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A 'cold blob' in the Atlantic could be a sign of AMOC shutdown
- ryanschneider 4mo agoHowTown has a pretty good video on the same subject: https://youtu.be/dqLM65HfVEw?is=avWFidbKxRvW3YUY https://youtu.be/dqLM65HfVEw?is=avWFidbKxRvW3YUY
- throw0101a 4mo ago> is=avWFidbKxRvW3YUY PSA: the is (as well as pp) parameter is for tracking. If possible try to trim it.
- pinkmuffinere 4mo agoroger that, if possible trim pp.
- voidfunc 4mo ago[flagged]
- functionmouse 4mo agoThank you. HN should not allow any headlines containing "could", "might", or a question mark at the end. Conjecture is not news.
- camgunz 4mo agoNo it's the frog boil effect. It's a staggering amount of change, it's just over a whole human lifetime so most people don't really clock it. Elites are supposed to do something about it, but mostly because of corruption and ideology they aren't.
- TheOtherHobbes 4mo agoClassic normalcy bias. AMOC collapse catastrophe is literally unimaginable for at least 80% of the population.
- albumen 4mo agoAnd yet millions of people still play the lottery. I don’t think it’s as simple as uncertainty. Nobody wants to change their lifestyle to avert climate change. People prefer carrots to sticks.
- pfdietz 4mo agoIt's that the marginal benefit of individual action accrues mostly to other people, or (on a national scale) to other nations. The fraction of benefit that accrues locally isn't enough to justify the cost (unlike, say, the ban on CFCs, or control of local pollution.) So absent something enforcing prohibition of defection from a collective action, the collective action doesn't happen. You want to actually solve the problem? Find such an enforcement mechanism (CO2 tariffs, perhaps), reduce the cost of solution (sufficiently cheap non-fossil energy), or find another solution that doesn't require global cooperation (albedo modification, say). A solution that just requires everyone to get along and cooperate to their marginal net detriment doesn't seem like it will work.
- tocs3 4mo agoPeople prefer carrots to sticks. I sometimes think those in the environmental movement have made a mistake with their messaging. It is too often "we need to suffer to save the planet". It could also be things like: "Why do you want to pay more to drive a giant expensive gas guzzling vehicle to work so that you can pay for a giant expensive gas guzzling vehicle to go to work in". "Why do you want to pay for extra electricity when conservation and efficiency will help save money for other things" "Single use items are thing you pay for time and time again. Durable maintainable items you pay for once." "Throwing things in the garbage is like paying to store things forever (landfills are not free)" It is true that there are, at times, good reason to do things that are not at the extreme of conservationism and environmentalism. If the messaging was a little more carrot than stick we might see more progress.
- awjlogan 4mo agoIt’s also been tried (endlessly), but society is too enamoured with consumption and GDP as the principle guiding metric for it to have had much effect. Some large number of people, wilfully or otherwise, reject intellectualism as a whole.
- tomrod 4mo agoI take it seriously, as do many others. Careful of the bandwagon fallacy or, even worse, the mind projection fallacy.
- pingou 4mo agoWould it be more scientific to say it is sure it will happen? I suspect the opposite is happening, too many times an environmental catastrophe has been predicted in too certain terms and has not happened, which is why many people lost trust. And if you think that we shouldn't try to predict but only inform about what has already happened that seems even stranger to me.
- _HMCB_ 4mo agoAll is good. until it’s not.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- moritzwarhier 4mo agoIt's a refusal to engage with the reported information, not an argument. Note that the general sentiment on HN when it comes to other topics is that every slight simplification in reporting on science is unforgivable, Gell-Mann-amnesia-effect, bla bla... For example, it is clickbait to say "cancer" instead of "some types of cancer which we further need to specify" in headline. But it is of course impossible to take scientists seriously when their results are reported as "they observed X, and are there are indications that it could mean Y". Who says "could"? It's way too risky to engage with people who don't tell me exactly what to think!
- _HMCB_ 4mo agoThis ^
- gadders 4mo ago[flagged]
- david-gpu 4mo agoOversimplifying: If global temperatures went down when greenhouse gases went up, it would falsify our current climate models. But we don't see that, do we? Denying climate change for decades is what brought us to the immense challenge we are facing now.
- sigmar 4mo agoAll science-based conclusions come with uncertainty. Only ideologues (and siths) write in absolute terms.
- croes 4mo agoEvery look into the future is could and might. So you prefer just to ignore it and deal with the disaster afterwards?
- _HMCB_ 4mo agoA read a good quote this week but I can’t remember the exact saying. Something like: the check gets cashed eventually.
- GolfPopper 4mo agoAnd once it has indisputably happened, and the destructive consequences are impossible to ignore, the same people and institutions who spent decades complaining about "could" and "might" will immediately pivot to "there was nothing we could have done".
- skeledrew 4mo agoIf you walk in the middle of a highway then you "could" be hit by a truck. "Might" be left at the side of the road as a hit-and-run. Don't take it seriously though; go walk on that highway like it's yours.
- gadders 4mo agoYou act as if reacting to global warming is cost-free. It would have a drastic impact on the economy and people's standard of living, especially in the 3rd world.
- skeledrew 4mo agoYou act as if NOT reacting to global warming is cost-free. It WILL have a drastic impact on the economy and people's standard of living, especially in the 3rd world. Yes I literally copied your comment, added a single word and modified another; it's that easy to rebut.
- nozzlegear 4mo agoIt's a bad rebuttal. What can an individual do besides vote? I already drive an electric car, I vote for candidates who promise to fight climate change, and I've been a vegetarian for over 7 years. I'm about maxed out on my negative carbon foot printing, so getting anxious over stories like this seems unproductive at best. I can't be worried about that shit.
- skeledrew 4mo agoWhat makes it bad? Kudos for at least trying, though I'm not sure driving an electric car helps, unless your power station uses hydro power or another renewable source to provide that electricity. A bigger gain/sacrifice in that regard would be to use public transport, or at least carpool, as often as possible so there's less energy overall being used. And one person didn't cause the situation we have now; many did. And it'll take huge collective action to move the needle in the positive direction.
- wpm 4mo agoYeah better to let an irreversible catastrophe happen than do anything about it before hand because we might be working to prevent something that wasn't going to happen.
- camgunz 4mo agoI really think people are sleeping on the AMOC. The first season there isn't European wine/cheese/olives because of climate change is the first season European farmers probably literally declare war on their governments, to say nothing of the fact that almost no European homes can handle this level of cold. And for some perspective, this is only one of many other huge changes that huge populations will react violently to in the next 20-50 years. Good luck to us all.
- giantg2 4mo ago"The first season there isn't European wine/cheese/olives because of climate change is the first season European farmers probably literally declare war on their governments," Unlikely. The government will be the only one who can bail them out.
- jeffbee 4mo agoI am interested in your implication that European farmers would have someone other than themselves to blame for this outcome. As a whole they are at least as backwards as American farmers. They are largely deniers of climate change either as a thing altogether or as something attributable to man, or are prone to believing it helps them with longer growing seasons, and their main political activity is protesting any changes in their diesel fuel subsidies.
- croes 4mo agoI guess that’s what parent meant. But just because it’s also their fault doesn’t hinder them to blame the government. Who do you think will MAGA blame for the consequences of climate change?
- bryanrasmussen 4mo agoWoke black people who sleep with members of their own gender!!
- amanaplanacanal 4mo ago
- deadbabe 4mo agoCould we put underwater data centers there to reheat the waters?
- fooqux 4mo agoProbably makes more sense than putting them in a friggen vacuum.
- Avicebron 4mo agoah the "boil the oceans" strat. Interesting play.
- deadbabe 4mo agoI don’t think we could boil the oceans or even affect their temperature much even if we put every data center on Earth into the oceans and multiplied their amount by 10. Earth is really, really big.
- hurtigioll 4mo agois fascinating that a software developer can have such a lack of awareness of the relative size of things
- usrnm 4mo agoWhy? Software developers aren't some superhumans, we're generally very bad at things outside our immediate area of expertise. Just like everyone else
- xantronix 4mo agoWould you work in such a facility?
- Avamander 4mo agoNo. AMOC is petawatt-scale, nine orders of magnitude beyond our reach.
- 4mo ago
- AndrewKemendo 4mo agoThis world, despite a century of warning, is truly not ready to pay the debt of industrialization
- AdamN 4mo agoGenerally don't do this but this is apropos my recent comment about externalities here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48527158 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48527158
- ponector 4mo agoThis is the end of ice age, not the first time, not the last one. Industrialization helped to speed up warming, though.
- skeledrew 4mo agoMeh who cares? Let it all burn and flood. Earth gets a fresh start, and hopefully whatever "intelligent" species evolves to be dominant in the next 5-10 million years is a better custodian. Rinse and repeat until that's the case. Heck, who knows if this is actually the 1st or 100th iteration...
- Y-bar 4mo agoThe rich, who have disproportionately contributed to the current crisis can buy and relocate to safety, while the poor will be hit the hardest.
- y-c-o-m-b 4mo agoI've seen a lot of stories about this in the last year, but I truly wonder how effective they will be. What's to stop people from acquiring equipment like large machinery to dig them out of their bunker or bombing it with bunker busters?
- Y-bar 4mo agoIf you look at both past and modern-day equivalents you will see that the rich do buy enough people to work as safety troops. The reason why Putin or Kim Jong Un is not dead a long time ago is that enough of the ruling upper middle class has been made dependent on their leaders and will work to ensure the safety of said leader.
- ArtemZ 4mo agoBut ultimately, isn't it the complacency of poor people, their disinterest in politics, in standing for each other, in learning and pushing for change is what allowed the existence and conduct of the rich?
- Y-bar 4mo agoI have seen this line of thinking before. ”Your honour, but the girl didn’t resist very much, so she must bear part of the blame for what I did to her”.
- hliyan 4mo agoI recently finished rewatching The Three Body Problem in which (spoilers follow) the world panics and goes into overdrive because an alien invasion is due in... 400 years. If the current climate trends continue, vast areas of the Earth may not be suitable for habitation within half that time, and we still can't seem to convince some people this is real. Granted I was a climate change skeptic myself until about 10 years ago, but right now the data seems indisputable. Even if we can't find a direct causal relationship between CO2 emissions and warming, we know the following very accurately (disclaimer: not a climate scientist): (1) amount of carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere per year (2) concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere (3) amount of extra energy that would be theoretically retained in the atmosphere via the green house effect, due to a given increment in CO2 concentration, (4) global temperatures within the past, say 30 years. Don't we know for a fact that (1) + (2) + (3) is very well correlated with (4), and that no other potential causes correlate as well with (4), and don't current computational models demonstrate an ability to predict (4) given (3). So, exactly what is the source of skepticism?
- gadders 4mo agoWhat's that scientific saying about correlations and causations? But, yeah, let's all go back to middle ages pre-industrial economy just in case.
- amanaplanacanal 4mo agoThis isn't that hard to understand. If you have ever gotten in your car after it has been parked in the sun, you know about the greenhouse effect. That CO2 does the same thing isn't some weird mystical thing. It's basic science. We know exactly how the causation works.
- yoyohello13 4mo agoI’ve come to terms with the fact that there is no stopping human consumption. It is simply not possible to get enough people to reduce to make an impact. The failure of the environment movements over the last 60 years are proof. The only way is ‘up and out’ developing clean, cheap methods of energy generation and lobbying to get that infrastructure built out as quickly as possible. At this point, investing more in Fossil fuels is a joke and anyone claiming “coal” or whatever is the future is simply a conman or a clown.
- mikert89 4mo ago[flagged]
- mzi 4mo agoYou should.
- baq 4mo agostop listening to politicians, start listening to scientists maybe, 15 minutes of thinking isn't good enough for anything
- pvaldes 4mo agoYour faith stopped the climate change, congratulations! And all that we needed was a pure soul to wake up the princess of snow! Ehm... nope. Another yearly record of heat, directly to the sink. Damned real world. At this moment trolling people that for some reason still keeps playing the "virtuous climate denial" card is not even funny.
- jdw64 4mo agoThe sad thing about humans is that under capitalism, capital consumes public goods like nature. Then, when those public goods degrade and harm the human species, the capital class that actively consumed those public goods refuses to help restore them and instead cries that it's all a lie
- tgv 4mo agoIt isn't simply capitalism. What system could handle this with grace? The only solution is world-wide care, which can only be achieved through civilization, education. Using an old-fashioned word: Bildung (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bildung https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bildung). That could lead to the moderation required, but social-democracy is dead, and other political ideologies can't deliver. Hedonism triggered by material well-being in the last decades will kill us.
- actionfromafar 4mo agoCapitalism is just a way to manage numbers. If the true costs were accounted for, Capitalism would work great. The problem is a lot of the costs are left for someone else to eat.
- pepperoni_pizza 4mo agoCapitalism us a way to manage resources in a civilisation. A way that assigns enormous resources to Elon Musk the nazi climate denier and minimum resources to climate scientists.
- leptons 4mo agoEven if we didn't have capitalism, people would still need energy, for everything. It's unfortunate that fossil fuels were the easiest thing to use to generate energy over the last couple of centuries, and that it continues today. Maybe capitalism makes it easy for fossil fuels to remain entrenched, but I doubt any other kind of system would make fossil fuels less pervasive if it were the dominant energy source for over a century.
- DenisM 4mo ago
- NDlurker 4mo agoPut a massive underwater data center there. Free cooling for the computers. Free heating for Europe. Everyone wins.
- clort 4mo agoWell its funny. I remember reading years ago that the big problems in Europe would start when the Greenland glaciers started melting, adding significant cold water to the Labrador Current, and pushing the AMOC to the south. Never mind the sea level rise, the temperature in Europe would drop significantly. Now, looking at the image in the article, there is a massive cold blob right there where the Labrador Current joins the Atlantic, but no mention of the theories that I've read about years ago, just that it is mysterious
- insane_dreamer 4mo agojust an insufficiently researched article
- snovv_crash 4mo agoEurope might have a hiccup until warming becomes more widespread and it goes back to 'normal'. The question is how long until Texas and Florida become uninhabitable because the heat isn't being shunted out to Europe, on top of the additional heat from global warming.
- metalman 4mo agoAny talk of the various climactic theorys is very³ very³ likely to be wrong³.These systems are huge, interconected, and NOT UNDERSTOOD. What we do have is some data that strongly suggests that the climate is changing, possibly at an unprecidented rate.Right now. Record territory in fact. https://www.ospo.noaa.gov/data/sst/contour/global_small.cf.gif https://www.ospo.noaa.gov/data/sst/contour/global_small.cf.g... https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/seaice_daily/?nhsh=nh https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/seaice_daily/?nhsh=nh https://nsidc.org/sea-ice-today https://nsidc.org/sea-ice-today
- _alternator_ 4mo agoWhat do you mean by 'very likely to be wrong' and 'not understood' (no scarecaps pls)? There are uncertainties, and there are still unanswered scientific questions, but the measured change in temperatures largely corresponds to the midrange predictions from climate models 20 years ago. Don't mistake "I don't understand the science" for "the science behind climate change is weak". Go out, learn some coupled atmospheric modeling PDEs, and build a climate model yourself (Claude can help). It'll only take a few days. You'll learn a lot about what's known and the sources of uncertainty.
- metalman 4mo agoHa! climate models are updated to account for what they get wrong, but off course there are so many thousands of "runs" published that there is "proof" that they got it right the first time. The uncertainty factor surounds the rate of ocean water expansion due to warming ,and resultant sea level rise,coupled with destabising ice sheets, glacial outflows, and other effects on perma frost, natural releae of CO², methane, and calthrates, and quite literaly 50~100 other drivers of atmospheric changes, albedo , rock weathering,cloud density, water vapour, bla baa, fucking blaaa!, on and on it goes been watching and reading since my mom taught me to read @ 3yr's old and nobodys model has reliable data for everything, just factoring in the effects of small waves in the southern ocean will SWAMP, ha!, is totaly beyond claude or even the very best teams, so guesses at best, HUGE unknowns that represent energy exchanges that introduce uncertainties rendering the outputs essentialy useless.
- iJohnDoe 4mo agoIf we take the down the signs then everything will be okay. https://www.cnn.com/2026/06/13/politics/judge-ruling-national-park-sign-change https://www.cnn.com/2026/06/13/politics/judge-ruling-nationa... > At South Carolina’s Fort Sumter National Monument, a sign that included details on the looming impacts of climate change, including information on how “rising seas could inundate most of the fort’s walls and flood the historic parade ground” was removed in its entirety.
- internet_points 4mo agoalso we can close our eyes and stop monitoring it https://edition.cnn.com/2026/06/03/climate/ocean-monitoring-system-amoc-trump-administration https://edition.cnn.com/2026/06/03/climate/ocean-monitoring-...
- insane_dreamer 4mo agoevery bit helps!
- Kon5ole 4mo agoI don't know if it's too late to stop the worst case scenarios of global warming yet or if there's still time, but it doesn't seem to be happening anyway. The world can't deal with something that requires global concentrated efforts. However, I do think we have time to prepare for the worst case scenarios, and individual countries and states can do that efficiently on their own. Improve evacuation routines in floodable areas, build greenhouses to deal with cold snaps, ensure there are air conditioned buildings to deal with heatwaves, have distributed local production of electricity, keep strategic food reserves stocked, and so on. Edit: Not saying that such efforts are the solution by any means, but they will help.
- awongh 4mo agoSince covid I’ve actually become less convinced of this. Yes there were national interests at play and there was a lot of general chaos. But. The level of international coordination with vaccine rollouts and agreements between countries was way more than I had initially expected. Of course this feeling depends on what your own baseline expectations are. My takeaway was that if the conditions arise that we all decide to do something about climate change (because of political conditions or because of actual effects) we (humanity) are willing to make big sudden changes
- Kon5ole 4mo agoI agree, the world is able to deal with some things. Another good example is perhaps the ozone layer. Global warming is much trickier though. Covid had hundreds dying daily, it was very direct and undeniable, and the cure was cheap and efficient once it was developed. Global warming has no clear signal (oh look, another heatwave) and no clear cure at all, let alone a cheap and efficient one.
- harrisi 4mo agoMillions of people died when a possible solution of "hey, everyone, let's stay inside for a couple weeks" could've possibly effectively eradicated the virus does not seem like a great example of humanity's ability to cope with imminent global existential threats. The potential solution(s) to the massive brick wall we're speeding towards are far more inconvenient than "everyone just hang out for a minute." It's radical change to everything in society. The comparison with Covid is also striking because the only reason a global "don't travel too much" solution couldn't work is due to the nature of capitalism. It's not like we couldn't feed everyone. It's just that some people with too much wouldn't gain as much for a little bit. Which is the same root cause of why solving climate change is impossible without radical change. Unfortunately, I don't know the answer. I'm quite certain it's not to maintain the status quo, though.
- Metacelsus 4mo agoHmm, Science just had a news article saying the AMOC was doing OK: https://www.science.org/content/article/ocean-current-warms-europe-may-be-more-resilient-feared https://www.science.org/content/article/ocean-current-warms-...
- monster_truck 4mo agoI believe the article says it is uncertain if climate change is responsible for the gradual weakening. It is gradually weakening though. This el nino should be a banger
- padjo 4mo agoYou see the words "suggest" and "may" in the subhead yeah?
- ramon156 4mo agoHas anyone seen the news in India (that the Indian media for some reason is not covering) It was 48 C this week in some cities. The power grid was not ready for the amount of AC power needed, and it turned into blackouts. You're sitting in a dark cube that has been cooking for 12 hours, hoping something might happen. A healthy 25 year old would die in 6 hours. Even if you do not want to accept climate change is a thing, you can accept the current state of the world is affecting people.
- CalRobert 4mo agoSooner or later we'll have a wet bulb event and many, many, many people will die. The first chapter of Ministry for the Future is plausible. https://www.indiatoday.in/science/story/north-india-heatwave-banda-hits-482degc-imd-issues-severe-alerts-across-uttar-pradesh-2914691-2026-05-20 https://www.indiatoday.in/science/story/north-india-heatwave... for anyone curious, and that was almost a month ago. Pakistan is also very vulnerable.
- _dark_matter_ 4mo agoThat first chapter lives rent-free in my head. Highly recommend reading it. https://www.scribd.com/document/979965270/Robinson-Kim-Stanley-Ministry-for-the-Future-2020-1 https://www.scribd.com/document/979965270/Robinson-Kim-Stanl...
- lelandfe 4mo agoI've been mentally preparing to read about the world's first unlivable hyper-heatwave for my whole adult life, it feels like.
- zzgo 4mo ago> Even if you do not want to accept climate change is a thing, you can accept the current state of the world is affecting people Or you could choose option three: do neither and go on Twitter to do some political point scoring: "The Democrat Party is going to use this three day Indian heatwave (they have one every summer) and their climate hoax to open our borders back up to illegal immigration! We must stop them! Vote against the Demonrats this November! MAGA!" No point in letting a good crisis go to waste.
- daft_pink 4mo ago[flagged]
- chicken-stew 4mo agoIs this why the US has been cutting ties with Europe?
- krupan 4mo agoEh, let's just build more natural gas powered data centers. Maybe an LLM will tell us how to solve problems like this I'm joking, but apparently there are influential people who really believe it's a good idea (see: governor or Utah and his statements on AI data centers recently)
- Yizahi 4mo agoI'm interested in AMOC and other aspects of the problem, and this recent video by RealLifeLore was very informative for me, unlike other;s like this OP article and the like. I definitely recommend it if previously you saw only two extreme points of view about AMOC. Basically the current is weakening, yes, but it's shutdown will happen neither soon nor unexpected. In fact there are several ocean wide monitoring stations which don't rely on a guess work that much and there is a clear data trend about AMOC power and shutdown requirements. If you really want to save time on watching the video, stations began monitoring in 2004 and in 20 years since the AMOC current calculated "bandwidth" dropped from 18 points to 16 points and physicists estimate that the drop is about 1 point per decade, and that AMOC will begin shutdown phase only after dropping to 6 points or less. In about 100 years if the trend holds. Even assuming gigantic errors or extreme climate change acceleration , it still won't decrease 100 year time by x10-x20 times less to make it happen in one decade. So in short, it's all bad and the trend is always bad to worse, just like the real emissions (unlike estimated PR "emissions" which are usually discussed by politicians). But AMOC specifically almost certainly won't stop in our lifetime. Our kids, though, won't be as lucky. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VkYWW95eSLs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VkYWW95eSLs
- frm88 4mo agoIn fact there are several ocean wide monitoring stations which don't rely on a guess work that much and there is a clear data trend about AMOC power and shutdown requirements. Trump Admin Just Rolled Back $368M Ocean Monitoring System https://www.newsweek.com/ocean-observatories-initiative-cut-back-donald-trump-climate-12023015 https://www.newsweek.com/ocean-observatories-initiative-cut-...
- Yizahi 4mo agoI'm not surprised. Absolutely demented guy with an equally spineless and corrupt government. Let me guess, NSF had at some point in time awarded Obama some award and our twelve year old is throwing a tantrum over his crush? :)
- lmaoguy 4mo agoQuick pay more taxes! That will stop it!
- coldbrewed 4mo agoHN comment guidelines: > Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes. > Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
- padjo 4mo agoHas to be the dumbest common response to climate change. You're against one potential method of reducing carbon emissions, therefore the problem doesn't exist. Well done.
- m463 4mo agoThe Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC) is the main ocean current system in the Atlantic Ocean. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_meridional_overturning_circulation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_meridional_overturnin...
- 1970-01-01 4mo agoOnly climate engineering can save us, if anything. Even if we stopped burning oil today, it's just too little too late.
- t0mpr1c3 4mo agoThis is a great time for the Trump administration to dismantle the system of oceanic data collection. If the evidence on worrying climatic events does not exist, we don't have to ignore and discredit it. https://oceanographicmagazine.com/news/trump-administration-dismantles-critical-ocean-floor-observation-network/ https://oceanographicmagazine.com/news/trump-administration-...