AMOC shutdown likely within the next 20-30 years
tandfonline.com
tandfonline.com
Which means several meters of rising sea level, loss of ecosystems etc. The timescale for these consequences is now (as opposed to 20-30 years ago) fairly close, in 20, 30, 50 years, so it seems significantly more inevitable and imminent. In my country (SE Europe), a hot summer day 20 years ago was 30 C. Now it's regularly 38-39 for days on end, some going to 40. I don't expect it to be 50 in another 20 years, but is it unreasonable to think so? Who would have thought 40 is expectable before?
Given the (even relatively) mild example we've had with Covid, of cascading supply chain issues and strained economies, I wonder what people think will happen when we start losing coastal cities, some of the big ports, crops, potable water etc, all combined, in different places in the world at once...Do we think that we'll somehow adapt quickly, overcome, is there a plan, or is it just a "future someone's" problem?
I grew up in a conservative state, I remember people mocking the ban, like spraying paint into the air just to mock it. My 8-year-old brain couldn't understand why they did that, but they also seemed like a minority. It felt like in just a few years we mostly managed to come together and fix it.
I am at a loss as to why Global Warming isn't treated the same. It was pretty clear to me to exist as a teen, just a decade later, but it seemed to face much more skepticism[1], both in prevalence and in intensity. What circumstances are different, that we didn't all band together and fix this problem, like we did the ozone layer?
- Did DuPont not lobby as hard, since they had other chemicals ready to go? - Do oil and coal companies just lobby more to prevent action on Global Warming, since they couldn't cheaply switch to alternative forms of energy? - Did the oil companies see what happened, and start better devising strategies to obstruct change? Like learning from the tobacco companies, who learned from the sugar companies? - Why didn't the chemical companies do the same? Was it just not as big a deal, like I mentioned above? - Fox News? They didn't exist until 1996, and I'm sure they would have spent enormous effort convincing their audience the ozone hole was "fake news". But there was plenty of conservative nutjob talk radio, did they not protest the ozone regulations? (At that age, I listened to what my parents listened to, and they didn't listen to talk radio, so I don't know). - Tobacco companies successfully fought off any regulation for decades, until finally there was a critical mass in the mid-90s.
What's changed between the 80s and now, that's us from solving this problem, when like 3/4 of the people in the world and even 60% of Americans agree is an emergency?
[1]: Not even skepticism, more like deliberate orneriness. "Rolling coal", etc.
If environmentalists hadn't been campaigning against nuclear power since the 60s then we'd have been in a much better position. That was an anti-intellectual as the current climate change deniers.
It seems to me like one of the problems is the way that multiple parties are incentivized (naturally — I don’t mean by a conspiracy) to view anti-climate-change action as being weaponized by others to unfairly harm them.
The #1 factor, I’d say, is that rich Western countries, having already had pretty reasonable and responsible regulation for decades, say (fairly) “Hold on, we’re supposed to (insert painful thing like high gas taxes, or electric cars when I have nowhere to charge it, or as we have in California, electricity prices 3x what it costs in many other states) when we know for a fact that they’re just running factories with zero emissions regulation in Asia?? Everybody knows it’s one atmosphere so if the third world just does their thing, all our sacrifice will do nothing despite its cost!!
And the third world argues, fairly, that since we got to have our “burn all the filthy coal you want” period 50-200 years ago in the UK, US, etc. it’s utterly hilarious for us to clutch our pearls at them now and expect them to only grow their economies as fast as the expensive energy from solar panels will take them when they have 3 billion mouths to feed and very little money.
Both sides have a good point and yes, it ignores the fact that if many scientists’ beliefs are right, ignoring the problem also isn’t a solution.
It also mentions some scientists who doubt the conclusion, that the 2 degree target is dead. As a doom-and-gloomer I'll buy what James Hansen is saying though, IMO the scientists are underestimating how quickly it'll get worse.
The worsening climate is already causing conflict and displacing people, e.g. in Syria [1] or North Africa in general [2], now they're in Europe and the Nazis don't like them, causing a drift rightwards (a sort of understandable one, from the point of selfishness, in times of trouble (be it real or perceived) you want to keep yourself safe, and then your family, and then your tribe).
[1] https://www.dw.com/en/how-climate-change-paved-the-way-to-wa... [2] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/climate-change-an...
"Atlantic overturning inferred from air-sea heat fluxes indicates no decline since the 1960s", https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-55297-5
"Florida Current transport observations reveal four decades of steady state", https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-51879-5
I think fusion is our last and only real chance at this point. Everything else is stuck in a political hellscape.
If there is a major breakthrough, or one of the 'fusion startups' bears fruit, we're generating electricity in every major city within 10 years.
One must have some hope.
https://blog.lukmaanias.com/2024/12/26/breaking-boundaries-t...
1. We haven't been able to sustain a fusion reaction for longer than 1,000 seconds, just a little over 15 minutes.
2. These are research reactors. Scaling-up these reactors to commercial output may not be straightforward and may require considerably more research.
3. These reactors require tritium, which is not exactly abundant, and requires its own technological advancements in order to scale-up production to satisfy commercial needs.
The project's "ambitious goals" is to hit 2030s? I'll be surprised if they hit their goals in the 2040s and even if they do - that's not a scale-out. You're talking another 10-20 years after that in order to have meaningful impact. That puts you in the 2050s or 2060s at the earliest. Using those more realistic timelines it's clear there's a high probability that the AMOC is going to shut down. So high a probability that it would be prudent to plan on it.
> The Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC) is the main ocean current system in the Atlantic Ocean. It is a component of Earth's ocean circulation system and plays an important role in the climate system. The AMOC includes Atlantic currents at the surface and at great depths that are driven by changes in weather, temperature and salinity. Those currents comprise half of the global thermohaline circulation that includes the flow of major ocean currents, the other half being the Southern Ocean overturning circulation.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_meridional_overturnin...