Iceland declares ocean-current instability a national security risk
12 comments
·November 29, 2025dredmorbius
Link disambiguation: <https://edition.cnn.com/2025/11/15/climate/iceland-warming-c...>
(Cited source by dagens.com, which is / may be AI-generated to boot.)
andai
So, if this happens, Iceland actually becomes Iceland...
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smyk1777
I'm glad they took this seriously and considered it important. Maybe the world will finally notice how we're destroying the planet and ourselves, and whether anyone thinks about their children and grandchildren who may live in a world destroyed by generations.
oldpersonintx2
[dead]
gnarlouse
My (paranoid) unpopular take: the AI boom we’re currently experiencing is a concerted effort by the billionaires to maintain operational agency (the ability to think and do at a massive scale) once society begins to collapse due to climate change.
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Thank you for the sane responses. I’m reconsidering how much I believe this.
andybak
This makes no sense. It takes a complex industrial society to keep that tech going. The supply chain to make GPUs would not survive even a modest disruption in the world economy. It's probably the most fragile thing we currently manufacture.
ben_w
If you're an AI company and you believe your own hype (like Musk seems to), you'll probably believe that you can automate everything from digging minerals out of the ground all of the way up to making the semiconductors in the robots that dig the minerals.
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.
fmbb
How would that work? AI cannot run if society collapses.
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.
forinti
If there's an evil plot, it's goal must surely be to accelerate environmental degradation.
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.
dkdcio
do you think it’s one person or a group of them that meets? design by committee? how are they getting it all done? let’s hear it!
I wish other countries would take it this seriously.
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.