It’s time to move on to pastures new from my Saying NO… book, as I mentioned in my last post. Seems like an opportune moment to try an ‘open comment’ post to signal the change of direction, an idea I trailed at the start of the year.
What I think emerged from that discussion was for me to suggest a broad topic and perhaps a few talking points from it and then to see where things went in the discussion. Kind of like a normal post! Back then, Ruben wrote “ I would love to hear your thoughts on AMOC shutdown, drought, more frequent extreme weather, and other growing challenges for agriculture. That might be a good topic for an open post.” Indeed I believe it would be, so let’s go with that.
In case this is unfamiliar, the ‘AMOC’ is the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, the major current system in the Atlantic Ocean, involving the northward flow of warm water and the southward flow of colder water which helps moderate the climate of both colder high-latitude countries and warmer low-latitude ones. Studies have suggested that present human-caused climate change could result in the shutdown of the AMOC, the consequences for both colder and warmer countries within this Atlantic system being, not to overstate the case … very bad.
A recent study that models AMOC shutdown has put the heebie-jeebies up a lot of people, including me – see Prof Stefan Rahmstorf’s summary here. Seems like we could be on course for an AMOC shutdown tipping point within the next seventy years with 95 percent confidence…
…click on the above link to read the rest…
