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Scientists warn Atlantic current at risk of shutting down
- kocsonya 5mo agoHot take on HN, but techno-optimism sounds so stupid when it comes to climate change... You can't engineer macro climate/ecology, since capital has no interest in human and it's surrounding environment balanced cohabitation.
- john_alan 5mo agoClimate also doesn't change in macro over a lifetime. It's very real, but the notion that it's changing over a 5 year period is nonsense. things aren't "shutting off".
- hiddencost 5mo agoWishful thinking... I wonder how people like you end up so hostile to experts.
- john_alan 5mo ago[flagged]
- xfce4 5mo agoso loud and wrong
- azan_ 5mo agoWell, typically people who make claims like yours are actual NPCs, just with opposite view. I'm sure you did not actually study models and find flaws with them but just vibe with people who say there's no climate change more. To deny there is climate change, you've got to actually deny what you can observe with your bare eyes and instead value more what you've read from climate change deniers, which is the most NPC thing you can do.
- jaapz 5mo agoClimate has changed over a lifetime though.
- john_alan 5mo ago[flagged]
- TimorousBestie 5mo agoIt’s rude to demand a citation when you’ve pre-committed to disbelieving it.
- john_alan 5mo ago[dead]
- Centigonal 5mo agohttps://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/climate-change-global-temperature https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/...
- energy123 5mo agoAverage temperatures keep going up. That's not binary/state-transition change but it's measurable.
- adrian_b 5mo agoSee my other comment above. No citation is needed when you see the changes with your own eyes, which happened at least in Europe, where I live.
- haunter 5mo agoAre you a vault dweller?
- rolph 5mo agothis is not unsupported anecdote
- adrian_b 5mo agoI am old enough to have witnessed how the climate has completely changed in Europe, where I live. In the same place where I live now, when I was young there was permanent snow cover for 3 to 4 months. During the last 10 years, there have been years with no snow and in the others a little snow has been present for 3 or 4 days of a year, when it melted the second day after falling. I have not used again my winter boots and my winter jackets for the last 15 years or more. This is really a huge change during less than a human lifetime.
- grey-area 5mo agoBetter keep those winter clothes in case the current shuts down.
- john_alan 5mo agoWhat you've said is emotionally compelling, but scientifically very weak. Personal recollection is selective and location-specific. You’ve described a memory, not established a mechanism. What you perceive as change isn't macro, it's micro. It doesn't mean macro change isn't happening, but it's not happening on our timescale. I'm 50 FWIW.
- koolala 5mo agoWhat are you considering 'macro' climate change to be then? The mechanism they described was warming climate.
- nickserv 5mo ago> it's not happening on our timescale. Talk to anyone over 30 and they'll tell you the climate has already changed. Well anyone that doesn't have a political agenda or shares in ExxonMobil.
- _fizz_buzz_ 5mo agoEven ExxonMobil scientists came to the conclusion. They made an internal study in the 70s and it was actually incredibly solid: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abk0063 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abk0063
- wongarsu 5mo agoLooking back at the amount of snowfall I saw as a kid and the amount of snowfall I see now in my 30s, or at the number of hot summer days ... I find it hard to claim that climate is not changing over a lifetime. 20 years isn't even a lifetime, that's like 1/4th of a lifetime Maybe climate is more stable wherever you live
- SoftTalker 5mo agoThere's a problem with memories. You can have a snowy week and remember it as the entire winter, if it affected you in particularly memorable ways. Kids usually get out of school and play building snowmen and having snowball fights. When I was a kid in the midwest USA, 100 degrees in the summer happened every once in a while. Still does. July and August were always hot. Still are. As a kid the heat didn't bother me so much, I'd go out and play in the sprinkler or go to the pool. Now, I've got to wear clothes and work. Makes the heat more noticable.
- array_key_first 5mo agoBut we have undeniable evidence that the number of record highs to record lows has been increasing dramatically over the past few decades. It's just measurement, there's no magic behind it. Summers are actually hotter and winters are actually warmer on average, that's real.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- Izkata 5mo agoLikewise in the winter, as a kid in the 90s I remember my dad wondering if we'd have a white Christmas (wondering if snow would fall before Christmas or not). There's even songs from decades earlier about it. Whether we'd get snow before January has always been a toss-up, and I'd hazard we've gotten it more often recently than when I was a kid. Like about 10 years ago I even remember a huge blizzard in November.
- 5mo ago
- water-data-dude 5mo agoI refer you to: https://xkcd.com/1732/ https://xkcd.com/1732/
- Descon 5mo agoHuh? Sudden events are a very real part of larger processes like evolution and climate change. A volcano eruption, a meteor impact, or a drought year, or the ceasing of a current can absolutely have massive implications on larger systems.
- jedimastert 5mo ago> capital has no interest Selfish humans. "Capital" is a mental model, it's not some force of nature or hand of god.
- thrance 5mo agoSelfishness has nothing to do with it. Capitalism rewards anti-social investment strategies and capital accumulation, so that's what we get. "Capital" is not a force of nature, it's an emergent force from our economic system. It behaves sort of predictably and can be described: that's economics. EDIT: got to love how anytime you write something even remotely critical of capitalism you get auto-downvoted. Fine, "climate change is only because of bad, selfish people". Is this explanation more palatable?
- Timon3 5mo agoWhile I agree with you that the system itself inevitably causes these issues, I don't see how this absolves those who use anti-social investment strategies etc. of selfishness. On an individual scale they're still making morally bad decisions, and worse: they're actively influencing the system to exacerbate these mechanisms.
- thrance 5mo agoPerhaps, certainly even, but that's not a really interesting way of looking at things. And individual blame is often used as a substitute to systemic analysis of issues.
- wotsdat 5mo ago[dead]
- MSFT_Edging 5mo agoThe forest where the community hikes has no value unless the trees are turned into paper. All to say, Capital at large seeks out the profit. Until climate change effects the profit considerably, mitigation will be the path less traveled. The only real way to approach this problem is to reduce consumption across the board which as you might guess, isn't profitable.
- hashmap 5mo agoreducing consumption across the board isnt just unprofitable, it would mean everyone agreeing to overcome our biological gradients. i do not think it is possible for us to do, and evolution has not equipped us to do that as far as i can tell. my semi-superstitious take is that the race to achieve ai is grounded in needing something that knows whats going on and is able to make decisions aligned to generational time horizons. whether that works out or not time will tell, but i get the sense a "good enough" ai is probably our best shot at saving us from ourselves. it's clear we can't do that on our own.
- conception 5mo agoI think it’s grounded with the thinking that whoever gets WOPR first wins.
- unethical_ban 5mo agoWhich is why, to be blunt, libertarians and conservatives are wrong to demonize government without being equally or more skeptical of the corrupting power of money. Government is the only apparatus that can govern unregulated motivations of capital, and we need regulations on pollution and investments in clean energy and waste creation/collection to stop things like climate change. Gen X and forward grew up in a world that by default was cleaner due to regulations like the Clean Water Act, better for seniors due to things like Social Security and Medicare, and safer due to things like food regulations and vaccine mandates. The people who rail against these things are railing against the very things that made their world safer and in some instances kept them alive.
- 5mo ago
- zurfer 5mo agoTechno optimist here who expects the following to make a big contribution to reducing human made future climate change: better batteries+solar/wind, nuclear fusion, self driving cars (we'll need to manufacture less cars for the same amount of miles humanity drives), AI helping with better resource allocation in general (hopefully). The answer can't be, let's just consume 10x less. We have to engineer our way out of it.
- cassepipe 5mo ago> The answer can't be, let's just consume 10x less. We have to engineer our way out of it. We will have to do both I am afraid
- conception 5mo agoWe will eventually do both but it won’t be willing. It’ll be through tragedy.
- giwook 5mo agoThese are all helpful contributions, but ultimately we need buy-in from decision makers (i.e. rulers/heads of nations). And at least in the US we do not have it and are actively going in the opposite direction, mostly in the name of money.
- xantronix 5mo agoI know one way to get their "buy-in", if you catch my drift.
- pier25 5mo agoIronically what is pushing many countries to a faster adoption of renewables is not climate change but the recent Iran conflict. Yes tech can help but implementation depends on human nature.
- amanaplanacanal 5mo ago
- bix6 5mo agoTechno optimism is bullshit created by power hungry VCs to ostracize anyone who argues against their myopic world view and further fill their own coffers at the expense of others. Anyone want to argue against that? I’ve yet to see a compelling counter.
- hgoel 5mo agoI don't get the impression of much techno-optimism here lately, it's mostly just incessant whining about how they think everything's AI generated.
- jandrewrogers 5mo agoThe singular input for every plausible avenue for mitigating and addressing climate change is energy. And an astronomical amount of energy at that if you want to make a measurable dent over the next 100 years. You can't cheat thermodynamics. Energy absolutely is something that you can engineer. It is one of the most fundamental things engineering is about. Nothing we can do will make a difference without serious investment in carbon-free power systems. There is a lot of money being invested in energy technology, the real question is if we will build enough of it.
- senordevnyc 5mo agoWe engineered ourselves into this, and we’re actually making good progress in engineering ourselves out. Not without some serious upcoming pain, but it’s not all doom and gloom. We as a species have accomplished many things that weren’t profit-motivated.
- rob_c 5mo agoWait I've seen this... Day before the day after tomorrow right?
- AlecSchueler 5mo agoGenerally in science when your see the same results being reproduced by different researchers your certainty should increase.
- fnordpiglet 5mo agoDon’t look up, 2026 is the midterm campaign slogan for MAGA
- rob_c 5mo agoregardless of a reproduction science is repetition and verification yes... is there a point beyond that?
- nickserv 5mo agoYes the movie was vaguely inspired by the science. The AMOC has been studied for a long time, including the effects of its possible weakening. Where the movie is firmly in fantasy land of course is in the timeline, where the effects are nearly instant rather than likely over decades in reality.
- rob_c 5mo ago> Yes the movie was vaguely inspired by the science. I.. _sigh_, my comment was satire I'm well aware of the "science", the modelling, the failures of large amounts of models, the ones that work, the...
- AndrewKemendo 5mo ago“Scientists” have been warning the world about this since Stommel issued his paper in 1961: https://tellusjournal.org/articles/10.3402/tellusa.v13i2.9491 https://tellusjournal.org/articles/10.3402/tellusa.v13i2.949... It’s going to shut down The ice caps and antartic ice are going to melt entirely The Gulf Stream is going to collapse Global emissions have skyrocketed with no brakes since then 1.5C target was a joke. 2.0 target is a joke. There is no world where humans can coordinate in a way that reduces global emissions MAYBE by accident with enough selfishness around not wanting to die. I don’t see it though
- howmayiannoyyou 5mo agoThe archeological and geological records strongly suggest we've been down this road before. There's as much arrogance in assuming we can prevent this, as there is in assuming we caused it (perhaps hastened it). Best use of national or global resources is preparing for the outcome, not trying to prevent it.
- lisper 5mo ago> preparing for the outcome How exactly do you propose to prepare for Europe becoming uninhabitable?
- nickserv 5mo agoYou can buy sets of matching luggage. "Funny" story, in a few months we'll be moving a few hundred km north, partly due to the summers being unbearably hot and dry the past few years. Now we're hearing more and more about the area we're going to potentially getting really cold due to the weakening of the Atlantic current. Good times.
- IAmGraydon 5mo agoMoving in response to something as slow and variable as climate change is definitely a choice. Like timing the market but 1000x worse.
- andyjsong 5mo agoTime to deploy sulfate aerosols in the stratosphere https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/73f7f362-9890-4375-9a92-1f3121daa3e3 https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/73f7f362-9890-4375-9a92-1...
- dmbche 5mo ago[flagged]
- luxuryballs 5mo agonot to diss the science and the work involved around it but this kind of alarmist stuff makes me wonder how many similar things have happened in the past but nobody noticed because nobody was looking or even knew how to track such a thing, the environment is so complex, seems unlikely that we can make heads or tails of this, and in 50 years some new understanding will flip all of our current models (no pun intended!), so what’s really the value of such “warnings”? money went into this, where does it ultimately go?
- AlecSchueler 5mo ago> how many similar things have happened in the past but nobody noticed because nobody was looking or even knew how to track such a thing We can actually make petty good estimates because of things like carbon layers in the ice. It's happened in the past, you're right, and usually it precedes large scale extinction events.
- luxuryballs 5mo agoso because a current in the ocean is changing we should tell everyone they might be about to die or what’s the goal here
- AlecSchueler 5mo agoThe "goal" of science is understanding. I'm not sure what your issue with it is.
- 4ndrewl 5mo agoDe be sure to let us know when you've completed your research into this topic.
- gmueckl 5mo agoThere are a couple of things wrong here. First off, there is a historic climate record that goes back centuries and is fairly accurate. Second, the climate prediction models are tested against this historic record. They reproduce the historic climates quite well. The error margins are generally shrinking due to model improvements. But when making actual predictions, the models need to make assumption about anthropogenic parameters like CO2 and methane emissions. That's the largest remaining uncertainty at this point. Given the same assumptions, climate models generally agree on the outcome.
- namenotrequired 5mo agoIsn’t calling AMOC “the primary source of warmth for northern Europe” wildly overstated?
- jaapz 5mo agoNot really, look at what's on the same latitude in Amerika as northern europe. Then compare their climates.
- wongarsu 5mo agoThe comparison only really works for the West coast though. The East coast is dominated by continental climate carried over from the interior by the prevailing winds. Meanwhile Europe is surrounded by water on three sides, plus the Baltic and North Sea in the middle. Just having this much water nearby (plus prevailing winds coming from an ocean) moderates temperature swings a lot
- card_zero 5mo agoYeah, I was doing a variation on this recently (wondering about the same question). Reversing the latitude of the island of Jersey ("extreme weather is rare due to the island's mild climate") takes you to the Kerguelen Islands ("snow throughout the year as well as rain"). But the contrast there is to do with the Azores High and the Roaring Forties. Local climates are complicated.
- ahartmetz 5mo agoIt would be correct if it said "Abnormally high temperatures for the latitude". Most of Europe would be 10 °C colder or so without. We'd be really screwed over here.
- Ekaros 5mo agoSo how much coal we need to burn to compensate that 10C?
- jurgenburgen 5mo ago
- pjmlp 5mo agoAs if war mongers, and AI tech bros would care. After COVID it feels doom is unavoidable.
- fmkamchatka 5mo agoI can’t believe there are people in our industry who turn a blind eye (or worse) to these problems. They say that climate scientists are fearmongering and argue there is not a single truth.
- giwook 5mo agoPeople do weird things when there's a lot of money involved.
- fmkamchatka 5mo agoBut how do you deal with that? How can they ignore the future suffering of our children?
- causal 5mo agoI think climate change is a compelling crisis but I find these types of “could maybe happen according to some models” type of catastrophic scenarios a little frustrating because they soak up a lot of attention with scary headlines, reinforcing hopelessness in those who care while providing ammunition to skeptics when the catastrophe doesn’t materialize. It’s also easy to question methodology for anyone who has done academic modeling and knows how easy it is to get the result you want. Much harder to argue against the basic first principle that injecting trillions of barrels of oil into the atmosphere is literal geoengineering and it’s gonna have consequences.
- stouset 5mo agoWhat, exactly, do you expect scientists researching these things to do? Bury their findings?
- 9rx 5mo agoI suppose they could refrain from injecting their feelings into it. The science doesn't change if it is presented as simple information and not as a warning.
- embedding-shape 5mo agoSo they should be more like "Atlantic currents might shut down, we'll see what happens and if it'll be good or bad" when they already can tell the effects will be pretty bad? Wouldn't that be basically burying the lede?
- 9rx 5mo agoYou'd have to ask the one who raised concern with this in the first place. What is apparent, though, is that "good or bad" is contrary to science. Science seeks to understand what is, not how you might feel about it. It is interesting that things went there.
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- RijilV 5mo agoThis is the study which is behind the recent news articles on the AMOC collapse: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adx4298 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adx4298 Basically newer modeling has shown a stronger weakening of the system. Lots of uncertainty, but 1/3rd loss by 2100. There's a lot of unknowns with feedback loops and tipping points where the whole thing might collapse if a threshold is crossed.
- frm88 5mo agoFor those who prefer visual information, James Stewart on Astrum Earth made a video detailling the changes. Please ignore the somewhat sensationalist thumbnail, the video itself is pretty accurate in its graphs and animations: https://www.youtube.com/live/GDy7Q8iAtFg https://www.youtube.com/live/GDy7Q8iAtFg
- metalman 5mo agowatch it happening in real time here https://www.ospo.noaa.gov/products/ocean/sst/contour/ https://www.ospo.noaa.gov/products/ocean/sst/contour/ I am seeing changes, unprecidented changes, in my decades of watching, and they do not match any predicted scenario.
- ijidak 5mo agoWhat changes are you seeing? When I look at these images, it shows me what sea surface temperatures are today, but I don't have context as to how it's changed. I would love someone to stitch years of these images together in a video to help me get better context.
- metalman 5mo agostich them together as an "endless" scroll that can be played, l8ke you say as a video or looked at with all the same days on one screen, which would be the tool I would use to show someone what I have watched for years. observations: there appears to be more heat in the system. there appears to be more mixing. right now the labrador current has been stronger, and reaching further south than I have ever taken note of and the gulf stream is struggling to push past it the current that transports heat around the southern tip of africa is and has been, very strong for the last 6 months. where the SST and the sea ice extent converge, is another way of looking at the same data, and there is more here https://climatereanalyzer.org/ https://climatereanalyzer.org/
- ck2 5mo agotwo absolute facts: 1. even if there was something humans could do about it, we won't, ever 2. insurance rates are the only "control". they will skyrocket and thereby the only change to select behavior human society allows "privatize the profits, socialize the costs" so that scales from the smallest to the largest models
- SoftTalker 5mo agoPretty much agree. Nature will fix the climate, after it eliminates (a large number of) the humans that are causing the problem. That's really the only way.
- ericjmorey 5mo agoThe defeatist mindsets expressed in these comments seem more like a way to shed any sort of personal accountability for participating in a solution that doesn't kill billions of people than a reflection of reality. There are many solutions.
- SoftTalker 5mo ago> There are many solutions. There are, but none that will be accepted. Will you give up your car, your air condititioning, your AI agents, your uber eats, your year-round fresh produce at the supermarket, meat as a regular part of your diet, all the imported stuff you are accustomed to having?
- cagey 5mo agoYou're right, I won't, and I'm probably not alone. So what's the endgame? A world government that enforces all of those "give-ups" at gunpoint?
- fmkamchatka 5mo agoAs a family: - We don’t use Uber Eats - We don’t fly - We bike in the city (long tail bikes to carry the kids) - We don’t use A/C (and resist so far installing it) and try to do some passive ventilation, shading to limit the house getting to hot in the summer (it’s gets sometimes around 42 C where we live) - We try to eat local food … And we are not sad!
- gib444 5mo agoWorth clicking just for that absolutely gorgeous photo of the church.
- Tyrubias 5mo agoThe probabilistic nature of predicting how likely any given climate change event like the AMOC shutting down is creating a false sense of security and skepticism. Many climate change skeptics like to claim that Earth’s climate has been radically different at various points in its history, therefore current anthropogenic climate change is fine. Other climate change skeptics like to claim that we’re currently in an ice age, therefore warming the planet is not a bad thing. Yet others claim that this is natural and humans shouldn’t try to stop it. What these arguments miss is that all available evidence suggests that CO2 levels and global temperatures have never changed this fast outside of mass extinctions. All available evidence strongly supports the ideas that humans released the excess CO2, that CO2 is a powerful greenhouse gas, and that human-produced CO2 is causing the planet to retain more heat. There are competing theories on how catastrophic anthropogenic climate change will be and how fast it will happen, but the broad consensus is that these drastic changes will impact both humans and the broader environment. People argue against preventative measures to slow down anthropogenic climate change because it can harm economic growth. The attitude seems to be “we shouldn’t sacrifice profits for the polar bears”. I argue that it’s not a matter of trying to save other species, it’s about saving our own species. Given the overwhelming evidence that humans are causing climate change and that the results will involve drastic changes in climate patterns, I don’t think we’re panicking enough. For the vast majority of us who are not ultra wealthy capitalists, faster economic growth won’t matter if extreme weather events threaten our lives every year and large areas of agricultural land become unusable. We need to slow down our production and consumption and study climate change more carefully, not defund climate research and charge blindly into a future we can’t control or predict.
- jules-jules 5mo agoConsidering that we're already approaching a Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum analog at up to ten times faster than the onset of the PETM (one of the largest mass extinction events) [1], I’d say it’s pretty much game over. [1] "Atmospheric Methane: Comparison Between Methane's Record in 2006–2022 and During Glacial Terminations" (Nisbet, Manning et al. 2023)
- bhouston 5mo agoThis is an ongoing warning which I first read about in university in 1997. One of the issues with slow moving catastrophes is that we get used to it and then we stop worrying about it. I believe this is because humans are not good generally at long term planning past a couple years when there is no clear feedback (or it is purposely muddied.) So essentially we are likely screwed.
- photochemsyn 5mo agoJust to list some uncertainties: (1) Gulf Stream is a wind-driven western boundary current and the equatorial Atlantic is getting warmer and warmer so heat delivery is probably stable; (2) Greenland melt rates are real and fresher ocean water won’t sink as much and could push northern surface currents south; (3) Wind-driven upwelling (other end of the AMOC) is likely to stay stable so you have the suction pump effect; (4) Atmospheric warming and overall climate conditions today are very different from that 12,000 ya system the article cites; Regardless, dumping all this fossil CO2 and CH4 into the atmosphere is definitely changing the climate system; but rather than cooling Europe and the UK I’d guess this will just reduce the warming rate in that region over the next 100 years, and it might cause problems with ocean hypoxia due to slower rates of deep water formation, impacting fish populations. P.S. If you want to vet these claims, plug it into an LLM with this header: “ As an expert in global planetary science, give me some critiques with positive/negative paper references that both support and push back against each point (eight papers total please, prefer recent, then critique summary).”
- jaybrendansmith 5mo agoEurope needs to start taking this seriously. If they are really science-led and fact-based, they need to fund a series of additional studies to absolutely confirm a 37% loss by 2100, and run clean estimates and projections of the cost to heat Europe and replace shorter growing seasons as the AMOC slows over 25, 50, 75, and 100 years. They can then project the the total cost of the loss, and speak to the insurance and reinsurance companies to determine the cost of remediation. Money will move this needle, nothing else.
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- insane_dreamer 5mo agoBut the Dow is over 50,000! Who cares about the AMOC?
- dasKrokodil 5mo agoGreat, I live in coastal northern Europe, so the question will be whether I'll freeze to death from AMOC shutting down, or drown from the rising sea levels. Maybe I should move to Switzerland or something.
- darkmarmot 5mo agoAs someone in the Venn diagram intersection of "software engineer" and "studied climate/astrophysics/planetary science" in school, reading comments here is painfully disheartening. Virtually everyone highly engaged in this field is anticipating multiple, systemic apocalyptic scenarios that will end modern life as we know it. I'd assume that most of the people reading have enough of a calculus background to understand some of the underlying math. I implore you to find a good book or course on it.
- orwin 5mo agoI like like the discourse changed over my lifetime from "climate change does not exist, those scientist are catastrophists" (200X) to "climate change is not primarily anthropogenic, those scientist are catastrophists" (201X) to "Climate change is real and caused by us, but the consequence won't be as hard as predicted, those scientist are catastrophists" (202X). Truly a wonder. It's always the same people too.