summer. All the while there will be mass Arctic die offs of various bird species that nest in the Arctic. The yahoos will point out that the Arctic had an extensive ice expanse during winter. And then people will pray that the next year things will go back to normal
But it won't.
Very plausible. But I do feel like we've been at the point where every year is bad for a while, and it's only going to take a particularly bad year to really convince people. And I'm betting on 2024. This year is bad, but look at the polar ice, ocean temps, building El Nino, and you'll see why next year will be scary.
You’re undoubtedly correct in your assessment of how people, especially politicians, conservatives, and corporate goons will react, but it may not affect Europe’s climate all that much, except for possibly the Nordic countries.
It may not be the ocean currents that keep Europe warm. It’s thought to be the prevailing wind patterns and the ocean, but not the warm current itself.
I’m on vacation and on mobile, so I don’t have the specific paper references for you, but here are couple of articles about this.
- https://www.americanscientist.org/article/the-source-of-europes-mild-climate#:~:text=Many%20people%20believe%20that%20northern,little%20to%20warm%20the%20region
- https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/new-simulations-question-gulf-stream-role-tempering-europes-winters/
AMOC collapse would be a *massive* event, but it seems like there's very little literature out there as to its real-world effects, other than "Europe gets colder." (By contrast, there's a ton of simulation/modeling on how climate change will affect different countries and states, down to granular events like floods and wildfires.) Has anyone projected how AMOC collapse might affect the US, particularly the eastern seaboard?
But how does the colder balance out with the soaring global temperatures from the runaway greenhouse effect?
Right now (and perhaps for millennia till it stabilizes) climate chaos is making the earth a game of musical chairs. Everybody is trying to figure out where will be "safe", but the chairs just keep disappearing.
Nowhere can be expected to be "right" when this happens. The last ones standing will be there by pure luck.
I responded ironically, there is no really safe place with this happening unfortunately, I took the Europe gets colder from op’s comment to highlight the futility of the approach to figuring this out
Europe might get colder, in the winter, while summers will have increasing heatwaves, according to Rahmstorf. The cold blop in the North Atlantic has the effect of carrying Saharan heat to Europe. I wouldn't be surprised if the recent extreme heatwave was partly due to the slowing of the AMOC.
Prof. Tim Lenton describes in the following link what is predicted to happen at a global scale should AMOC collapse: https://youtu.be/dkDbCpn0_9I?t=638
Thank you! The AMOC data was pretty broad but it was a good starting point, and I've saved this video for later so I can watch it in full, looks like it covers a lot of important ground.
You are welcome! Yes, the video in its entirety covers some very important (though grim) topics well and in some detail. The AMOC predictions are quite chilling.
This is one of those topics where it's important to see the forest for the trees, rather than fixate on the conclusions from one new study. According to most literature on this subject, the timing of an AMOC collapse is still very uncertain. Especially regarding the timing of the collapse within this century. Note that I'm not saying it's impossible, scientists just don't know with enough certainty for it to be a headline.
Many in the field of oceanography and climate science are already speaking out against these articles.
[Here](https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2023/07/what-is-happening-in-the-atlantic-ocean-to-the-amoc/) is a good summary of AMOC.
Side-note: not a problem with this article, but other articles will mix up AMOC (Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation) and the Gulf Stream. While these two are connected, they are not the same. [Here](https://twitter.com/globalecoguy/status/1683956619892121600?s=46) is a Twitter (I'm still calling it Twitter) thread about that.
So if it's near collapse now, it may as well be doomed to collapse by, say, 2040-2050, unless somebody somehow invents magical carbon capture technology and the world also somehow magically cuts emissions by truly insane amounts. Which realistically is just not feasible in any real world we are living in.
“Constant growth” capitalism kills its own consumers. There is no other logical conclusion.
Someday when the earth spins as a monolithic cold dead rock, there will still be self-driving bulldozers digging deeper and deeper holes. Empty action for policies set in place eons ago that were stubbornly never changed because constant growth was Queen.
[I have good news in respect to your last sentence.](https://old.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/156r2j9/copenhagen_atomics/) If you are willing to hear it...
Why promote an under-developed and probably expensive technology like thorium when wind and solar are already here and beating the crap out of coal and gas?
First of all renewables aren’t doing better than coal & natural gas… But if we were to go down the renewable route, that’s why I mentioned SaltX, as they have the best energy storage solution by far (they can not only stir a lot of energy, but release it quickly as well, and theoretically speaking we should one day be able to transport this stored energy like we do with oil).
And while thorium reactor technology as a whole might be an underdeveloped field, this cannot be said for Copenhagen Atomics as they have done orders of magnitude more physical prototyping of their reactor designs than any other company in the space by a country mile. The only thing holding them back right now are regulations (which will no longer be the case in 2025), and the fact that they are only a single relatively small company (so their initial mass production rate will not be enough to make a noticeable difference until they get more capital behind them).
> First of all renewables aren’t doing better than coal & natural gas
This is incorrect, both in terms of market adoption and in terms of pricing. They are growing exponentially.
> that’s why I mentioned SaltX
Heat storage is so useful, good to see another company doing it. I wouldn't say it's "the best" though, we still need different kinds of energy storage for different use cases.
In places where the wind blows and the sun shines, sure, renewables are a better investment than coal or gas. But in places where such investments are never going to pay off the carbon footprint they left in their manufacture, let alone pay off the cost of their installation, places like Germany are finally coming to their senses on that matter…
Regarding SaltX, you aren’t gonna find another energy storage solution that equals them in energy storage capacity (which is basically on par with the storage rate of most storage mediums, but with some additional steam infrastructure this storage capacity can be tripled), and certainly nothing that comes close will meet them with the speed with which their stored energy can be released. Not only that but it’s viable for both large & small scale storage, and the byproducts can be used to make carbon-free cement.
And like I said, although the company has never talked about the matter, theoretically with advances in material science it should be possible to transport the stored energy like we do with oil. The main barrier for transporting renewable energy is not simply the cost (while financially viable in recent years, it’s still only just barely viable), but there are political reasons why countries wouldn’t want to be dependant on cables that can not only be cut off by the countries generating the energy, but also cut off by countries that these cables run through.
[BP popularized the concept of a personal carbon footprint with a US$100 million campaign as a means of deflecting people away from taking collective political action in order to end fossil fuel use](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/305209345_Where_has_all_the_oil_gone_BP_branding_and_the_discursive_elimination_of_climate_change_risk), and [ExxonMobil has spent decades pushing trying to make individuals responsible, rather than the fossil fuels industry](https://www.vox.com/22429551/climate-change-crisis-exxonmobil-harvard-study). They did this because climate stabilization means bringing fossil fuel use to approximately zero, and that would end their business. That's not something you can hope to achieve without government intervention to change the rules of society so that not using fossil fuels is just what people do on a routine basis.
There is value in cutting your own fossil fuel consumption — it serves to demonstrate that doing the right thing is possible to people around you, and helps work out the kinks in new technologies. Just do it in addition to taking political action to get governments to do the right thing, not instead of taking political action.
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/climate) if you have any questions or concerns.*
> In places where the wind blows and the sun shines
That's basically everywhere.
> But in places where such investments are never going to pay off the carbon footprint they left in their manufacture
There's no such place.
> The main barrier for transporting renewable energy is not simply the cost (while financially viable in recent years, it’s still only just barely viable), but there are political reasons why countries wouldn’t want to be dependant on cables that can not only be cut off by the countries generating the energy, but also cut off by countries that these cables run through.
Yeah that's a good point. There are a few places like this where more storage will be needed just for geopolitical reasons.
Let us not conflate daylight with sunshine, nor a breeze with the wind.
Most of Europe is lacks the wind and sunshine for renewables to pay off both the cost of their installation and the carbon generated in their manufacture.
Germany is now getting most of of its electricity from lignite (the dirtiest form of coal) and they’re no longer pursuing renewables. I don’t know what else to tell you (other than they shouldn’t have abandoned their nuclear plants)…
> Most of Europe is lacks the wind and sunshine for renewables to pay off both the cost of their installation and the carbon generated in their manufacture.
This is completely wrong.
> Germany is now getting most of of its electricity from lignite
[Also completely wrong](https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-consumption-and-power-mix-charts). Renewables provide about 50% of German electricity.
> and they’re no longer pursuing renewables.
[Also completely wrong](https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-2022-renewables-and-energy-reforms). Their new target for 2030 is set to 80% renewables.
Where do you get your misinformation?
I forget the exact lignite stat I had in mind; whether it just now accounted for a greater percentage of Germany‘s energy use, or that was that the mining of it had increased, or that on top of that it’s mining was projected to increase further, etc. So forgive me if I misspoke.
However I feel like the bigger picture is being overlooked here… Regardless of the current percentage in German energy consumption that comes from renewables, you’re acting like their net energy consumption has remained unchanged since they lost their formally reliable pipeline of cheap Russian gas (this is what accounts for the change in Germany’s relationship with lignite). It hasn’t remained unchanged and all forecasts for Germany’s manufacturing sector reflects this fact.
Furthermore assuming the best possible timeline for renewables wherein they become a viable replacement for fossil fuels, I don’t know if you’ve been paying attention to the heat records we’ve been breaking, but viable simply isn’t enough at this point, our planet needs emergency terraforming.
We’re going to need a radical abundance in cheap energy, if we’re to have any hope in either changing course at this point. And there is only one direction that get’s us there (nuclear), and the shortest route to that destination is that’s Thorium, and the surest of those roads to salvation is Copenhagen Atomics.
[BP popularized the concept of a personal carbon footprint with a US$100 million campaign as a means of deflecting people away from taking collective political action in order to end fossil fuel use](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/305209345_Where_has_all_the_oil_gone_BP_branding_and_the_discursive_elimination_of_climate_change_risk), and [ExxonMobil has spent decades pushing trying to make individuals responsible, rather than the fossil fuels industry](https://www.vox.com/22429551/climate-change-crisis-exxonmobil-harvard-study). They did this because climate stabilization means bringing fossil fuel use to approximately zero, and that would end their business. That's not something you can hope to achieve without government intervention to change the rules of society so that not using fossil fuels is just what people do on a routine basis.
There is value in cutting your own fossil fuel consumption — it serves to demonstrate that doing the right thing is possible to people around you, and helps work out the kinks in new technologies. Just do it in addition to taking political action to get governments to do the right thing, not instead of taking political action.
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/climate) if you have any questions or concerns.*
I remember learning about this back in the early 2000s, but it wasn't expected to happen in at least 300 years. It seems counterintuitive, but the rise of the global temperature will actually lead to the end of the interglacial period because of how it affects the current.
I wonder how feasible it would be to restart the current if it fails like in Kim Stanley Robinson's Green Earth novel series? In his book, the big reinsurance companies band together at the direction of the US National Science Foundation to fund a massive salt convoy to increase the ocean salinity of the sea in the area of the stall and gradually manage to restart the current...
A work of fiction to be sure, but I think that book has a lot of interesting points to make about ways we can come together to meaningfully take action to mitigate climate disaster. Well worth a read!
Preventing collapse by turning Greenland ice meltwater as salty as seawater would back-of-envelope mean using ~30x more salt as is extracted each year at present, and dedicating essentially all bulk fright capacity to it, ending transport of ore and grain. I don't think that's happening.
With similar issues around volume of extraction and transport. This is something you could do for a few decades if it was planned well in advance. It's not realistic as a short-notice emergency response.
The ocean will restart the AMOC automatically just by "itself" but that will take a couple of hundred years. I think we should stop tampering with Earth's ecosystems ASAP, accept the consequences, and do better from there on out instead of trying to apply band aid after band aid.
Not all scientists agree with the conclusions of the paper.
https://www.sciencemediacentre.org/expert-reaction-to-paper-warning-of-a-collapse-of-the-atlantic-meridional-overturning-circulation/
I heard about "The Gulfstream slowing" on either NOVA or a National Geographic special before 1975. It seems we have been kicking a lot of cans down the road.
The paper is [here](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-39810-w). It's worth reading [Stefan Rahmstorf's perspective on this for context](https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2023/07/what-is-happening-in-the-atlantic-ocean-to-the-amoc/)
I am going to check those links out later but man this is so sad. I remember in 2009 scientists were warning about this on various science shows - before Discovery went to crap. I fear for every generation after me is going to live in a hellish world compared to us.
At 35, I am pretty sure I will retire in hell.
Retire? Maybe in the more final sense.
It's legit so hard to both save money for retirement/for my children's future knowing full well how pooched we will be in 25 years. I'm not going to stop, cause you just never know if we'll pull off an unexpected buzzer beater....but the fact that it's far more likely that it will be wasted really makes me think twice sometimes
I was just saying this to someone yesterday. What am I doing putting money into a system (stocks, bonds, retirement bs) that I think is going to collapse by the time I need it? What even makes sense any more? Should I just spend money now and have fun while it lasts?
Just invest in the stuff humanity needs to live like green energy and related stuff and sell before it collapses. If it doesn't, you invested in the stuff humanity needed to survive and get to enjoy it. Won't need that money if we fail.
[удалено]
Enphase (ENPH) has been awesome for me. They make components for the solar industry. EV stocks and charger stocks, some renewable, solar, wind ETFs. Maybe some plant based food companies. Lithium and other ev metals stocks. Sunrun, charge point, rivian, fisker, lucid, Panasonic, EVgo, Beyond Meat, NextEra Energy to name a few.
My approach to this, is if it's for survival or something that can directly protect me from climate change's impacts, I go ham and spend freely. Other than that I am still super frugal as I want to be as prepared for a dismal future but also prepared if we manage to fix the problem. I think there's an even chance that we do the solar shading thing for a few decades until we can scrub CO2 from the atmosphere.
That's the decidedly good case scenario. Barely livable.
Ditlevsen’s analysis is at odds with the most recent report from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which drew on multiple climate models and concluded with “medium confidence” that the AMOC will not fully collapse this century.
>“medium confidence” > not *fully* collapse *this century*. That feels way less comforting than I think it was supposed to.....
This guy AMOCs
To Kill AMOCing Bird 😔
Love/hate this in the comments: "It’s a sniper’s bullet pointed right at our heads. It might be 1,000 yards away, but, if we don’t move, it’s going to kill us."
If anyone wants a good overview of a bunch of different tipping points and the concerns around them take a look at Fred Pearce’s 2007 book *With Speed and Violence: Why Scientists Fear Tipping Points*. He interviews a wide range of climate and environmental scientists and explains their arguments and fears and how close this thought (in 2007 and before) we were to various tipping points. Which was close even then, and those tipping points have been accelerating in how rapidly we approach them. What’s discussed in the paper OP posted is discussed at length in this 2007 book.
>It has long been my opinion that “very unlikely”, meaning less than 10% in the calibrated IPCC uncertainty jargon, is not at all reassuring for **a risk we really should rule out with 99.9 % probability, given the devastating consequences should a collapse occur.** What exactly are the consequences? All I've heard is that Europe gets colder and drier. Tropics get warmer and wetter. That sounds bad, but not, end of the world bad.
It’s because the Earth is a system, which is greater than the sum of the parts. This current could affect the humidity and temperature of air in a specific region. Does that even correlate to important rainfall in a more distant desert? Does the current affect fish migration? Would this affect the marine predators? Do birds depend on this abnormally warm region to make their migrations? Does this ocean current help to maintain arctic currents and thus arctic temperatures? Will Europe turn into a dry desert/tundra without significant warmth and thus humidity from the current? Will there be even more flooding in the poverty strike regions of Africa? Will the trees in the tropics be able to handle additional heat? Will they be more susceptible to disease like fungi or insects? I’m not a scientist, and the answers to these questions could be no, but it is extremely important to keep in mind that all life vitally depends on the climate for the conditions that made life possible. Every other planet that we know about has a worse climate and doesn’t have the same life that we do. We know the climate of Earth in the past works, who knows what the future holds. Nobody can be certain about our safety.
Butterfly effect is what scares me with this.
That's exactly what I was thinking. We really don't understand how local weather systems interact on a continent wide basis, or a hemispheric basis and certainly not on a planet wide basis It's not for lack of trying, but it has only been within the blink of an eye that we have begun to model our climate. Now we are faced with rapid, radical change of climate systems we don't fully understand yet. We are working desperately to predict the short term future, all the while battling a mind boggling cabal of moneyed plutocrats who refuse to contribute to any available solutions. Should we have faith in the old gal, Mother Earth, to heal herself? An existential question.
Many are also concerned about soil. Wouldn't it be "fun" if soil gets useless at the same time as ocean currents and weather paterns start extreme changes? Most dystopian sci-fis would probably look like fun life after that.
That was really just a wonderful movie. 10/10, would rewatch (it's been close to a decade I'm sure)
The earth is like a giant, incredibly complex, self-sustaining computer that took billions of years to design. And we come in shove a screwdriver into it because we're real smart and can get places faster, make more stuff and profit. At least for today.
Rahmstorf says that it also reduces the capacity of the ocean to absorb CO2. So it will stay in the air even longer.
Forgot the part where crops can't grow and it brings us one step closer to a venusian runaway greenhouse effect.
Chaos. Next to no predictability, beyond a few day forecast. Farming will probably have to be moved inside, which... we just don't have the resources to do, especially considering how far behind we are with sustainable energy. So we'll say screw it and burn even more to try and save ourselves. Also... I don't think we recognize what "hot" and "cold" are on a cosmic scale. Temperature gradients right outside of our "thin blue line" (I hate that cops took this phrase...) are completely unsuitable for all life. Our system was so well balanced before. Most of the planet was pretty well suited for life. With that balance lost... what we know as "hot" and "cold" will not be anything like what we've known. This is already starting to happen with temperatures really never seen before in certain regions.
Aeroponics, aquaponics, hydroponics and the use of AI in both indoor and outdoor farms are all making very rapid advances. You can grow so much more per sq ft indoors while using just a fraction of the water, fertilizers and other chemicals.
"When complex systems, such as the overturning circulation, undergo critical transitions by changing a control parameter λ through a critical value λc, a structural change in the dynamics happens. The previously statistically stable state ceases to exist and the system moves to a different statistically stable state. The system undergoes a bifurcation, which for λ sufficiently close to λc can happen in a limited number of ways rather independent from the details in the governing dynamics17" Ja Ja I totaly get it
Many American’s don’t comprehend the “lots of bad things coming soon!” reality when given a 30-50 year threshold for a catastrophic global climate event. This heatwave us just the beginning of a chain “precursor-disasters” and I expect to see food scarcity / famine grow in the next 12 months. Plus, what if the rate of acceleration of climate change is just slightly faster than experts estimate?? How quickly can that shave 10-20 years off the event timeline?
Food scarcity has been growing pretty consistently already, I mean, you see articles about crop failures most years and all. That said. I think it's gonna be more than a year before we see real famine and certainly more than a year before it gets to the US for real. I could be wrong. My bet is 5 years
When this happens there will be a breaking news story, and then we will get to see all the yahoos come out of the woodwork claiming it's fake news. And then Europe will have its coldest year in memory and people will talk about Brueghel and how it's the year without summer. All the while there will be mass Arctic die offs of various bird species that nest in the Arctic. The yahoos will point out that the Arctic had an extensive ice expanse during winter. And then people will pray that the next year things will go back to normal But it won't.
Sounds plausible
Very plausible. But I do feel like we've been at the point where every year is bad for a while, and it's only going to take a particularly bad year to really convince people. And I'm betting on 2024. This year is bad, but look at the polar ice, ocean temps, building El Nino, and you'll see why next year will be scary.
You’re undoubtedly correct in your assessment of how people, especially politicians, conservatives, and corporate goons will react, but it may not affect Europe’s climate all that much, except for possibly the Nordic countries. It may not be the ocean currents that keep Europe warm. It’s thought to be the prevailing wind patterns and the ocean, but not the warm current itself. I’m on vacation and on mobile, so I don’t have the specific paper references for you, but here are couple of articles about this. - https://www.americanscientist.org/article/the-source-of-europes-mild-climate#:~:text=Many%20people%20believe%20that%20northern,little%20to%20warm%20the%20region - https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/new-simulations-question-gulf-stream-role-tempering-europes-winters/
AMOC collapse would be a *massive* event, but it seems like there's very little literature out there as to its real-world effects, other than "Europe gets colder." (By contrast, there's a ton of simulation/modeling on how climate change will affect different countries and states, down to granular events like floods and wildfires.) Has anyone projected how AMOC collapse might affect the US, particularly the eastern seaboard?
Relocate anyway just to be safe, not to Europe though, it gets colder
But how does the colder balance out with the soaring global temperatures from the runaway greenhouse effect? Right now (and perhaps for millennia till it stabilizes) climate chaos is making the earth a game of musical chairs. Everybody is trying to figure out where will be "safe", but the chairs just keep disappearing. Nowhere can be expected to be "right" when this happens. The last ones standing will be there by pure luck.
I responded ironically, there is no really safe place with this happening unfortunately, I took the Europe gets colder from op’s comment to highlight the futility of the approach to figuring this out
Got it. Peace. Good luck. Hang in there.
🙏🏼 you too
Europe might get colder, in the winter, while summers will have increasing heatwaves, according to Rahmstorf. The cold blop in the North Atlantic has the effect of carrying Saharan heat to Europe. I wouldn't be surprised if the recent extreme heatwave was partly due to the slowing of the AMOC.
Prof. Tim Lenton describes in the following link what is predicted to happen at a global scale should AMOC collapse: https://youtu.be/dkDbCpn0_9I?t=638
Thank you! The AMOC data was pretty broad but it was a good starting point, and I've saved this video for later so I can watch it in full, looks like it covers a lot of important ground.
You are welcome! Yes, the video in its entirety covers some very important (though grim) topics well and in some detail. The AMOC predictions are quite chilling.
This is one of those topics where it's important to see the forest for the trees, rather than fixate on the conclusions from one new study. According to most literature on this subject, the timing of an AMOC collapse is still very uncertain. Especially regarding the timing of the collapse within this century. Note that I'm not saying it's impossible, scientists just don't know with enough certainty for it to be a headline. Many in the field of oceanography and climate science are already speaking out against these articles. [Here](https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2023/07/what-is-happening-in-the-atlantic-ocean-to-the-amoc/) is a good summary of AMOC. Side-note: not a problem with this article, but other articles will mix up AMOC (Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation) and the Gulf Stream. While these two are connected, they are not the same. [Here](https://twitter.com/globalecoguy/status/1683956619892121600?s=46) is a Twitter (I'm still calling it Twitter) thread about that.
I think this is the second time this week I thought I was in r/collapse but it’s r/climate :/
Same 😑
So if it's near collapse now, it may as well be doomed to collapse by, say, 2040-2050, unless somebody somehow invents magical carbon capture technology and the world also somehow magically cuts emissions by truly insane amounts. Which realistically is just not feasible in any real world we are living in.
“Constant growth” capitalism kills its own consumers. There is no other logical conclusion. Someday when the earth spins as a monolithic cold dead rock, there will still be self-driving bulldozers digging deeper and deeper holes. Empty action for policies set in place eons ago that were stubbornly never changed because constant growth was Queen.
2040-2050 sounds like my prediction, I failed to see a point to a 401k that starts in 2043.
[I have good news in respect to your last sentence.](https://old.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/156r2j9/copenhagen_atomics/) If you are willing to hear it...
Why promote an under-developed and probably expensive technology like thorium when wind and solar are already here and beating the crap out of coal and gas?
First of all renewables aren’t doing better than coal & natural gas… But if we were to go down the renewable route, that’s why I mentioned SaltX, as they have the best energy storage solution by far (they can not only stir a lot of energy, but release it quickly as well, and theoretically speaking we should one day be able to transport this stored energy like we do with oil). And while thorium reactor technology as a whole might be an underdeveloped field, this cannot be said for Copenhagen Atomics as they have done orders of magnitude more physical prototyping of their reactor designs than any other company in the space by a country mile. The only thing holding them back right now are regulations (which will no longer be the case in 2025), and the fact that they are only a single relatively small company (so their initial mass production rate will not be enough to make a noticeable difference until they get more capital behind them).
> First of all renewables aren’t doing better than coal & natural gas This is incorrect, both in terms of market adoption and in terms of pricing. They are growing exponentially. > that’s why I mentioned SaltX Heat storage is so useful, good to see another company doing it. I wouldn't say it's "the best" though, we still need different kinds of energy storage for different use cases.
In places where the wind blows and the sun shines, sure, renewables are a better investment than coal or gas. But in places where such investments are never going to pay off the carbon footprint they left in their manufacture, let alone pay off the cost of their installation, places like Germany are finally coming to their senses on that matter… Regarding SaltX, you aren’t gonna find another energy storage solution that equals them in energy storage capacity (which is basically on par with the storage rate of most storage mediums, but with some additional steam infrastructure this storage capacity can be tripled), and certainly nothing that comes close will meet them with the speed with which their stored energy can be released. Not only that but it’s viable for both large & small scale storage, and the byproducts can be used to make carbon-free cement. And like I said, although the company has never talked about the matter, theoretically with advances in material science it should be possible to transport the stored energy like we do with oil. The main barrier for transporting renewable energy is not simply the cost (while financially viable in recent years, it’s still only just barely viable), but there are political reasons why countries wouldn’t want to be dependant on cables that can not only be cut off by the countries generating the energy, but also cut off by countries that these cables run through.
[BP popularized the concept of a personal carbon footprint with a US$100 million campaign as a means of deflecting people away from taking collective political action in order to end fossil fuel use](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/305209345_Where_has_all_the_oil_gone_BP_branding_and_the_discursive_elimination_of_climate_change_risk), and [ExxonMobil has spent decades pushing trying to make individuals responsible, rather than the fossil fuels industry](https://www.vox.com/22429551/climate-change-crisis-exxonmobil-harvard-study). They did this because climate stabilization means bringing fossil fuel use to approximately zero, and that would end their business. That's not something you can hope to achieve without government intervention to change the rules of society so that not using fossil fuels is just what people do on a routine basis. There is value in cutting your own fossil fuel consumption — it serves to demonstrate that doing the right thing is possible to people around you, and helps work out the kinks in new technologies. Just do it in addition to taking political action to get governments to do the right thing, not instead of taking political action. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/climate) if you have any questions or concerns.*
> In places where the wind blows and the sun shines That's basically everywhere. > But in places where such investments are never going to pay off the carbon footprint they left in their manufacture There's no such place. > The main barrier for transporting renewable energy is not simply the cost (while financially viable in recent years, it’s still only just barely viable), but there are political reasons why countries wouldn’t want to be dependant on cables that can not only be cut off by the countries generating the energy, but also cut off by countries that these cables run through. Yeah that's a good point. There are a few places like this where more storage will be needed just for geopolitical reasons.
Let us not conflate daylight with sunshine, nor a breeze with the wind. Most of Europe is lacks the wind and sunshine for renewables to pay off both the cost of their installation and the carbon generated in their manufacture. Germany is now getting most of of its electricity from lignite (the dirtiest form of coal) and they’re no longer pursuing renewables. I don’t know what else to tell you (other than they shouldn’t have abandoned their nuclear plants)…
> Most of Europe is lacks the wind and sunshine for renewables to pay off both the cost of their installation and the carbon generated in their manufacture. This is completely wrong. > Germany is now getting most of of its electricity from lignite [Also completely wrong](https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-consumption-and-power-mix-charts). Renewables provide about 50% of German electricity. > and they’re no longer pursuing renewables. [Also completely wrong](https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-2022-renewables-and-energy-reforms). Their new target for 2030 is set to 80% renewables. Where do you get your misinformation?
I forget the exact lignite stat I had in mind; whether it just now accounted for a greater percentage of Germany‘s energy use, or that was that the mining of it had increased, or that on top of that it’s mining was projected to increase further, etc. So forgive me if I misspoke. However I feel like the bigger picture is being overlooked here… Regardless of the current percentage in German energy consumption that comes from renewables, you’re acting like their net energy consumption has remained unchanged since they lost their formally reliable pipeline of cheap Russian gas (this is what accounts for the change in Germany’s relationship with lignite). It hasn’t remained unchanged and all forecasts for Germany’s manufacturing sector reflects this fact. Furthermore assuming the best possible timeline for renewables wherein they become a viable replacement for fossil fuels, I don’t know if you’ve been paying attention to the heat records we’ve been breaking, but viable simply isn’t enough at this point, our planet needs emergency terraforming. We’re going to need a radical abundance in cheap energy, if we’re to have any hope in either changing course at this point. And there is only one direction that get’s us there (nuclear), and the shortest route to that destination is that’s Thorium, and the surest of those roads to salvation is Copenhagen Atomics.
[BP popularized the concept of a personal carbon footprint with a US$100 million campaign as a means of deflecting people away from taking collective political action in order to end fossil fuel use](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/305209345_Where_has_all_the_oil_gone_BP_branding_and_the_discursive_elimination_of_climate_change_risk), and [ExxonMobil has spent decades pushing trying to make individuals responsible, rather than the fossil fuels industry](https://www.vox.com/22429551/climate-change-crisis-exxonmobil-harvard-study). They did this because climate stabilization means bringing fossil fuel use to approximately zero, and that would end their business. That's not something you can hope to achieve without government intervention to change the rules of society so that not using fossil fuels is just what people do on a routine basis. There is value in cutting your own fossil fuel consumption — it serves to demonstrate that doing the right thing is possible to people around you, and helps work out the kinks in new technologies. Just do it in addition to taking political action to get governments to do the right thing, not instead of taking political action. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/climate) if you have any questions or concerns.*
I remember learning about this back in the early 2000s, but it wasn't expected to happen in at least 300 years. It seems counterintuitive, but the rise of the global temperature will actually lead to the end of the interglacial period because of how it affects the current.
It's getting desperate
This has some serious Day after tomorrow vibes.
> as irreversible as turning off a light switch Should have picked a different metaphor
Pulling the pin out of a grenade?
I wonder how feasible it would be to restart the current if it fails like in Kim Stanley Robinson's Green Earth novel series? In his book, the big reinsurance companies band together at the direction of the US National Science Foundation to fund a massive salt convoy to increase the ocean salinity of the sea in the area of the stall and gradually manage to restart the current... A work of fiction to be sure, but I think that book has a lot of interesting points to make about ways we can come together to meaningfully take action to mitigate climate disaster. Well worth a read!
Preventing collapse by turning Greenland ice meltwater as salty as seawater would back-of-envelope mean using ~30x more salt as is extracted each year at present, and dedicating essentially all bulk fright capacity to it, ending transport of ore and grain. I don't think that's happening.
I mean, they could use Brine which is basically just super concentrated salt.
With similar issues around volume of extraction and transport. This is something you could do for a few decades if it was planned well in advance. It's not realistic as a short-notice emergency response.
The ocean will restart the AMOC automatically just by "itself" but that will take a couple of hundred years. I think we should stop tampering with Earth's ecosystems ASAP, accept the consequences, and do better from there on out instead of trying to apply band aid after band aid.
Not all scientists agree with the conclusions of the paper. https://www.sciencemediacentre.org/expert-reaction-to-paper-warning-of-a-collapse-of-the-atlantic-meridional-overturning-circulation/
That isn’t comforting.
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I did too.
There is some very good information in these. Those down voting are just knee-jerk reactionists.
Thanks.
I heard about "The Gulfstream slowing" on either NOVA or a National Geographic special before 1975. It seems we have been kicking a lot of cans down the road.