Bye Bye Humanity: The Potential AMOC Collapse
thatjoescott.com
thatjoescott.com
We're living in a fake world and pretending everything is fine.
Adam Curtis made a movie HyperNormalisation and we're living it also today.
Adam Curtis:
“HyperNormalisation” is a word that was coined by a brilliant Russian historian who was writing about what it was like to live in the last years of the Soviet Union. What he said, which I thought was absolutely fascinating, was that in the 80s everyone from the top to the bottom of Soviet society knew that it wasn’t working, knew that it was corrupt, knew that the bosses were looting the system, know that the politicians had no alternative vision. And they knew that the bosses knew that they knew that. Everyone knew it was fake, but because no one had any alternative vision for a different kind of society, they just accepted this sense of total fakeness as normal. And this historian, Alexei Yurchak, coined the phrase “HyperNormalisation” to describe that feeling.
You think they'd care for something as remote as the AMOC collapse?
Worst case scenario seems to be that people will stop migrating to Europe.
That's not the problem, though. The problem is almost nothing else can. Livestock, staple crops, pollinating insects, etc.
There is a pretty big variation in average temperatures by country [0]. Somehow People everywhere from Thailand to Greenland manage to find food. All else failing it is a possibility to trade for calories. Let alone technology improvements that might save the day by accident.
I mean, it might make places uninhabitable over the course of a few generations, but things that change so slowly are't actually much of a threat on an individual level. Worst of the worst cases people can move or not have children - the statistics suggest that is an acceptable option to a lot of people.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_y...
This won't end humanity, no. But it is likely to cause absolutely catastrophic levels of upheaval and probably billions (with a b) of deaths—from famine, disease, exposure, and war.
You must have missed it: https://xkcd.com/1732/
A 1C rise means hotter hots, colder colds, stronger storms and longer or more frequent droughts as well as the general climate of a region possibly changing.
Yes you can find crops that will grow in specific conditions, but you need to know those conditions and if you have a day that kills a crop that can mean you need to wait for the next season. That 1C rise corresponds with a lot more of these crop damaging events as well as changing the efficiency and possibly infrastructure needed in an area.
I'll also note that the last 1C rise is over a generation not a lifetime i.e. 25 years not 80.
And it's not just food. Europe is a major producer and exporter of fertilizers. If European industrial and agricultural output collapses, the ripple effects hit global food supply chains hard. Countries that depend on those imports will face famine.
Then there's the knock-on, hundreds of millions of people in food-insecure regions losing a key supply source, simultaneous disruption to Atlantic weather patterns affecting rainfall in West Africa and the Amazon, potential shifts in monsoon systems affecting South and East Asia. It's a cascading global food security crisis.
> lots of time to adjust
This assumes a gradual slowdown, but paleoclimate evidence suggests AMOC transitions can happen within a decade or even less. The idea that we'd just smoothly adapt to one of the most dramatic climate shifts in human civilization is not supported by what we know about how these systems behave.
Some humans will very likely survive. Millions, possibly hundreds of millions, will die.
Life as it has been known for hundreds of years will change dramatically.
An unwillingness or inability to conceive of this possible future as anything more than “it’ll be colder, but fine” would make it vastly worse for many people.
Full film at https://youtu.be/to72IJzQT5k
Whenever a politician gets elected on the wish to fix housing, jobs, the pension system, the larger and larger divide between the ultra rich and the masses, either they are lying to you or are hopelessly naive they can achieve anything in their 4 years. At that point all they can do is just fill their pockets like everybody else is doing.
Maybe not that exact variant but there have been thousand of hours of climate change stuff in the news, including worrying about changing ocean currents.
The title is egregiously exaggerated. It implies humanity will go extinct if this happens, when it obviously won't. The actual article doesn't even come anywhere close to making that claim.
Hence the egregious exaggeration of the title. Even large fractions of the population dying != "Bye Bye Humanity."
I think the bigger concern is what sudden climate shifts might do to agriculture. If some farmland becomes much less viable on a wide basis, that might be much harder to adjust to on the short term.
I can't help but think of all the historical societies that collapsed due to even mild pressure on the food supply.
They didn't have the logistical advantages we have today (storage and transport).
Okay, when prawns fished from the coast of Mozambique are no longer viable some other spot will, necessarily, become viable.
Historical societies did not have the technology to simply farm in another place when their current place become hostile to farming. We already do this.
The only danger we have is if the global area for farming decreases. I do not think this will happen - it will merely shift around.
What is your basis for this claim?
It's entirely possible for prawns fished from the coast of Mozambique to simply...go extinct. For areas with good arable land to be plunged into inhospitably cold temperatures, only for other areas with arable land to be made too hot to reliably support their crops.
There's no cosmic balance being kept here.
So? That isn't an irreplaceable staple, is it? Those prawns can be replaced by food that is grown in other places that are viable, whether newly viable or always viable is irrelevant.
> For areas with good arable land to be plunged into inhospitably cold temperatures, only for other areas with arable land to be made too hot to reliably support their crops.
I find it unlikely that all areas become non-arable at the same time. Not even the most extreme warnings about climate change go to this extreme.
What is your reasoning for considering a possibility so small that it exceeds all the most extreme models we have?
But those prawns are gone. The people whose livelihood depended on them have lost that. The people for whom they were a staple have lost that, no matter how replaceable they may be.
Sure, given time, we may be able to find replacements for the things we lose to this drastic climatic shift. But that's not a guarantee, and even if we do, there's huge damage and upheaval in the meantime.
> I find it unlikely that all areas become non-arable at the same time.
It's not about "all areas". Nowhere did I say that everywhere on the planet would become non-arable land at the same time. It's about having more land lose viability than gains it within a short span of time.
What you're positing—that as various areas of the planet warm and cool, there will be perfect balance in what arable land we lose and gain—seems much, much less likely than the scenario where land we have farmed for literally thousands of years becomes wasteland, and we do not immediately gain enough new arable land in other areas to replace it. In fact, every projection I have seen has suggested that while we may gain some new arable land, it will be much, much less than what we lose in a scenario like the one described.
What it looks like to me is that you are either handwaving the decades (or more!) of turmoil, hardship, and loss of life for people in the areas that will be most affected by this, or you're engaging in seriously magical thinking to posit that every acre of farmland lost will be perfectly balanced by an acre of farmland gained somewhere else, and no one will be seriously negatively affected by the move from one to the other.
I am not, and never did propose that. I am arguing that there is no model that I am aware of that predicts a such dramatic NET reduction in arable area that society collapses. If you know of such models, now would be a good time to make me one of the lucky 10k :-) The only ones I am aware of are those predicting specific collapse on specific populations, most of which are tiny, percentage-wise.
> What it looks like to me is that you are either handwaving the decades (or more!) of turmoil, hardship, and loss of life for people in the areas that will be most affected by this,
No, I am not. Respectfully, you appear to be ascribing intentions to my argument that I don't have. I quoted the bit I was responding to specifically!
>>> I can't help but think of all the historical societies that collapsed due to even mild pressure on the food supply.
To which my answer is that this is very unlikely - there will be turmoil, hardship and (some - they aren't going to all die) loss of life in the affected currently-arable areas, but society does not depend on any specific area being viable.
The largest societies live nowhere near their source of food. The impact is not the same as the quoted "historical societies" that collapsed when the arable land did, because our societies don't have the dependency of "living on or near arable land".
Will there be a negative impact on those people living in and around arable land? Sure. Are they a significant percentage of our societies? Nope. Single-digit percentage of the population is nowhere close enough to cause a societal collapse.
All of this to say that, what happened to historical societies happened because those societies were built in, on and around their basic nutrition requirements.
Our societies are not.
> some other spot will, necessarily, become viable.
and provided no basis for that claim.
Not "some other spot may become viable." Not "the amount lost will be minimal." Not "we will be able to get by with less." You made an extremely strong claim, that for every lost place to fish, we will, definitely, necessarily, be granted another.
That is what I was responding to. Indeed, I quoted it in my first message here.
>> some other spot will, necessarily, become viable.
You are correct, I did say that, but that's because the probability of that is so close to 1 that it's not worth splitting hairs about.
Can that fail to happen? Sure, but for the planet to heat up even by an exceptionally high 10c and have few places near the average is a vanishingly small possibility, and would almost certianly require a change in the earth's orbit.
> and provided no basis for that claim.
The proposition wasn't "all the viable land/fishing spots will be destroyed". No one has been arguing that.
It was "when we lose this viable fishing spot, another spot that was not viable will become viable".
And there is zero basis for that.
So either you have massively failed to state your position clearly, or you are so blatantly moving the goalposts, the dragmarks can be seen from space. Which is it?
Stop with the personal attacks - you are obviously emotional about this, and it's clear I am not.
My position is, and always has been, that there is no evidence that modern societies are as dependent on living on, near or around their source of nutrition.
Even an extremely high increase, past what all models predict currently, will still leave net than enough arable land on earth to continue sustaining societies.
I am arguing that an imbalance wide enough for societal collapse is highly unlikely.
My position is absolutely clear, from the very first message in this thread.
You have, variously, 1) strawmanned that I argued cosmic balance, 2) shifted the frame of the argument from societal collapse to individual human suffering, 3) Made personal slurs against me rather than my argument, and 4) Point-blank refused to address my argument, restarted here for the third time.
These optics are not good. Just to be clear, this is what you are supposed to be arguing against (because this is my point): "Climate change on its own will not be sufficient to cause societal collapse."
I cannot see how you have any argument against that, but you have replied so many times that I have to wonder why you are even replying, arguing against an argument that is not being made.
> some other spot will, necessarily, become viable.
You doubled down, changed the subject, and moved the goalposts.
If you had said what you claim to be your point 12 hours ago, rather than strawmanning my posts as claiming that all arable land would disappear at once, then perhaps we could have had a different conversation. (I'd still disagree, but at least it would've been different.)
....also, what the hell is so wrong with being emotional about the collapse of modern human civilization, caused by very preventable factors that we've known about and been screaming about for literally longer than my entire life?
Is acting like a Vulcan supposed to make you morally superior or something...?
For instance, when permafrost melts the land left behind is extremely uneven, covered in marshy hollows and collapsing pingos. Where soil exists, it is thin and biologically inert. Primary succession to the point where it is suitable for intensive arable production will take at least a millennium, even if there are no further changes to the climate.
Now, it's likely - human ingenuity being what it is - that we'd be able to use that new land for some form of agriculture well before that, perhaps even within a century or two. But if we do, it'll be through something like genetically-engineered moss and sedges, not intensively growing wheat and corn in northern Siberia!
Maybe not to the same extent, but empires in the past certainly had the ability to move food around.
In the meantime food production has become more specialized relying on fewer producers.
The Syrian refugee crisis meant something like a million people fleeing into Europe and it caused massive political upheavals.
If North America and Europe enters an ice age, the preferred term would be "climate-expatriates"
Out of curiosity, what happened 1000 years ago to make it so weak? 1000 years ago is still human time scales - there were people living in europe and north america at the time. We have written records from the europeans at least. Its not like this was 100,000 years ago.
The Gulf Stream is not also known as the AMOC. The nature of the Gulf Stream (intense surface current flowing off the eastern coast of North America) is largely driven by wind torque (westerlies in the mid-latitudes, easterlies in the tropics and polar regions) with the intensification due to Coriolis and coastal friction. What we're talking about collapsing is the overturning part largely driven by the differences in salt & temperature between the surface and the abyss. This overturning intensifies the heat transport from tropics to poles and pulls the Gulf Stream farther north:
All Ireland is washed by the Gulf Stream
-- Ulysses, James JoyceI didn't appreciate how he slid into a sponsored block without saying that he slid into a sponsored block. Not only that, he never says it's a sponsor, not within this 2 minute sponsor block, not before or after. The only way to know it is by looking at chapter titles or by guessing by the changed style of the video with graphics and "link below" stuff (so if you're just listening you'd never know). Even if it's relevant to what you're saying (you can pick your sponsors so that's a given) it should be explicitly marked. Even if you think they do a good thing (presumably you would think so, you picked them as a sponsor) it should be marked. Even if it was a non profit (it's not a non-profit).
https://weather.ndc.nasa.gov/goes/
https://www.ospo.noaa.gov/products/ocean/sst/contour/
We don't know enough.
I prefer to plant trees. And stop cutting them down in cities because of "leaves clogging the drains”.
Article contents doesn't reflect the alarmist statement in the header.
"Don't be alarmist, it's just the curtains that are on fire. Besides, there's a good chance it might rain".
“Our paper says that the Atlantic overturning has not declined yet. That doesn’t say anything about its future, but it doesn’t appear the anticipated changes have occurred yet.”
The study is a stark contrast to a 2018 study that said the AMOC had declined over the last 70 years."
...
“Our results imply that, rather than a substantial decline, the AMOC is more likely to experience a limited decline over the 21st century—still some weakening, but less drastic than previous projections suggest.”
Am I the only person here who actually read it?
The idiotic article then downplays this horrific numbers because "Yeah, 43 percent is a lot, but it’s nowhere near what other climate models project". As if even a 20%-25% is not very bad already.
And that's just one cherry-picked study, whereas the majority of the studies predict worse outcomes. But sure, let's pick the sole nicer looking as the comforting winner - the "just" 18%-43% reduction "nice" one.
Doesn't load without VPN
Peak modern internet
When that wave washed over New York, awesome! The freezing helicopter, woot!
I also liked the South Park parody.
Seems like this kind of disaster engagement bait that’s super popular now
All serious experts (including the nature study you linked a popsci article about) agree this is a problem that will have a devastating impact on humanity in the future. We're just quibbling about how devastating and how soon.
„Under high-emission scenarios, the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), a key system of ocean currents that also includes the Gulf Stream, could shut down after the year 2100.“
0: https://thatjoescott.com/2026/02/03/bye-bye-humanity-the-pot...
The will-it-won’t-it collapse of the AMOC is something to keep an eye on. But there are other pressing climate change issues to address in the near term, such as food security, ecosystem degradation, and rising disease rates.
Any change is seen as good or bad, only by the people who saw both ends of it and categorize the change as such. If a change happens through multiple generations, each generations sees only a part of the change. Specially the younger population can only see the change through the past decade or two. That explains why the youth are always merrier than the older folks who have a bigger burden of mempries.
Europe is already hotter than expected.
AMOC collapse in a heating world wouldn't mean much. It seems to me that whatever cooling from it will be offset by global warming.
AMOC could be a generally bad thing for biodiversity or crops, but it's not going to stop global warming.
"Climate disaster affecting a mechanism Europe depended for millenia to keep warm? No biggie, we are already have another climate disaster making Europe hotter, they'll just cancel each other out"
Not just second and third order effects, many can't even understand first level effects.
That said, a new ice age it will not be. If your local temperatures get closer to polar, and polar gets closer to tropic, I don't see the logic of it will cause an ice age. You can't have AMOC positive feedback loop from albedo if enough ice doesn't form.
And you didn't provide any mechanisms outside of ad hominems.
Not to mention past AMOC data is missing one key parameter - Humanity. On account of us not being there. What happens when humans are cold? They warm themselves usually with CO2 emitting heat sources. Last time AMOC was around only CO2 source was the volcano. They don't care about heat.
We know how to warm up the planet. It's cooling down without massive casualties that's hard.