Chris Nelder 🤘Jul 25, 2023

The climate freak-out du jour is, typically, horribly misrepresenting a very technical paper about the AMOC. E.g., if you read this https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jul/25/gulf-stream-could-collapse-as-early-as-2025-study-suggests?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other you'll get a clear sense that the climate will soon pass a "tipping point" and "The Gulf Stream system could collapse as soon as 2025" or worse - as one person said, "The North Atlantic Conveyor is going to fail over the next decade."

That is not exactly what the paper says.

1/2

Gulf Stream could collapse as early as 2025, study suggests

A collapse would bring catastrophic climate impacts but scientists disagree over the new analysis

The Guardian
Show threadChris Nelder 🤘Jul 25, 2023

Prof. Stefan Rahmstorf has a much more accurate take: https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2023/07/what-is-happening-in-the-atlantic-ocean-to-the-amoc/

His conclusion:
"Timing of the critical AMOC transition is still highly uncertain, but increasingly the evidence points to the risk being far greater than 10 % during this century – even rather worrying for the next few decades. The conservative IPCC estimate, based on climate models which are too stable and don’t get the full freshwater forcing, is in my view outdated now."

And we need to take climate action. 2/2

RealClimate: What is happening in the Atlantic Ocean to the AMOC?

RealClimate: For various reasons I'm motivated to provide an update on my current thinking regarding the slowdown and tipping point of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC). I attended a two-day AMOC session at the IUGG Conference the week before last, there's been interesting new papers, and in the light of that I have been changing

RealClimate | Climate science from climate scientists...
Show threadJim SmootJul 25, 2023
@chrisnelder the climate models are/were too conservative. This was obvious when “spike” experiments resulted in less arctic sea loss than observed with present carbon dioxide levels. Folks at UCSD reported this a few years ago and are working on improving model sensitivity afaik.
Show threadChris Nelder 🤘
@jim_smoot Good to know.
Jul 25, 2023 at 10:19pmWeb