Iceland declares ocean-current instability a national security risk
edition.cnn.com
edition.cnn.com
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_Circle#/media/File:Arct...
Notice the red line, marking where the average temperature of the warmest month is below 10°C. Notice how low it is on the west side of the Atlantic, in Nunavut and Labrador. It’s between 50° and 60° north.
Now imagine that line at those latitudes in Europe. You’d have Labrador-like conditions in the UK, a drastic situation indeed. Reykjavik would suddenly resemble Iqaluit.
Also, the temperature change was rapid: Somewhere between 50-100 years. If we’re in the same cycle, we’re more than a decade in already.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skuta_Glacier
Granted it’s not a very big glacier, but it’s there :D
People tend to underestimate how cold it gets in the interior of countries generally seen as the "sunny Mediterranean" - from Croatia, Montenegro, Albania and even Greece.
Also, spotting the typical tourist climbing the Picos de Europa range in sandals is not weird. What's weird if he/she makes it alive... or without frozen fingers or toes.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
High-resolution ‘fingerprint’ images reveal a weakening Atlantic Ocean circulation (AMOC) - 12 Oct 2025 - https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2025/10/high-...
Physics-Based Indicators for the Onset of an AMOC Collapse Under Climate Change - 24 August 2025 -https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2025JC02...
(Cited source by dagens.com, which is / may be AI-generated to boot.)
Adapt.
There’s no stopping this train.
every bit of improvement is a higher chance to avoid some of the most catastrophic outcomes (where the unlikely but possible worst outcome being a mass extinction chain reaction which humanity will find very very hard to survive in a functioning manner/without losing their future)
so still worth fighting for any improvement even if we can't avoid a catastrophe anymore, as there is a huge margin between what we still can archive, and what we might end up with if we stop fighting and are quite unlucky
But it's also clear, it won't be enough. Emissions are not only still increasing, they likely won't stop increasing in my lifetime (in the next 50 years.)
We must adapt. The earth is going to get a lot warmer, and wetter in some parts, and drier in others, and sea levels will likely keep slowly rising for many centuries to come, if not millennia.
On the other hand: nuclear war, genetic engineering, or just plain bad luck (carrington event, asteroid impact) seem much more likely to actually wipe out modern society
It's not an extinction level event (not for humans anyway, it may well be for many other species.) It's not a candidate for the great filter.
There will be migration, but over centuries, not a sudden exodus. There may be wars, but what's new.
I don't see it. Maybe at worst it's a temporary setback, not a permanent one.
We'll never know the counterfactual, but I think if coal didn't exist what you would have seen is an increased focus on hydropower instead. That would have meant industrialisation would have been slower and distributed completely differently geographically, but would still have happened in my opinion
e.g. if you want the true climate damage done by a country you would have to look at all the damage done by producing all the goods consumed there. This isn't very practical doable. But if you e.g. mass import Chinese goods you can't only blame China for the climate damage done in context of producing those goods (but neither can you take away all the fault from them, they still decide how to produce the goods in the end and we (west) motivate them to do so badly).
This also applies to Oil producing countries etc.
And some non amicable countries are so because they see no way to handle their economical situation if they tried to change it. But if countries where to work better together they might find a way forward. And sometimes innovation can fix that by itself. E.g. solar cells have gotten absurdly good to a point where sometimes they just out compete non-renewables on purely economical benefits. That is, if your government doesn't do regulations to actively prevent this (weather it's by hindering solar or by hugely subventionieren oil/coal/gas).
So the situation is both better and worse then the statistics above make it look. Better as you could move production away from non amicable countries and boycott their products and "convince" some of them by giving them a economical feasible means to improve. Worse because we know this won't happen and it means its not just "their fault" but quite often indirectly partially our fault, too.
Also lets be realistic thanks to corruption, short term thinking(e.g. next election) and sometimes plain stupidity many countries which try to get away from oil/coal/gas have done such horrible bad decisions that they not only completely fucked avoiding climate change but also have put their economy in a thought spot. When then is taken out of context and used by people like Trump as an example why fighting climate change is supposedly a scam.
This hyperbole isn’t helpful. The world won’t be destroyed. (If you promise annihilation and are visited simply by devastation, it reduces credibility in an unnecessary way.)
The purpose of Earth, from the point of view of most humans, is to act as a comfortable host of humans. We are destroying the Earth by making it no longer fit for that purpose. I don’t think anybody reads “destroy Earth” and interprets it as something more like, “get rid of the iron ball as well.”
Unless you are one of those deep-sea vent dwelling creatures, we’re risking changes to the planet that will affect your life eventually.
Most people should already be seeing changes to their life in a statistically significant way.
But the AMOC collapsing doesn’t mean plenty of the Earth isn’t comfortable for humans. Global temperatures peaking in their pessimistic state still leaves, for better or for worse, most of the industrialized world viable. Poorer. Less comfortable. But viable nonetheless.
This is important because committing to long-term projects requires avoiding nihilism and complacency. Pitching everything as disaster tips into the former.
If we're trying to use precise language, the economic modelling [0] actually suggests they will be wealthier and more comfortable than they are now. Just probably not as wealthy and comfortable as they could be under other hypotheticals.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_analysis_of_climate_c...
It wasn't a scenario where the Earth is literally annihilated by a black hole, or a super nova, or a meteor or a GMB, it was a scenario where the world is functionally ruined for human life as we know it in a time-scale far shorter than we can muster up the resources to stop or even mitigate it.
So like, what's going on here? Is your response a subconscious coping strategy to change the topic to something more comfortable than one of impending doom for the human species and civilization as we know it?
Sure. The AMOC collapsing doesn’t do that. It makes life shit for a lot of people. But it doesn’t make the Earth uninhabitable for humans or technological civilization.
“Destroy the earth” is hyperbole. Cause mass starvation, associated wars and refugee crises, and mass extinctions with renewed vigor are not.
Unless someone stands up and says "no smoking in the house" ... people are going to keep smoking.
Sure. But if if someone says the house will burn down when the first person lights up, and they’re ignored, and it doesn’t, that doesn’t help. Most importantly because it isn’t true.
Here's a plausible scenario -- European countries decide that they will just power through the cold Frostpunk style by burning massive amounts of hydrocarbons and some other societies in regions suffering from the heat due to climate change decide that this course of action is unacceptable and war breaks out.
The theme of climate change is feedback loops and one way checkpoints. The increasing rates of change from these feedback loops and how societies respond may doom the plant and life as we know it.
This isn't hyperbole.
If Russia hasn’t used one on Ukraine, it doesn’t seem likely that a country mad about its climate would just destroy the world.
As you said, we’ve had plausible scenarios for actually destroying industrial civilisation since the middle of the Cold War. We dealt with it by having the population ignore it while a few nuclear states manage the risks. That doesn’t work for climate change.
We should always try to speak with precision, but not for the sake of people who will dismiss it no matter what you say.
I am pretty sure you can do better than that.
That assumes Iceland consider "National Security Risk" as politically charged as it is in other major countries.
this might sound very pessimistic
but the world has noticed _very long ago_
the first calculations about the greenhouse effect where in 1896!
in the 50th/60th it increasingly more clear that there might be a huge problem
in the 70th it became clear that there might not just be a huge problem but most likely is one, even if there wasn't yet scientific consensus on it
in the 80th scientific consensus was formed that there is human accelerated climate change and that it's a huge problem
since then outside of a very small fraction (depending on year, but in general <10% of scientist) the question wasn't if it is happening or if it is quite bad, but how "exactly" it will play out and how bad exactly it will get with options ranging from quite bad, over parts of earth becomes inhabitable for human where currently up to ~1000000000 people lives, to risk of human extinction in the long run (indirectly by causing a mass extinction event from a combination of climate change being to fast in combination with other environmental damages done by humans). Sure there have been other effect overlying climate change and people have tried to use them to explain climate change away, but consistently fail, sadly only from a scientific POV and not from a convincing people they don't have to worry POV.
And now in 2025 we have on of the most powerful nations of the world deciding that climate change is a scam, not based on data or analysis but based on it benefiting companies owned by some of their most influential citizens. And started systematically removing access to all public data they had previously gathered about climate change basically trying to rewrite history. And that at a time where large part of the US are currently being severely affected by long term environmental abuse. And yes abusing the environment isn't the same as climate change, but we could take a hint that if something has pretty bad effect on a local scale that then something similar done globally will probably have pretty bad effect globally.
It's also not like we don't know that currently _already_ whole nations (e.g. Philippines) are in the process of sinking. Or the amount and level of extrema weather conditions has constantly increased. Or that heat related death are constantly increasing. Or that there are gigantic dead areas in the oceans (through likely not caused by climate change, but this other kind of environmental catastrophes overlap with it putting even more strain on nature).
And still overall the trend of the last few years is to do less about it, not more. Because it is seen as luxury counties can't afford in a very strained world economy.
And people very commonly speak about it's anyway to late why bother, when we are speaking about a gradual effect not a binary yes/no switch.
I honestly don't have optimism about it anymore, there is no indication for me to believe thinks will get better until it's way way to late to prevent a catastrophe.
And don't get me wrong, humanity will (probably) survive, we are quite good at that. And there most likely will be a future where children can have a nice happy live. But before that for reasons not limited to climate change things probably will go to shit for a few decades, maybe even a century. But don't worry as long as people still try to make things better, things will get better again, it just might take some time.
But if I where living close by the coast or close to the equator, or in a area which already has common extrema weather, I would make sure my children grow up somewhere else.
bah that was such a downer to write, but it is my take on the topic anyway
Even 1824 by Fourier
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_effect#History_of_d...
They seem to suggest only certain northern countries would be affected because warm water stops flowing from the south.
So the southern waters would stay hotter right? Or what about across the Atlantic where the currents do the opposite (and make the winters so cold). Would Boston and New York get more temperate?
Additionally, Carribeans, Mexico and South of the US would also be fucked since the energy wouldn't disperse and all the heat and humidity would stay there. Hurricanes would be much more violent, with way more rain, and likely more frequent.
Labrador current might become weaker though, but it is not a given. Currently, the waters from the gulf stream cool down and sink to the bottom of the ocean, so they don't displace the artic waters and hence are not likely the cause of how cold north eastern US is.
If you are asking which area will benefit from climate change I would say Siberia as it will become increasingly important due to the northern corridor remaining ice free and because a lot of people will be displaced by weather/sea level. And that place is empty. Additionally, it has nice farming soil which right now is not used since there are easier places to farm but in a warming world this could change
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/7/4/044...
We're worse than their worst case scenario, so their models were significantly too optimistic.
In the same paper, they also note that for temperature, the models have been accurate.
No. The paper does not show that. Figure 3 shows that recent sea level rise, accounting for measurement uncertainty, is in line with projections of any of the models (around 2mm per year). In any case, they call out explicitly that the recent data is of insufficient duration to make the comparison you’re trying to make.
Temperature data in figure one is more or less exactly in the uncertainty window of the models (not shocking, considering that they’re calibrated to reproduce recent data).
Quoting "The satellite-based linear trend 1993–2011 is 3.2± 0.5 mm yr−1 , which is 60% faster than the best IPCC estimate of 2.0 mm yr−1 for the same interval"
But, as the authors point out, the worst case forecasts that were within-data, are so for the wrong reasons. Quote "The model(s) defining the upper 95-percentile might not get the right answer for the right reasons, but possibly by overestimating past temperature rise."
My previous comment is regarding Figure 2, i.e. "Sea Level". I would invite you to read the whole paper. It is only 3 pages and written without jargon.
> this period is too short to determine meaningful changes in the rate of rise
Now, you note that the authors openly acknowledge that the rate of rise is measured in low-single-digit units of millimeters per year. So, why is the y-axis of Figure 2 measured in centimeters?
Hint: it’s because every point on that plot is a wild extrapolation.
This paper is not good, btw. The fact that it’s “only three pages” should be a blinking red sign telling you that it is not serious. Just read the more recent IPCC reports, because they deal with the question of updates from prior reports.
I don't understand, or do not spot the issue you are seeing. Could you expand a bit?
The uncertainty on the rate of change is quite large (relatively), therefore, any 100 year projection has huge, compounded uncertainty. Figure 2 is not useful for determining anything about the present.
Unfortunately you didn't specify where one can find this "vastly different historical data", so I can't get more specific than this.
Eg https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/aug/28/collapse...
https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2017/08/AR5_Uncertai...
They seem to be giving the word unlikely a range from 0-33%. I'm not sure how to reason about that 0% given that they also used the phrase "not impossible."
Somewhat ironically, Iceland might be the country best suited by nature to handle the cold that would descend upon the Nordics if the gulf stream collapsed. At least they have plenty of volcanic heat they can use. My home country Sweden is not so lucky. Sure it's located a fair bit further south, but it's not clear that'll be enough to escape the cold. Yet the Swedish government seems wholly oblivious. Even the opposition is silent on this issue.
Kudos to the Icelandic! I wish you well in this endeavour!
Feel like I should mention the other end of this problem too: if the gulf stream stops heating the Nordics, it also stops bringing cold water from the Arctic to the gulf of Mexico. The heat waves will be absolutely epic. The Caribbeans, Florida and Mexico ought to be more worried too. In my armchair opinion, this will go way beyond nice beach days.
Fort Lauderdale and Miami are underwater several times a year as is. The seawall at Daytona is gone.
It is going to be destabilizing. As long as it doesn't affect the corn growing in Iowa.
From what I've read, a full collapse is unlikely, though. Plus, preventing this from happening requires a concentrated worldwide effort, which seems unlikely with the leader of the leading greenhouse gas emission source per capita having gone on record saying climate change is a Chinese conspiracy.
At this point, I think a lot of governments are just hoping the best case scenario is right, because there's hardly anything we can do if the AMOC does indeed start collapsing fully, other than southbound mass emigration.
Sweden, Finland, Norway would not be hit too badly. Summers will still be warmer, but shorter. Winters longer but about as cold.
The worst effects will be for the UK and specifically Scotland. Their climate wil change to look more like Finlands or Swedens. I.e. proper winters with pretty deep cold spells. This will be a complete disaster as buildings and general infrastrucure will not be able to handle it. There'll be massive issues from frost heave, buildings that are not insulated enough, heating systems specced too small to properly heat houses and so forth.
An AMOC collapse will be very bad, but not quite the Day Afer Tomorrow as some think it would be.
On the cooling side. The worst general effects will hit the Caribbean, Africa, India and Southeast Asia.
(Also the northern Rockies will get slightly better ski seasons?)
Unfortunately people are too short-sighted and selfish so it's unlikely taxes will be raised.
I'm curious how the long-sighted and altruistic are going to restore the weakening currents to their best strength. Could you start with how much voluntary tax you're going to contribute, what sort of tax scheme you'd recommend for the rest and how these contributions will affect the currents?
Preferably, a step by step explanation, like an llm-R model would produce.
Wouldn’t the more likely scenario be working out how the country will weather (pun intended) the huge change rather than trying to reverse the inevitable?
Either way I imagine step one there is research. Which costs money. “Don’t spend a penny until an incredibly detailed step by step plan arrives from nowhere” doesn’t strike me as a plan for success.
To quote myself, the important part here is "how much voluntary tax you're going to contribute" and "what sort of tax scheme you'd recommend for the rest"
On the flip side Quick, the sky is falling, tax everybody for "research" is going to fly like a lead balloon.
Don't fret at the messenger, it's politics 101...
> “Don’t spend a penny until an incredibly detailed step by step plan arrives from nowhere”
"Don’t spend a penny" and "don't propose a tax increase by an unspecified amount and undefined distribution of tax load" are two vastly different statements, I did not author the first one of these.
In other words, solving the problem does not start with calls for raising taxes, nor are people "selfish" for rejecting such calls.
My comment was about dealing with the economic and social impacts that might result from the changing currents.
If keeping the current regime, marginal tax rate works best, from 20% to 90%. And definitely not voluntary. See my earlier comment about the selfish and shortsighted. Everyone must pay their fair share if society is to flourish.
If innovations are allowed in this hypothetical, phasing out income tax in favour of LVT would be even better.
I am talking about the decision by our national security council. I had not seen any reporting on that domestically.
Everything is a national security risk when we look generally enough. Climate, education, economics, cultural diversity: failing in any of these fields makes the country weaker in some abstract way and that will impact national security down the road. “This impacts the general welfare and quality of life of the people” should be the highest category of urgent problem that needs to be fixed. A healthy, happy, productive populace can solve national security as a side effect.
I think many “healthy, happy, productive” societies that have been invaded by less happy and productive neighbors throughout all of recorded history would beg to disagree.
https://acoup.blog/2020/01/17/collections-the-fremen-mirage-...
Remains depressing that somehow no one thinks for a second of the economic instability that will be induced by the climate change that that oil pipeline would contribute to...
Even the Green party is supporting this government.
If it wasn't clear before, it certainly is now; there is no political solution to the climate crisis.
When all that is left is direct action, the results aren't pretty.
~~ edit ~~
Thank you for the sane responses. I’m reconsidering how much I believe this.
Maintaining all that infrastructure and supplying spare parts is not going to work.
Also AI cannot do anything on its own. Barely anything with support from humans.
That doesn’t mean some idiot billionaires huffing each others’ farts can’t think it can.
Sure it's easy to just throw that out there in one sentence, but once you actually dig into it, it turns out to be a lot more complicated than you thought at first. It's not just a matter of "AI" + "Robots" = "self-sustaining". The details matter.
https://medium.com/@kevin_ashton/what-coke-contains-221d4499...
The highlighted parts are a kind of TL;DR, but in the context here actually reading it - it is not much - is actually required to get anything out of it for the arguments used here.
Anything technological is orders of magnitude more complex.
Pointing to any single part really makes no sense, the point is the complexity and interconnectedness of everything.
Some AI doing everything is harder than the East Bloc countries attempting to use central planning for the whole economy. Their economy was much more simple than what such a mighty AI would require for itself and its robot minions. And that's just the organization.
I did like "Gaia" in Horizon Zero Dawn (game) because it made a great story though. This would be pretty much exactly the kind of AI fantasized about here.
Douglas Adams hints at hidden complexity towards the end of HHGTTG, talking about the collapse of Golgafrincham's society.
You overlook just one single tiny thing and it escalates to failure from there. Biological systems don't have that problem, they are self-assembling no matter how you slice and dice them. You may just end up with a very difference eco-system, but as long as the environment is not completely outside the useful range it will grow and reorganize. human-made engineered things on the other hand will just fail and that's it, they will not rise on their own from nothing. Human-made systems are much much more fragile than biological ones (even if you can't guarantee the kind of biological system you will get after rounds of growth and adaptations).
> Pointing to any single part really makes no sense, the point is the complexity and interconnectedness of everything
Doesn’t it though?
The bauxite mine owners in Pincarra could purchase hypothetical robotic mining & smelting equipment. The mill owners in Downey, the cocoa leaf processor in New Jersey, the syrup factory in Atlanta, and others could purchase similar equipment. Maybe they all just buy humanoid robots and surveil their works for awhile to train the robots and replace the workers.
If all of those events happen, Coca Cola supply chain has been automated. Also, since e.g. the aluminum mill probably handles more orders beyond just coke cans, other supply chains for other products will now be that much more automated. Thereby the same mechanism that built these deep supply chains will (I bet) also automate them.
> Biological systems don't have that problem, they are self-assembling no matter how you slice and dice them.
If the machines used to implement manufacturing processes are also built in an automated way, the system is effectively self-healing as you describe for biological systems.
> did like "Gaia" in Horizon Zero Dawn (game) because it made a great story though. This would be pretty much exactly the kind of AI fantasized about here.
Perhaps the centralized AI “Gaia” becomes an orchestrator in this scheme, rather than the sole intelligence in all of manufacturing? Not too familiar with this franchise to make a more direct comparison, but my larger point is that the complexity of the system doesn’t need to be focused on one single greenfield entity.
So, no. You are not thinking far enough, only the next step. But it is a complex vast network, and every single thing in it except the humans has that man-made item deficiency of decay without renewal.
You miss even repairs of the tiniest item - which in turn requires repairing he repairers, everything eventually stops.
Humans have to intervene fixing unforeseen problems all the time! It is humans that hold all those systems together.
Even if you had AGI, human brains are far from perfect too so that would not change anything in the end, we have biology to the rescue (of us in general, not necessarily the individual ofc) when we miss stuff.
> Man made stuff does not self-repair and self-replicate.
If robots can repair a man-made object or build an entirely new one, the object is effectively self-repairing and self-replicating for the purposes of a larger goal to automate manufacturing.
> You miss even repairs of the tiniest item - which in turn requires repairing he repairers, everything eventually stops
So… don’t? Surely the robots can be tasked to perform proactive inspections and maintenance of their machines and “coworkers” too.
> But it is a complex vast network
…that already exists, and doesn’t even need to be reimagined in our scenario. If one day our hypothetical robots become available, each individual factory owner could independently decide the next day to purchase them. If all of the factories in the “supply chain graph” for a particular product do this, the complex decentralized system they represent doesn’t require human labor to run. It doesn’t even need to happen all at once. By this mechanism I propose the supply chain could rapidly organically automate itself.
By the time AI will be capable of maintaining the whole supply chain required to keep itself running sufficient time will have passed so we can come up with something viable.
https://lukemuehlhauser.com/bostroms-unfinished-fable-of-the...
and I’m always fascinated by these conspiracy theories, was genuinely hoping to get one (but also happy to see you’re challenging your own position). the idea of people coordinating on these things is very funny to me
I think like all tech people will use it for good and bad. those in power have more power etc etc I think it tends to boil down to whether you believe people are, overall, good or bad. over time, that’s what you’ll get with use of tech
but they do meet at davos every now and again, without the democratic shackles.
https://english.elpais.com/technology/2023-09-20/writer-doug...
As you may infer from my use of the word "hype", I do not think we are close to such generality at a high enough quality level to actually do this.
I don't know.
My expectation is that a lot of social breakdown happens with AI that's not quite capable of fully replacing human labour. A lot of angry unemployed people, or a lot of people who suddenly find they're unable to compete with data centres for electricity and can no longer afford to keep their freezer frozen, groups like that may not be able to pull of a Butlerian Jihad, but they're absolutely relevant to the timelines, and I think they happen before fully-automated security bots that are worth bothering to install.
Fun failure mode: https://taskandpurpose.com/news/marines-ai-paul-scharre/
Humans that aren't trying to hide are likely easier, so search-and-rescue bots will happen well before security bots are worth bothering with.
For the billionaires without rockets, there's also a whole bunch of deserts conveniently filled with lots of silicon.
(Or as Mac(Format|World|User) put it sometime in the 90s when they were considering who might bail out Apple and suggested one of the middle east oil barrons, a "silly con").
The economics he talks about are all nonsense. No bank will lend someone $200k for the ticket to go to Mars on the offchance they might be a successful pizza restaraunteur.
But like I said, if you're (e.g.) him and you buy your own hype…
(His grandkids' lifetimes are another question entirely. Things are changing too fast).
My anxiety entirely orbits around the scale of AI compute we’ve reached and the sentiment that there is drastic room for improvement, the rapidly advancing state of the art in robotics, and the massive potential for disruption of middle/lower class stake in society. Not to mention the general sentiment that the economy is more important than people’s well being in 99.9% of scenarios.
[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/14/ai-gpu-depreciation-coreweav... [1] https://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-hawaii-under...
The only thing that IMO would be really hard to regulate would be the distribution of open-weight models existing at the time regulations come into effect, although I imagine even that would be substantially curtailed by severe enough penalties for doing so.
First we had the blockchain, now AI to consume enormous amounts of resources and distract us from what we should be investing in to make the environment healthier.
Perhaps it's not worth mentioning that because there are existing well-tested methods of stopping population migration that are available to be deployed once supported by public opinion. Specifically, fences, warships, and machine guns.
I don't have a solution, but to change people one has to start where masses are and how they thing and especially how they feel. Facts seem to be overrated too.