Scientists Warn Gulf Stream Slowdown Could Begin as Early as 2025

The 2025 date while possible, is much less likely than a middle of the range date.

That said, with the rate that dates relating to climate issues keep getting moved forwards, I would be surprised if in 5 years we dates like between 2030-2060 being proposed.

Sure, the headline is written in a way that draws attention, but it is not dishonest clickbait or written to mislead, IMO.

Others here have hinted at the so-called "hot-model" fallacy, which is relevant to the timeline. [^1]

Apart from that, the article does make clear that "collapse" can be a gradual process.

Even climate change effects that hit very suddenly in a climatological sense can easily spread out over hundreds of years.

This does not in any way rule out tipping points with extreme changes that wreck ecosystems, e.g. average temperatures dropping or rising by 10 degrees Celsius over 20 years in some regions.

[1] Sabine Hossenfelder has a great video on this topic, should be findable by querying "climate sensitivity".

The search results I find are mostly (affirmative) statements of that "hot model Problem", such as this article: https://www.science.org/content/article/use-too-hot-climate-...

I am not a climate scientist, but I have heard the claim that the models that best model 2020-2024 (especially 2023-24) disprortionately often fall into the category of having been dismissed for being "too extreme" before.

First order effect, this would mean that you get less predictable weather events. Essentially, heat domes and artic blasts become much more persistent, sticking around for weeks or even months (worst case) rather than just brief periods.

Second order, A month long heat wave can kill a lot of crops followed by a month low wet spell that can completely flood the same area.

Third order effect, In metropolitan areas this is an inconvenience. For the food system, this is deadly.

Forth order effect, a fragile food system that feeds the metropolitan areas - things get dicey fast. Tough times, tough leaders, rise of authoritarianism etc. May you live in interesting times.

A slowdown is expected to lead to a temperature drop from artic air being able to circulate further down, which would shorten growing seasons and probably change farmland distribution.

The effect of this happening over individual human generations in an environment where established farmland is hundreds to thousands of years old would be considerably expensive to adapt to.

While the entire globe has warmed, the subpolar North Atlantic has resisted and even cooled. This is exactly the region where the AMOC delivers much of its heat, and exactly the region where climate models have long predicted cooling as a result of the AMOC slowing down.

[A] cold subpolar North Atlantic correlates with summer heat in Europe (Duchez et al., 2016).

For example, in summer 2015, the subpolar Atlantic was the coldest since records began in the nineteenth century— while Europe suffered a strong heatwave. Subsequent study has shown that heatwaves are increasing three to four times faster in Europe than in other regions of the Northern Hemisphere [...]

Most of it should be all called Northern Europe and North of Northern Europe.

Paris sits between Vancouver and Seattle.

London is the same latitude as Calgary.

Hamburg is at the same latitude as Edmonton.

If the golf stream slows downs or gets diverted north towards Greenland much of Europe will freeze.