Europe may freeze if this ocean current collapses. The climate crisis may lead to devastatingly cold winters rather than scorching summers.

8 comments

1. Someone is probably going to misunderstand my remark as pushing soft denial… if or when this happens, it will harm a great many people since Europe has established its current patterns of settlement and industry according to the former climate and peoples homes, possessions, clothing and habits are for the former climate. And here’s the part somebody’s probably going to misunderstand….. I personally would much rather live in a harsh cold climate than a harsh hot, muggy one. That’s not to be understood as pooh-poohing the climate crisis or suggesting we stop trying to change government policy. It’s just a fact. I function much better when it’s cold than when it’s hot.

2. Many GCMs have us at +4 °C MST before 2100 in BAU scenarios. As climate science seems to have collectively underestimated the cooling effect of anthropogenic aerosols in increasing albedo, newer models that reflect post IMO 2020 warming may go higher.

   AMOC collapse may be viewed in that late century context as a good thing.

   I think what’s lacking is full GCMs modelling precipitation in Europe post AMOC collapse. Will cooler, less water laden air from the Atlantic improve or worsen the impacts seen from current models, where the Sahara crosses the Mediterranean to encompass everything south of the Alps.

3. Resources please? I’ve heard this before and then it was debunked. Credible resource please. 

4. The freezing was debunked. I’d have preferred it.

5. Meanwhile, as Hansen showed in his “Superstorms” paper, the tropical Atlantic will heat beyond anything humanity has ever seen, creating hurricanes that will be literally off the present charts.

6. On a lighter note. Anyone read Maggie Gee’s The Ice People?

7. My sis may hit the lottery tonite.

8. Yeah, the author’s summary is just plain wrong in regards to hypothetical summer feedbacks. The direct opposite would happen, and most in academia do accept the fact that intense summer heat would continue to be a concern across Europe even post-AMOC collapse. It’s a common misinterpretation of the theorem that summers would get cooler under such a scenario, it would basically be physically impossible when you consider that the expected atmospheric feedbacks would provide all of the climatic factors required for substantially drier and hotter summers, especially so in western and northern Europe. There’s really no contextually realistic analyses that demonstrate that summers would be anything but hotter under a hypothetical AMOC collapse in response to anthropogenic climate change. The only simulations that come anywhere close to suggesting such a feedback are older idealised studies that apply a preindustrial control baseline which, of course, is not contextually realistic. There’s also a considerable degree of known model biases and deficiencies which directly impacts the plausibility of simulated outputs, and observational methodology equally has such an impact, but I’ll keep this post brief as it would turn into an academic paper otherwise. The basic tl;dr here is that no, intense summer heat wouldn’t disappear if a hypothetical AMOC collapse occurs. In fact, summers would get much more intense. Furthermore, it’s increasingly highly debatable as to how much of a winter cooling feedback is possible if at all, but that would come down to model biases and observational errors which is an area of the theorem that does require much more attention (Bellomo et al. do adress it, as do McCarthy et al. and Srokosz et al.).

   The whole “new ice age in Europe” trope is disingenuous at best, and more often than not borders on deliberate disinformation with ulterior motive. I suspect in this case it’s largely down to clickbait material.

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