[octaane]

I cannot overemphasize how epochal of a crisis this would be for human civilization - the gulf stream is pretty much the only thing keeping northern europe (The UK, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Finland, parts of germany, the Netherlands, etc) habitable by current standards.

Basically, the gulf stream is a conveyor belt that grabs nice warm water from southern latitudes (carribean, southeast atlantic ocean) and slowly moves it up the east US/Canadian coast, when it then gently arches past the tip of Greenland and Iceland before splitting and arriving in northern Europe.

To get an idea of how big of a problem the gulf stream going away would be, look at the comparative latitude of the UK and the Nordic countries compared to north America. The UK is aligned with Newfoundland in Canada, where it gets more than a little chilly. The UK is currently nice and toasty because of the gulf stream. It would be an extremely uncomfortable place without it - no more agriculture as the UK knows it now, no more nice weather. Fishing grounds destroyed, etc. The general public doesn't seem to really understand the massive impact of a potential gulf stream shutdown.

[roadside_picnic]

The AMOC collapsing (I have no idea why the title says 'Gulf Stream' as that is different and not mentioned in the post), has far more disastrous implications than destroying the climate of Europe.

It's the beginning of the process of ocean de-oxygenation, ultimately creating a lifeless ocean that emits hydrogen sulfide instead of oxygen. It would completely disrupt the planetary food change, make the ocean poisonous, and fundamentally alter life on this planet in unimaginable ways.

For a more detailed look at the issue I highly recommend Peter Ward's "Under a Green Sky".

[tcumulus]

Should have used AMOC indeed, in Dutch media the word "golfstroom" was used, and I translated it without putting too much thought into it.

[Insanity]

Just added it to my backlog of books. That does look like an interesting read, thank you.

[CharlesW]

Related deal alert: Is $1.99 on Kindle today.

[neffy]

Ok, but this happens pretty regularly on a planetary scale (at least every 110,000 years or so) - why hasn´t it been so disastrous before - say at the end of the last interglacial?

[hagbard_c]

There were fewer humans around last time. Also there were no 'journalists' around to proclaim it so. If a tree falls in the forest and there is nobody around to hear it, does it make a sound?

[AlecSchueler]

Are you suggesting that humans never write about great extinction events that occurred in the past?

[LargoLasskhyfv]

I'm unaware of any surviving artifacts of the chronicles of Lemuria. Non-fictional, that is.

[AlecSchueler]

I'm not sure what I'm supposed to take from this statement.

[rozap]

And presumably there's another side of it too? Like all that hot air would have to be somewhere else if not Western Europe. That somewhere else would also have a bad time, just in the opposite direction. Very bleak.

[barbazoo]

Crazy in my mind to think about the system moving unimaginable amounts of energy around the planet and now we're changing it on a time scale shorter than what the planet usually sees. Reminds me of what I read about the Younger Dryas and how temperatures changed within centuries, if not decades.

[api]

I've heard some speculation that rapid climate change at that time could be the origin of global flood myths in so many cultures. Imagine you're just minding your own business and a glacial dam breaks. As far as you're concerned, you just experienced a global flood.

[baq]

Melting so much ice in such a short time without some kind of a dam made of not-ice is physically unimaginable. Water has soooo much heat capacity it'd take hundreds of years unless we're talking about a yellowstone or deccan traps eruption under the south pole or something (haven't done the math, but I'm not sure if it'd be enough).

[shaboinkin]

Something like this already happened relatively recently.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missoula_floods?wprov=sfti1

[api]

The water is already liquid. It’s just held back by an ice dam that fails. That’s what I meant by glacial dams.

[phkahler]

>> Crazy in my mind to think about the system moving unimaginable amounts of energy around the planet and now we're changing it on a time scale shorter than what the planet usually sees.

The inter-glacial periods are 10K to 20K years. We are currently around 12000 years into it. "AI overview" keeps telling me human induced climate change may lengthen it, but the collapse of the AMOC might just end it.

[raffraffraff]

Yep. It's like the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer... Except with heat.

[pfdietz]

"The notion that the Gulf Stream is responsible for keeping Europe anomalously warm turns out to be a myth."

https://www.americanscientist.org/article/the-source-of-euro...

[Gud]

Interesting!

[LargoLasskhyfv]

Sacrilege! Heresy! Sick Fantasy! Madness! Heathen Hell! Demonic Spell!

[pfdietz]

Don't hold back, tell us what you really think. :)

[myth_drannon]

Europe suffers from unprecedented heat waves, record after record. Wouldn't it be beneficial for temperatures to drop 10C? I remember the winters in Eastern Europe in the 80's unbearably cold (to a child), now barely any snow and endless forest fires in summer...

[s_dev]

It doesn't work that way. It would result in hotter summers and colder winters. So it wouldn't alleviate the heat waves but exacerbate them.

Large bodies of water like the Atlantic or the Med keep us cool in summer and warm in winter. Climate change in general leads to more extreme weather events and weather just simply being a lot more volatile.

[deanCommie]

You're probably going to get downvoted, but the reality is it's a valid question.

Just as apparently sulfur emissions from global shipping fleets helped offset some warming and eco-friendly fuel actually caused problems, the climate is complex, and there are definitely going to be the collision of interesting trade-offs.

Unfortunately, most likely, the answer is there won't be anything beneficial here. Remember, the key here isn't average global temperatures, but rather the temperature range. Life likes a temperate climate in a narrow range of degrees. Not just humans, but agriculture too.

If you lower the winter temperatures by 10 degrees, and raise the summer ones by 10, your crops still die either from the frost or from the fire. And humans likewise either freeze on the street or overheat in the sun.

This is the main thing climate change denialists can never seem to grasp. It's not the specific temperature numbers, it's the SPEED at which it's happening. Humans, in their current biological form, have been around for a million years, and survived much larger climate swings. But...the climate also changed slower. And they migrated. And they still almost didn't make it several times, barely surviving.

A world where hundreds of millions of people from the indian subcontinent are trying to escape murderous heat one season while tens of millions of people in Europe are freezing in the winter, and putting up walls to protect what they already have, is not one where humanity thrives.

In the long term we'll probably be fine. A few billion will die. Demographics and politics will shift. The human spirit will persevere, and we'll innovate our way through and adapt to a new world.

But it might take a century and our children and our children's children will not be better off than us.

[outside2344]

Most research on the effects of this have shown that it will make weather more variable. So imagine 45-50C heat waves and -10-20C polar blasts.

[Eddy_Viscosity2]

Maybe the cooling from lack of gulf stream air will perfectly counter-act the increase in heat of global warming and result in net zero effect?

[hatthew]

The gulf stream doesn't create heat, it just moves it. If it doesn't move as much heat, then the destination will get colder and presumably the source will get warmer.

[salynchnew]

Okay. Let's say the low lows of a middle Sweden equivalent climate are brought more in line with current UK temp ranges. Let's say the winter temp goes up +10 degrees Celsius.

What happens then to, say, the Mediterranean at +10 C average temps? Seems quite bad, eh?

[hatthew]

My understanding is that AMOC collapse is not gulf stream collapse. The gulf stream will still exist, but will just be weaker.

[nemo44x]

It's a good thing there's a near 0% chance of it actually happening.

[pklausler]

How do you know that?

[nemo44x]

All this nonsense is the same as the guys who have predicted 80 of the last 2 recessions. But hey, if you can exaggerate the output your model suggests that was built from faulty assumptions, incomplete data, hubris, and spans decades in time and get people to buy it and continue to fund your project, good for you.

[pklausler]

How do you know that climate scientists are as unreliable as some economists?

[nemo44x]

They’re probably more unreliable as climate is far more complex than economics and predicting 50 years out with any certainty is a ridiculous notion for both.

[conception]

https://www.science.org/content/article/even-50-year-old-cli...

Most of the high profile climate models have been wrong… but in underestimating the speed of global warming. So things generally are worse than research suggests.

I think you underestimate how well the models are doing.

[AlecSchueler]

You don't explain why you believe that though?

[jaybrendansmith]

You can put your head in the sand, but it will not save you. You must take the world on from first principles, and dive deep into the details if you want truth. Simply countering that nobody can predict what will happen is not an argument, it's a plea to stay ignorant.

[nemo44x]

Open your mind until your brain falls out. How many bromides should we exchange? Saying “there’s no proof” is better than believing everything that comes your way with 0 critical analysis. But it’s nice to feel smart.

[jaybrendansmith]

Jesus, what does that even mean? Simple physics says carbon dioxide traps heat. Chemistry 10th grade. Did you take it? This is not hard. Only an absolute ignoramus would pretend it's not happening at this point.