Anyone familiar with how this will impact climate in Western Europe, from say Portugal to western France?
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.
I am in Australia and I have said it for many years, if it goes badly, we will welcome refugees with open arms. Those arms being machine guns and explosives.
That we will move into the realm of Lifeboat ethics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifeboat_ethics
I do hope that do not take this path as it would become the greatest moment of shame for our whole species.
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.
1. https://www.arcgis.com/home/item.html?id=f1e7378b962d42168fd...
I think the other big issue is that back then we didn't have industrial civilization and high level agriculture dependent on specific environmental factors.
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.
Do you consider Sao Polo to be in north America because Johannesburg is more southern?
People don’t realize how far north most of Europe is because of its very temperate climate powered by the golf stream.
Everything from the English Channel up to the Baltics should be much much colder than it is.
The daily mean temperature in London is around 6c in January vs lower than -8c in Calgary.
The record low temperatures in London are higher than the mean daily minimum in Calgary.
Besides the impact on things like farming the infrastructure of many European cities isn’t built to withstand the winters it may have in a few decades.
You can't compare a coastal city with an average elevation of like 10 meters and an inland city perched more than 1000m above sea...