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Bye Bye Humanity: The Potential AMOC Collapse

82 points by rolph

by shrubby

6 subcomments

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.

by palmotea

1 subcomments

> 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.

by aqme28

1 subcomments

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.

by bawolff

2 subcomments

> 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.

by roter

0 subcomment

> ... 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
```

by adlotsof

2 subcomments

There was this movie, 'dont look up'

by andreapaiola

2 subcomments

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.

by HackerThemAll

0 subcomment

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.

by throwaway290

0 subcomment

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).

by metalman

0 subcomment

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

by d_silin

1 subcomments

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

by valvix

0 subcomment

Cucked by cloudflare with VPN on
Doesn't load without VPN
Peak modern internet

by SadErn

0 subcomment

[dead]

by SanjayMehta

1 subcomments

[flagged]

by renewiltord

5 subcomments

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

by HardCodedBias

0 subcomment

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.

by Ygg2

1 subcomments

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.

by zkmon

0 subcomment

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.