2057 (maybe) (more or less)

July 26, 2024 5:42 PM

"To be sure, 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. ... It follows, then, that you’d wonder how close we humans are to that threshold. Perhaps you’d heard about the AMOC’s frailty; the shutdown threat; maybe even the decades of fighting among scientists as they try to fathom this gigantic, interconnected, barely understood current. But it was only rather recently that someone dared to go right to the core and ask: How much time do we have left before the AMOC breaks?" How Soon Might The Atlantic Ocean Break, in Wired (archive), on the work of Peter and Susanne Ditlevsen to understand the timing of what's happening to the AMOC.
posted by mittens (19 comments total)

Jackpot.
posted by notoriety public at 6:14 PM on July 26 [12 favorites]

I look forward to the next 33 years of inevitable internecine scientific squabbling while the world crashes down around us, because SCIENCE! And I mean, yeah, I know that has to happen in order to build solid scientific consensus, and that's good and proper and all. But...given the context and current stakes, what if right now we treated it like it could maybe be right? Just in case?
posted by Greg_Ace at 6:23 PM on July 26 [4 favorites]

The squabbling you need to worry about isn't scientific squabbling, it'll be political.
posted by aramaic at 6:28 PM on July 26 [17 favorites]

One of the big tipping points.
posted by doctornemo at 6:40 PM on July 26 [1 favorite]

I am so frustrated with the lack of action. Wildfires, massive storms, people dying of heat, milestones toppling.

I'm reading Ministry for the Future, recently read The Great Transition.
posted by theora55 at 7:23 PM on July 26 [7 favorites]

This is a beautifully-written article and a story worth telling. But... I'll say, I'm not qualified to directly evaluate the Ditlevsens' work here, but I'm familiar with the kind of scientists who work the way they do, and the kind of scientists who work the way Boers does, and the kind of criticisms he seems to be raising of their work, albeit all in the context of a different scientific discipline. And on that basis I'm strongly inclined to think Boers is likely to have the right of it. My inferences here are not evidence, of course, but arguably neither are abstract, 1-dimensional statistical models based on strong assumptions about the "type of system" that the climate is (in contrast to, say, physical models of the climate system, which I would consider to be good evidence).

This doesn't mean that the AMOC is not concerning, or that there is no urgency to it. Peter Ditlevsen is still certainly correct that a 1 in 10 chance of it reaching a tipping point by 2100 is unacceptably high given the potential consequences. But it sounds like their 2057 estimate is both a minority opinion within their field, and based on what sounds to me (as an outsider to their field) like rather iffy methodology.

From a policy perspective, anyway, the question is moot. We already know what needs to be done to safeguard the climate for the next generations: we have to stop extracting all fossil carbon, as soon as possible. We have to leave it in the ground, and we are already past the time for avoiding terrible future consequences: now it is only a matter of ensuring that the consequences are less bad than they might become.
posted by biogeo at 9:43 PM on July 26 [8 favorites]

25 years ago (!) science historian James Burke hosted a well-done but for some reason little known documentary called After the Warming about climate change. It is set in 2050 and is presented as a look back at how the earth got so hot over preceding 60 years and whether the climate change could be halted or even reversed. A major point concerned the thermohaline circulation in the oceans (I seem to remember him talking about the AMOC but calling it something else). The concern was that if that oceanic circulation collapsed the effects on the climate would be significant and likely irreversible. Sobering to think he was talking about this in 1989, and the prediction of what might happen if global warming continued seems to coming true.
posted by TedW at 4:01 AM on July 27 [7 favorites]

Jokes on them. I'll be dead!
posted by DeepSeaHaggis at 5:33 AM on July 27

Jokes on them. I'll be dead!

This has been the reaction of every Boomer, my parents included, whenever the topic of global climate change comes up.

It could almost be funny except that, to a person, they all use it as an excuse to ignore the issue and continue doing exactly what they've been doing.
posted by fader at 6:54 AM on July 27 [9 favorites]

Q) But how much more money and power can rich people hoard while getting us right up to the line of "ooops, too far"?

A) Never enough.
posted by No Climate - No Food, No Food - No Future. at 7:11 AM on July 27 [4 favorites]

People pretend that if they had a time machine, they'd stop Hittler. Well, no time machine needed now. We know that 500 holocausts are coming.

Yet just crickets. Oh, and some traffic jams.
posted by No Climate - No Food, No Food - No Future. at 7:15 AM on July 27 [4 favorites]

Yeah, but Al Gore was fat when he talked about this in An Inconvenient Truth! Don't look up!
posted by nofundy at 3:56 PM on July 27

Jokes on them. I'll be dead!


Sigh. Yeah....and everyone on earth will be too, eventually. Guess that's a big 🤷
posted by tiny frying pan at 6:51 AM on July 28

theora55 I've just read Stephen Markley's The Deluge .. and I was left thinking it's either a (shallow) rip-off or a framing to take heat out of Kim Stanley Robinson's Kim Ministry - over-identifying is the term for this. Some useful ideas but a turgid, grinding read.

Very likely folk are already using Ministry as a manual (no matter the consequences) - crowd sourced geo-engineering.
posted by unearthed at 12:04 PM on July 28

I posted about trees removing methane and Global Forest Watch, once my comment for here grew too long.

I burried two links there, but overall geo-engineering looks really poorly understood, ala what particles at what altitude. Afaik, the self lofting effect promoted by nuclear winter models looks largely irrelevant, so geo-engineering effects might terminate faster than expected.

We should remove roads & parking of course, and paint roofs white, but not sure the status of the fancy climate white roofs.
posted by jeffburdges at 2:29 PM on July 28

crowd sourced geo-engineering

This is already a thing -- the latest Make magazine contains an article by Luke Iseman, who is involved in a group that builds and launches high-altitude sulfur dioxide distribution balloons. Thus far they've dispersed over 35,000 grams of sulfur dioxide and for better or worse they're getting fancier (some folks are looking at generating the sulfur dioxide at altitude, rather than creating it at ground level and loading it for flight).
posted by aramaic at 2:56 PM on July 28

Memo to President Jimmy Carter dated July 7, 1977, from the Office of Science and Technology Policy.
posted by jeffburdges at 8:09 AM on July 29

“In signing such a surge of new oil & gas licenses, they are signing away our future. The leadership of those with the greatest capabilities & capacities is essential. Countries must phase out fossil fuels – fast & fairly.” - Antonio Guterres
posted by jeffburdges at 8:55 AM on July 29

Atlantic Ocean Conveyor Likely (59%) to Collapse Before 2050, Say Climate Scientists

Probability Estimates of a 21st Century AMOC Collapse by Emma J.V. Smolders, René M. van Westen, Henk A. Dijkstra (17 Jun 2024).

Also, the wired article for this post seemingly references this article from over a year ago, while the newer work predicts collapse almost 10 years sooner.

Warning of a forthcoming collapse of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation by Peter D. Ditlevsen, Susanne Ditlevsen (17 April 2023)

We'd unrealted work preducting synchronous maize crop failures from heat in the 2040s, so maybe Europe gets squeezed from both directions. We do know civilization evolved in a 12,000 year calm streak for climate.
posted by jeffburdges at 8:22 PM on August 15 [1 favorite]