A vital system of Atlantic Ocean currents that influences weather across the world could collapse as soon as the late 2030s, scientists have suggested in a new study — a planetary-scale disaster that would transform weather and climate.

Several studies in recent years have suggested the crucial system — the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC — could be on course for collapse, weakened by warmer ocean temperatures and disrupted saltiness caused by human-induced climate change.

But the new research, which is being peer-reviewed and hasn’t yet been published in a journal, uses a state-of-the-art model to estimate when it could collapse, suggesting a shutdown could happen between 2037 and 2064.

This research suggests it’s more likely than not to collapse by 2050.

Like a conveyor belt, the AMOC pulls warm surface water from the southern hemisphere and the tropics and distributes it in the cold North Atlantic. The colder, saltier water then sinks and flows south. The mechanism keeps parts of the Southern Hemisphere from overheating and parts of the Northern Hemisphere from getting unbearably cold, while distributing nutrients that sustain life in marine ecosystems.

The impacts of an AMOC collapse would leave parts of the world unrecognizable.

An AMOC collapse “is a really big danger that we should do everything we can to avoid,” said Stefan Rahmstorf, a physical oceanographer at Potsdam University in Germany who was not involved in the latest research.

  • lemme in@lemm.eeOPEnglish
    0·
    5 months ago

    That’s the problem there’s no common consensus from scientists. What is happening right now is similar to the scenario from The Day After Tomorrow, scientists debate and offer their theories.

    from phys.org today

    Not the day after tomorrow: Why we can’t predict the timing of climate tipping points

    A study published in Science Advances reveals that uncertainties are currently too large to accurately predict exact tipping times for critical Earth system components like the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), polar ice sheets, or tropical rainforests.

    These tipping events, which might unfold in response to human-caused global warming, are characterized by rapid, irreversible climate changes with potentially catastrophic consequences. However, as the study shows, predicting when these events will occur is more difficult than previously thought.

    Climate scientists from the Technical University of Munich (TUM) and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) have identified three primary sources of uncertainty.

    https://phys.org/news/2024-08-day-tomorrow-climate.html

    Also as Rahmstof said.

    “There’s now five papers, basically, that suggested it could well happen in this century, or even before the middle of the century,” Rahmstof said. “My overall assessment is now that the risk of us passing the tipping point in this century is probably even greater than 50%.”

    While the advances in AMOC research have been swift and the models that try to predict its collapse have advanced at lightning speed, they are still not without issues.

    This research gap means the predictions could underestimate how soon or fast a collapse would happen.

    • DominusOfMegadeus@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      0·
      5 months ago

      That’s the point though.

      They don’t have to be right.

      They need to scare the shit out of the people who could maybe get some traction in addressing this thing. There have been a disproportionate amount of tipping point events happening far sooner than predicted, and/or worse than expected. Anything we can do to get people to actually act is worthwhile.