Bye Bye Humanity: The Potential AMOC Collapse

70 pointsposted 12 hours ago
by rolph
(thatjoescott.com)

72 Comments

shrubby

10 hours ago

This scary, yet almost nothing on the news.

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.

fallinditch

9 hours ago

Well worth watching, Adam Curtis takes you on a wild ride around recent history and strings together an amazing viewpoint - intentionally fucking with how you emotionally understand the present, by showing how power, myth, and simplification interact over time.

Full film at https://youtu.be/to72IJzQT5k

coldtea

10 hours ago

The top politicians, academics, businessmen, can party with underage children and even torture them, or dicuss blatant undemocratic actions that impact billions, and it's business as usual.

You think they'd care for something as remote as the AMOC collapse?

helloplanets

9 hours ago

Isn't this exactly the point the original post is making?

tim333

6 hours ago

>almost nothing on the news

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.

sph

8 hours ago

Another take away from that documentary is not that politicians do not care, but that the world has become so increasingly complex, fast-moving and interconnected there is no simple or real solution to any of the problems people have. They just do not have the answers.

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.

roenxi

10 hours ago

It isn't actually all that scary; humans cope pretty well over a wide variety of temperatures. If the change caught everyone by surprise it'd be a huge problem but it seems to be fairly well understood and there is lots of time to adjust.

Worst case scenario seems to be that people will stop migrating to Europe.

SupremumLimit

8 hours ago

The ignorance of this comment is breathtaking. How are the crops going to grow if the temperature drops by 15 degrees Celsius? What marine and terrestrial ecosystems can survive a sudden catastrophic change like that? What’s going to happen to the weather patterns after this planet-scale shift? How do you “adjust” to the collapse of your food supply and entire ecosystems?

tim333

6 hours ago

Grow the crops somewhere else? The earth's climate has always changed - the sea was 100m lower 20k years ago and much of Europe covered by ice. But it doesn't change so much over one human lifetime.

vdupras

2 hours ago

20k years ago, humans hadn't invented agriculture. Our whole civilization has existed in one particular geological time, an exceptional one. There is absolutely no indication that it's flexible enough to be transposed in another, and particularly not at that speed of transition, which is, in geological time, exceptionally fast.

lossolo

4 hours ago

Europe is one of the world's largest agricultural producers and exporters. France alone is one of the top grain exporters globally. The EU exports massive quantities of wheat, barley, dairy, and processed food to North Africa, the Middle East, and Sub-Saharan Africa. Countries like Egypt, Algeria, and Nigeria are heavily dependent on European grain imports. An AMOC collapse would devastate growing seasons, slash yields, and potentially make large parts of Northern Europe unsuitable for current agriculture.

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.

PinkMilkshake

8 hours ago

> humans cope pretty well over a wide variety of temperatures.

That's not the problem, though. The problem is almost nothing else can. Livestock, staple crops, pollinating insects, etc.

roenxi

8 hours ago

How big a problem is that over a multi-decade time horizon?

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...

danaris

6 hours ago

Right, and we know that modern human societies are really good at planning for a major disaster on a multi-decade time horizon! Look at how well we've dealt with the climate cri—oh, wait.

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.

greygoo222

8 hours ago

Livestock, staple crops, and pollinating insects cope pretty well over a wide variety of temperatures. Some specific crops don't, but that's not a problem as long as changes are predicted.

roter

23 minutes ago

> ... potential collapse of the Atlantic Gulf Stream, also known as the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation or AMOC.

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 Joyce

palmotea

9 hours ago

> Bye Bye Humanity: The Potential AMOC Collapse

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.

8bitsrule

9 hours ago

Somehow humanity survived 10,000 years of the last ice age. Without central heating. Of course, furs will be harder to come by.

bawolff

8 hours ago

Being cold doesn't seem that big a problem.

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.

HackerThemAll

10 minutes ago

Current society can quickly collapse if the internet or AI data centers are shut down. All supply chains and finance are based on it. The shutdown can easily happen if the climate cools down, given that more electricity would be needed to heat houses, and we're already on the verge of efficiency of electric systems.

lelanthran

8 hours ago

> 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.

tasuki

6 hours ago

It will become easy to keep things frozen!

danaris

6 hours ago

> some other spot will, necessarily, become viable.

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.

lelanthran

6 hours ago

> It's entirely possible for prawns fished from the coast of Mozambique to simply...go extinct.

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?

danaris

5 hours ago

> Those prawns can be replaced by food that is grown in other places that are viable, whether newly viable or always viable is irrelevant.

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.

lelanthran

3 hours ago

> 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

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.

roryirvine

38 minutes ago

Net land area suitable for arable production may well remain roughly constant, but only over timescales much longer than a human lifespan due to the speed at which ecological succession operates.

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!

danaris

2 hours ago

You said

> 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.

lelanthran

an hour ago

> You said

>> 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.

danaris

an hour ago

But...that's just a complete non sequitur.

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?

lelanthran

14 minutes ago

> 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.

unglaublich

9 hours ago

They were already excellent at survival, and they migrated, and many of them died young. Sure, _humanity_ will survive, but a large part of the population won't.

palmotea

8 hours ago

> They were already excellent at survival, and they migrated, and many of them died young. Sure, _humanity_ will survive, but a large part of the population won't.

Hence the egregious exaggeration of the title. Even large fractions of the population dying != "Bye Bye Humanity."

simianparrot

9 hours ago

Yeah but they didn’t have social media algorithms turning their brains into slush

gyrovagueGeist

9 hours ago

They also didn't have nuclear weapons to use in global conflicts over resources.

aqme28

9 hours ago

Yes, the title is exaggerated. But I think a lot of you are underestimating the societal impact of roughly half a billion climate refugees. That kind of destabilization could easily lead to societal collapse, world war, etc...

The Syrian refugee crisis meant something like a million people fleeing into Europe and it caused massive political upheavals.

overfeed

8 hours ago

> But I think a lot of you are underestimating the societal impact of roughly half a billion climate refugees.

If North America and Europe enters an ice age, the preferred term would be "climate-expatriates"

bawolff

9 hours ago

> Back in 2021, a study in Nature Geosciences showed that the AMOC was the weakest it’s been in more than 1,000 years.

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.

HackerThemAll

13 minutes ago

My amateurish view of this tells me that the amount of heat that's going to concentrate in Mexican Gulf (yes, Mexican) should Gulf Stream slow down/stop, will have enough power to push the hot waters through to the north anyway. The heat cannot just accumulate in the Gulf indefinitely. The Gulf Stream may hiccup, but it'll eventually restart/resume.

adlotsof

10 hours ago

There was this movie, 'dont look up'

t0bia_s

7 hours ago

There is also narrative to scare society. Because frightened people are easier to manipulate with.

DangitBobby

38 minutes ago

So how do we tell the difference between something actually scary and something designed to manipulate us?

andreapaiola

8 hours ago

There is no clear or remotely clear timeline. There is no clear or remotely clear solution. So, there is no actionable.

We don't know enough.

DangitBobby

37 minutes ago

That's not true. We suspect this will eventually happen if climate emissions aren't eventually stopped or reversed. So the action is the stop or reverse climate emissions.

throwaway290

an hour ago

The text below the youtube video is not a transcript of the video, it's more like a short summary. The video is much longer than that.

I 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).

metalman

5 hours ago

The sattelite feed links below update every day or more often, and show varios views and visual data of what is happening in the North Atlantic. I have watched for years, and the last few years are markedly different.The SST (sea surface temerature) charts are especialy interesting as these provide a real time visual representation of the amount of heat in the system (earth surface), and watching things like major weather events like hurricanes or polar vortexes exhanging heat with the ocean is also interesting. Depending on conditions things like the gulf stream itself can up in the visible light images from the GOES sattelite and things like sea ice can be corelated in multiple sattelite feeds that show the direct conection between seaice, and ocean currents in real time, superimposed on past conditions. My conclusions are, that there is more heat and less ice, and much more mixing of water bodys, where it looks like heat builds and builds untill some threshold is reached and then hot and cold currents interact suddenly and then reach a new equalibrium. By suddenly I mean in a ridiculously fast movement of bodys of water the size of continents....takes a few days. Most of these feeds have been running in the same format for decades and I suppose I now have more than 1000 hr's observing, every morning with my coffee, my phone working as a 50 billion dollar front seat on the planets reactions to our activities. Very cool, and strange to watch as things start to look serious.

https://weather.ndc.nasa.gov/goes/

https://www.ospo.noaa.gov/products/ocean/sst/contour/

https://nsidc.org/sea-ice-today

https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/seaice_daily/?nhsh=nh

renewiltord

10 hours ago

Is this real? https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/research-frontiers/how-a-swiss-... Says it’s not.

Seems like this kind of disaster engagement bait that’s super popular now

f_allwein

10 hours ago

Here’s the science: https://www.pik-potsdam.de/en/news/latest-news/possible-nort...

„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.“

renewiltord

9 hours ago

75 years to work on a solution to a possible problem? I rate humanity’s chances. But Europe is responsible for a third of cumulative emissions. Once they undo that bit it should be okay. Negative emissions for 75 years will be hard but they can perhaps undo the damage they’ve done to the Earth.

f_allwein

8 hours ago

It is a global challenge. Climate change is caused by rich people in developed countries (the average Indian person causes very low co2 emissions). There are some good initiatives to mitigate climate change, but so far, it is too little, too late. The US taking a back seat does not help either.

SupremumLimit

8 hours ago

How’s it going so far? Greenhouse gas emissions only keep rising. There’s no basis to rate humanity’s chances positively based on actual evidence to date, even despite all the positive developments in renewable energy generation and storage.

layman51

10 hours ago

But doesn’t that article say that it hasn’t weakened from “between 1963 and 2017” with the important caveat being that after 2017, maybe there’s been more acceleration? Some other commenter on this thread also posted a similar statement about how its collapse is unlikely before 2100, but that’s not very far away which should be very concerning.

gambutin

8 hours ago

The last paragraph says this:

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.

idiotsecant

10 hours ago

>The AMOC will decline substantially, that’s virtually certain and the consequences will be extremely grave.

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.

skybrian

10 hours ago

It's important, but if it happens, the main effects are expected to be after 2100. That seems pretty relevant for any plans you might make.

valvix

5 hours ago

Cucked by cloudflare with VPN on

Doesn't load without VPN

Peak modern internet

d_silin

10 hours ago

"Another study in 2024 showed that a collapse of the AMOC before the year 2100 was unlikely."

idiotsecant

10 hours ago

If you read the article and that's the overall conclusion you came away with I'm not sure we read the same article. They're just pointing out that timing is uncertain, but the majority of diverse models show AMOC failure within a few generations and nearly all of them do if we extrapolate continued CO2 release growth.

d_silin

10 hours ago

I hate endless catastrophism in the headlines.

Article contents doesn't reflect the alarmist statement in the header.

coldtea

9 hours ago

"The house will burn down"

"Don't be alarmist, it's just the curtains that are on fire. Besides, there's a good chance it might rain".

d_silin

9 hours ago

Literally in the article:

“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?

coldtea

32 minutes ago

No, but you might be the only person here who missed "The team found that the AMOC will only weaken by about 18 to 43 percent by the end of the 21st century."

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.

HardCodedBias

10 hours ago

I saw this movie! It was awesome.

When that wave washed over New York, awesome! The freezing helicopter, woot!

I also liked the South Park parody.

Ygg2

10 hours ago

AMOC makes Europe hotter than expected, and US east coast colder.

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.

coldtea

10 hours ago

That's some industrial level cope.

"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.

Ygg2

9 hours ago

Where is the cope? I said things will suck. US gets hotter, Europe gets colder and there are cascading effects from those. Changed weather patterns and biodiversity loss as temperatures rapidly shift.

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.

zkmon

8 hours ago

As long as things gradual enough, similar to Roman empire collapse, you wouldn't even recognize the collapse.

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.