Collapse

I would imagine for decades or centuries at least. Scary stuff.

Nobody knows, theoretically AMOC will slowdown / shudown after BOE. And this will drastically affect the climate around North Atlantic. And what happened in July, Greece on fire, hail storms, tornadoes in parts of Europe.

Under Earth’s current climate, this aquatic conveyor belt transports warm, salty water from the tropics to the North Atlantic, and then sends colder water back south along the ocean floor. But as rising global temperatures melt Arctic ice, the resulting influx of cold freshwater has thrown a wrench in the system — and could shut it down entirely. The study published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications suggests that continued warming will push the AMOC over its “tipping point” around the middle of this century. The shift would be as abrupt and irreversible as turning off a light switch, and it could lead to dramatic changes in weather on either side of the Atlantic.

Susanne Ditlevsen, a statistician at the University of Copenhagen, then developed an advanced mathematical model to predict how much more wobbling the AMOC system can handle. The results suggest that the AMOC could collapse any time between now and 2095, and as early as 2025, the authors said.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2023/07/25/atlantic-ocean-amoc-climate-change/

There’s a couple of different approaches to deciding what constitutes BOE (that is, the fraction of ice remaining), but my understanding is that without a change in trajectory we’re looking at something happening within our lifetimes, by which I mean the next ten years.

There was a paper in Nature that re-evaluated the timeline to an AMOC change that moved it up significantly. I’m a biologist not a climatologist, but from what I’ve read most recently they’re looking at the 2030-2050 range.

It’s not going to be a Day After Tomorrow helicopters freezing out of the air kind of sudden shift, but it will have potential significant negative consequences for food production and public health.

I used to think that in twenty years people would look back on these days with anger and confusion. I now just think it will be more of the same politically motivated denialism with President Boebert saying the flooding of Washington DC is god’s judgement on the democrats and half the country agreeing with her.