The looming collapse of the Atlantic Current threatens the climate of Northern Europe

• Two recent studies predict that the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) could collapse by mid-century due to climate change.
• This collapse would drastically lower temperatures in Northern Europe, causing significant disruption.
• The main cause is the influx of freshwater from the melting Greenland ice sheet, which disrupts the AMOC flow.
• Despite the urgency, current global efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions are insufficient to prevent this potential catastrophe.

In recent years, scientists have been tracking and measuring the flow Atlantic meridional overturning circulation(AMOC), what Americans often refer to as the Gulf Stream, although this flow is only one part of this vast ocean current. For a long time it was thought that the AMOC – which transports heat from the tropics to Greenland, Iceland and northern Europe and makes them much warmer than they would otherwise be – would continue to flow with no discernible end date.

But two recent studies suggest that the current may not just slow, but stop altogether sometime around mid-century, dropping temperatures dramatically in northern Europe. The previous study of 2023 suggests that a collapse could occur sometime between 2025 and 2095, a wide range but actually a blink of an eye in geologic time. The more recent study released this year used a more sophisticated model and narrowed the window from 2037 to 2064. Both studies put the most likely collapse date at mid-century (either 2050 or 2057).

Rising temperatures due to climate change are resulting in a considerable increase in meltwater from the Greenland ice sheet, which averages over a mile thick. This meltwater is dumped into the North Atlantic, where it reduces the salinity of the ocean water, thereby making the water less dense. This reduced density appears to slow the current where it sinks deep into the ocean, a sink that is essential for the current to continue flowing.

Meanwhile, business as usual continues in Northern Europe and the rest of the world. Greenhouse gases are now accumulating in the atmosphere at a record rate. Far from addressing our climate crisis, we as a species are behaving as if it doesn’t exist (even though in many places leaders are doing nothing while doing nothing commensurate with the danger we face).

Cheerleaders for the so-called energy transition like to talk about how carbon dioxide emissions have “decoupled” from economic growth. By this, they generally mean that per capita emissions are decreasing compared to per capita economic growth. And while some countries experienced real declines in RATE of emissions, this does NOT mean zero emissions. They continue to contribute to the atmospheric carbon stock at prodigious rates. And, the world as a whole still needs to burn ever-increasing amounts of carbon to grow.

This leads me to believe that the North Atlantic freeze up will more likely than not arrive on time. We have no plan to prevent it, and simply wearing warmer clothes will not solve the myriad problems that societies unprepared for sudden climate change will suffer.

By Kurt Cobb via Resource information

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