Scientists are sounding the alarm that a crucial component of the planet’s climate system is in gradual decline and could one day reach a tipping point that would radically alter global weather patterns.
The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC, is a system of ocean currents that circulate water in the Atlantic Ocean like a conveyor belt, helping to redistribute heat and regulate global and regional climates. New research, however, warns that the AMOC is weakening under a warming climate, and could potentially suffer a dangerous and abrupt collapse with worldwide consequences.
“This is bad news for the climate system and humanity,” researchers from Utrecht University’s Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Research wrote in a new study published in the journal Science Advances.
Won’t somebody think about the profits?
tipping point scenarios are very horrifying. And all the global warming deniers will probably be like “but it wasn’t because of global warming it was because this ocean current collapsed!”
You should try to understand others more, instead of building strawmen to give yourself an excuse to feel smug without challenging your ideas. Among the larger concerns that people have with the messaging on climate change is how the world’s largest polluters, China and India, are always completely ignored. It strikes people that, if it really were such a massive and immediate threat, then it would be completely irrational to ignore the massive contributions those economies are making to the problem.
Canada, for example, could completely stop existing tomorrow and it wouldn’t make even the smallest dent in global emissions. On top of that, life in a winter climate such as ours requires significantly more emissions simply to sustain the basics required for living, such as heat, and yet many of the very same people talking about the dangers of climate change are also importing massive quantities of people from nations with warm climates where people can much more easily live with little to no emissions.
All things considered, the arguments presented simply do not sound honest to many people.
But on the other hand China and India are the largest polluters because people everywhere on Earth demand to consume more and more. If you renew your wardrobe every year or buy every slightly interesting junk you see in Alibaba then you are a part of the problem.
Moreover not believing in climate change is very different from not believing the main polluters aren’t this or that.
Moreover not believing in climate change is very different from not believing the main polluters aren’t this or that.
That’s my point though. when you hand wave away every dissenting voice the way the commenter I replied too did, you’re not understanding a very large segment of opposition to climate change initiatives, and therefore are incapable of meaningfully engaging on the issue. And there are those who encourage this behaviour in an attempt to isolate us within partisan silos, to make it impossible for anyone to be an active participant in issues which affect us all.
Kinda funny to call out a logical fallacy and then immediately commit an ad hominem (whataboutism) fallacy. Your argument does not change the fact that this is happening and that we aren’t doing everything we can to prevent it. No one involved in this issue is ignoring that China and India are part of the problem, there’s just nothing we can do short of war or economic pressures. War is out of the question because no one would survive to fix the planet anyway, so economic pressure it is, which would once again require us to do something.
It strikes people that, if it really were such a massive and immediate threat, then it would be completely irrational to ignore the massive contributions those economies are making to the problem.
It’s because “these economies” are everyone’s economies.
The world outsourced its slave labor and environmental disregard for regulations to two places, and you think it’s sus that the world is hush hush on criticizing themselves?
Yes I do think it’s sus when the very same people who are screaming about an impending apocalypse, and the need to hamstring every other economy, pretend to see nothing at all wrong with China and India producing such vast quantities of emissions. It’s sus as fuck.
The gulf stream is weakening and could collapse too. I’m tired of living in interesting times.
Why do you think the ultra rich are building themselves doomsday bunkers? Conflict and disaster are coming.
They believe the science they’re asking you to ignore. They also believe they’re not planning to stop anything.
Which shows why obsecenely rich people need to be kept at bay. Anyone who builds a doomsday bunker while profiting off the destruction of the climate is a genocidal mass murderer who enjoys killing people.
Living in a doomsday bunker is so much fucking worse than living in a sustainable society, while being just very rich instead of obsecenely rich.
It’s not just immorality of it, it’s the absolutely fucked logic of it. How many of them have actually thought through the scenario in which they have to actually use their doomsday bunker? How long will their supplies last? How many people they pay to help them would still do so after the value of money drops to nothing? They won’t last long.
Anyone else feeling deflated?
On the bright side, it says in the article they figure there’s a 95% chance this will not happen in the next 75 years, and that we don’t know enough about the natural variability in the current to draw up any significant conclusions. They said the last time the current shut down was after the last ice age, when a significantly larger amount of freshwater melted into the oceans than is melting today
Good article; this news has been making the rounds for quite some time, but this article actually goes into more thorough detail re: what various effects we might see worldwide.
