File:North Pacific and Atlantic sea temps - July 2024.jpg: Difference between revisions

A Wired thought...

Something may be wrong with the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation.

The AMOC is the main current system that crisscrosses the ocean. It flows like a big river up, down, and across the two hemispheres.

... the worry is not that the AMOC is on the verge of a complete stop. The fear is that it will cross a pivotal threshold, and then begin a decline that is unstoppable.

At that point, it would take many decades for the currents to grind to a halt. Even so, a shutdown would trigger, as one paper put it, “a profound global-scale reorganization” in Earth’s climate systems.

How much time do we have left before the AMOC breaks?

(M)any scientists now agree: abrupt, dramatic changes in the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation.

That the climate could change violently had huge implications. As more carbon was being released into the atmosphere, Broecker and other scientists were getting increasingly anxious that it wasn’t degrading the planet in only the steady, humdrum, “up goes the heat” kind of way. They worried that humans were pushing the climate toward a big jump. “Our climate system has proven it can do very strange things,” he wrote in 1997. “We’re entering dangerous territory and provoking an ornery beast.” What remained was a very important question: Could a leap be predicted?

• https://www.wired.com/story/amoc-collapse-atlantic-ocean/
• https://www.wired.com/story/climate-tipping-point/

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