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The Gulf Stream is responsible for the temperate climate of Europe which enables the swathe of farmland that it has. A slowdown is expected to lead to a temper
by XorNot 3y ago
The Gulf Stream is responsible for the temperate climate of Europe which enables the swathe of farmland that it has.
A slowdown is expected to lead to a temperature drop from artic air being able to circulate further down, which would shorten growing seasons and probably change farmland distribution.
The effect of this happening over individual human generations in an environment where established farmland is hundreds to thousands of years old would be considerably expensive to adapt to.
- non-chalad 3y agoHow did humanity respond the last time this happened?
- VelesDude 3y agoThere is no history of this happening before, at least not on the time frames we are talking about here. This is thousands of years of change in decades. It isn't so much just the change but the pace that is the issue. Like how jumping off a building and taking the elevator achieve the same amount of change but on a very different time frame and thus very different results.
- non-chalad 3y agoDo we know how the Gulf Stream worked during the last ice age maximum, when the Rhine river still flowed over land-locked British Channel (1)? 1. https://www.arcgis.com/home/item.html?id=f1e7378b962d42168fdefec3b6eb8b5f https://www.arcgis.com/home/item.html?id=f1e7378b962d42168fd...
- VelesDude 3y agoThat is a good question but I suspect we wouldn't know. Just educated guesses and I cannot find those at the moment. I think the other big issue is that back then we didn't have industrial civilization and high level agriculture dependent on specific environmental factors.
- ang_cire 3y agoWe weren't agrarian back then, we were still hunting stuff with sticks and simple stone tools (12,000 years ago/ 10,000 BCE).