AMOC shutdown likely within the next 20-30 years
28 comments
·February 7, 2025alluro2
psadauskas
As a kid in the 80s, I remember the "Hole in the Ozone Layer". My mom watched the morning news, and I remember it being mentioned frequently as a crisis and we needed to stop using CFCs to fix it right away. There were TV shows (Captain Planet) about it and environmentalism in general. Congress passed a law banning them even with chemical companies like DuPont lobbying against it.
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.
jemmyw
I think the main difference is the pain to people. We had alternatives to CFCs pretty much ready to go, it wasn't a major economic cost. You could still get hairspray after. Businesses could not run subtle campaigns about the issue because it was too hard to care about. What does subtle look like? Fossil fuel companies spending money on influencers to make videos about how gas cooktops are so much better - because if you have gas supply for one thing, even if that isn't a big climate issue by itself, why would you not also use that to heat your house?
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.
xp84
Great question!
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.
daedrdev
Reading the abstract it seems to support the idea of geoengineering if half the excess warming magnitude was from stopping ships Aerosolization of particles
netsharc
Curious that you're picking 1 aspect of the dire prediction of this climate scientist, which contains more things than just the AMOC. The "digested by journalists" summary of that paper: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/feb/04/climate-...
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.
janice1999
I really hope they are wrong or I'll be underwater. AMOC models are based on close-to-surface temperatures so there is so some dissent about how accurate they are. It's probably just a matter of time though. Personally I think panic will eventually set in and we'll be forced to watch governments attempt geo-engineering. I am not optimistic.
netsharc
This paper's title is asking if the UN and public are well-informed enough. I wish there's a more "sociology/anthropoligical look at what happens when things break down" research. Yeah, panic is surely coming, although I feel like desperate attempts at geo-engineering are better than doing nothing, although I suppose a "That thing we did 20 years ago? If we hadn't done that we wouldn't have doomed the entire planet." would be a massive oops.
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...
api
James Hansen has been a very vocal Neo-malthusian doomer forever. Not saying this means he's wrong, just that he's got a clear point of view.
hindsightbias
James Burke explains it to you 36 years ago:
rufus_foreman
Related:
"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
1970-01-01
It's probably less than this due to recent political reversals.
I think fusion is our last and only real chance at this point. Everything else is stuck in a political hellscape.
taylodl
We're not likely to have commercial fusion within 20 to 30 years. Even if we do, it won't be to scale. At this point, we can just assume the AMOC is shutting down as we've been doing very little to date to prevent that.
1970-01-01
If the ITER timelines stop slipping, we're generating electricity from fusion in 25 years.
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.
janice1999
Nuclear reactors connected to the grid in 2023 had a median construction time of 11 years. That's with proven technology. I doubt I will see commercial fusion in my lifetime.
LargoLasskhyfv
"Die Hoffnung stirbt zuletzt. Aber sie stirbt."
marssaxman
We're not likely to see large-scale fusion development even if it does become technically possible, because wind and solar are already so cheap that heat-engine-based power generation cannot compete. Even if we could build fusion power stations, investors would still get a better, safer, and quicker return via renewables, so that's where the money would go.
blain
For those like me that don't know what AMOC is [1]:
> 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...
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havesomewit
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thomascountz
[flagged]
qzw
It seems like we’re hitting all the projected points early. For example, aren’t we already at 1.5C of warming by some metrics, which was supposed to not happen for another decade or two? If anything, I think the scientific community has been too conservative in its predictions, which in turn has caused a massive under-reaction to climate change globally. Seems to me AMOC collapse is probably a foregone conclusion.
netsharc
I saw somewhere that a scientist explained it by saying "You don't want to appear like a kooky alarmist, so you report the numbers that you can be confident in, instead of the extreme numbers"...
As for the reaction, it's a tragedy of the commons, nobody wants to give up their fly-to-Europe-to-ski-because-it's-cheaper holidays/why do they have to give it up and see all those billionaire Instagram kids flaunting about doing that on Instagram?
null
I feel that it's kind of obvious by now that we, as humanity (ofc, in most cases passively), have resigned to not do anything big to prevent negative impact of climate change.
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?