A vital ocean current system that helps regulate the Northern Hemisphere’s climate could collapse anytime from 2025 and unleash climate chaos, a controversial new study warns.
The Atlantic Meridional Ocean Current (AMOC), which includes the Gulf Stream, governs the climate by bringing warm, tropical waters north and cold water south.
But researchers now say the AMOC may be veering toward total breakdown between 2025 and 2095, causing temperatures to plummet, ocean ecosystems to collapse and storms to proliferate around the world. However, some scientists have cautioned that the new research comes with some big caveats.
The AMOC can exist in two stable states: a stronger, faster one that we rely upon today, and another that is much slower and weaker. Previous estimates predicted that the current would probably switch to its weaker mode sometime in the next century.
Related: Gulf Stream could be veering toward irreversible collapse, a new analysis warns
But human-caused climate change may push the AMOC to a critical tipping point sooner rather than later, researchers predicted in a new study, published Tuesday (July 25) in the journal Nature Communications.
“The expected tipping point — given that we continue business as usual with greenhouse gas emissions — is much earlier than we expected,” co-author Susanne Ditlevsen, a professor of statistics and stochastic models in biology at the University of Copenhagen, told Live Science.
“It was not a result where we said: ‘Oh, yeah, here we have it’. We were actually bewildered.”
I think this is really the most terrifying thing on climate change that I’ve read recently. If the Gulf Stream collapses, we are well and truly screwed, and I don’t see how we stop it.
It’s so infuriating knowing we could have collectively stopped things, like we did with the ozone layer in the 80s and 90s, but there was no financial incentive to do so, like there was with getting rid of CFCs (there was a cheaper alternative that had just been developed iirc), so politicians and companies have done exactly jack and shit.
I don’t think it’s that suitable alternatives that could make a lot of headway into limiting the problem dont exist, it’s more that a lot of people are making a lot of money from the status quo and have a vested interest in ensuring the status quo remains. You can bet your bottom dollar that if those people had found a way to continue the gravy train with the alternatives then they would. Eventually they are going to have to consider that if society collapses due to their actions that the currency they are accumulating will be worthless without the societies that dictate its value. I don’t think that will happen until we start seeing some of the climate change chickens come home to roost. It’s going to be unpleasant for a lot of people and might be too late.