I’m a physical oceanographer. While I have only skimmed this article I would like to make two quick comments.
1) The AMOC is one of the most studied parts of the world ocean and predictions about its collapse have been made since Stommel in 1961. I think in general any study on its imminent collapse should be taken with a grain of salt and it would be wise to wait for further replication and the consensus of the community. You can google AMOC collapse and find articles stretching back decades.
2) This may be my bias a dynamacist but I am skeptical of purely statistical models of AMOC collapse. The AMOC is complex and trying to predict the time of a complete collapse is a significant simplification (especially when, as the authors note, a slowdown rather than shutdown of the AMOC seems more likely from our current understanding).
Nevertheless this is a very interesting study and contribution to the field.
The terms "imminent" and "predict the time" seem like missing the point of the article you acknowledged you have only skimmed.
I felt the article was clear collapse is not imminent, not even in this century.
I felt it noted focus was not on imminence, but on changes worth mentioning in aspects of interest.
Perhaps the difference is this article is talking of timing for transitions of significance, rather than the forthcoming collapse more likely to arrive sooner after such transitions?
You are completely correct I regret that word choice now. I was rushing to comment because I felt it was important to provide context on AMOC collapse scholarship.
Ocean currents bring lots of warm water from the south towards Europe making it quite a bit warmer than other places at similar latitudes. Cities in Europe are quite a bit further north than most people think.
Lots of other side effects as well would happen but be less known or surely predicted by models.
Current stable pattern changes into another stable one, probably quickly. Or it may split into two independent stable patterns. It will not disappear. It may result in long term climatic changes in different geographies, especially during transition, although it would be rather quick.
For comparison, the El Niño / La Niña cycle, a/k/a the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) drives patterns of drought and excessive precipitation and severe storm activity across the Pacific basin, including Australia, Japan, and North & South America, with effects being felt into the Gulf of Mexico and by some accounts, Europe. Those result from shifts in sea-surface temperatures of about 0.5 °C / 1 °F.
AMOC is part of a tremendous thermal-energy circulation system from the tropics to the arctic within the Atlantic Ocean, and tying to global ocean circulation patterns. Specific impacts are difficult to identify, but could well be hotter tropics (and likely: stronger and more frequent hurricanes and extreme storms), colder North Atlantic (including a loss of the moderating influence of the Gulf Stream on Northern European climates, hence potentially far colder and more severe winters). There are also likely impacts on marine life, agriculture, general wildlife patterns (plant and animal), amongst others. Regional sea-level rise is another possible impact (through thermal expansion if I understand correctly).
Effectively: a predictable and beneficial pattern to which human and nonhuman life and existence has evolved over many thousands of years, if not longer, may be on the verge of complete disruption. That's an event without precedent for on the order of 10,000 years (since the end of the last major glaciation period).
Are you comparing Stommel's Box model to Bower's recent work? I would argue the latter is more "expressive" though yes, it depends on measurements we weren't collecting in the 60s.
Since you're familiar with this stuff, and I didn't see it in the article, what's the impact if it were to collapse? To the ecology? To the weather? To other ocean currents?
Global warming is the effect of decreased solar radiation (as compared to how much solar energy is absorbed), thus more energy added to the Earth. A new ice age in Norther Europe might slightly increase that area's albido, which would increase solar radiation and in theory mitigate global warming. But truth is, the effect of that change in albido will be very small compared to the effect of the atmospheric CO2 (which traps the solar radiation).
Europe may be colder, but somewhere else is going to be much, much hotter.
I also commented something similar, before seeing your comment.
Not sure why people are eager to believe literally some guy on the internet. Maybe the people are afraid to believe the other guys, you know, the ones published in Nature.
I've got a background in this field and I am very surprised to see this published in Nature. The model presented is purely statistical with no representation of the underlying physics. When we are dealing with a phenomenon that is driven by well-understood physical laws (e.g. geophysical fluid dynamics, radiation physics etc) then these physical models are the most reliable basis for prediction.
When I say physical models here by the way I'm referring to physically-based mathematical models as well as numerical models.
It seems that the authors have done a good job in developing their model. My issue is with Nature deciding to publish it. If this paper was not published in Nature it would receive little attention within or without climate science - in fact many such statistical models are published each year without much comment. However, Nature have published a paper that I think many ocean scientists would feel draws dramatic conclusions from a weak basis but will now inevitably draw much more attention than more insightful papers.
MIT professor Carl Wunsch accused Nature in 2010 of near-tabloid science with a tendency towards sensational papers built on weak foundations. However, I've felt that Nature's choice of publications on climate in recent years has been high quality. This paper feels like a big step-down from that standard.
As a lay-bystander to the climate debate, I get a little spooked when I see comments like this. Like 99.9% of people, the science of complex climate systems is beyond me as are the de facto black box models that project
climate change. Instead I use “appears in a credible journal” as a basis for trusting the apparent direction of travel and I’m
disconcerted when I see that proxy challenged. I also, I am somewhat sorry to say, likely to discount anonymous comments as credible as there is so much propaganda in this space. That’s not to say I don’t understand the challenge of modeling complex systems, but want to point out that one of the most frustrating things about the climate debate is that the battling sides require us to take on trust what they tell us for some very big changes. It’s difficult.
Question for the community: how does one navigate such uncertainty?
Like you would any other thing that is outside your circle of influence: kick it out of your circle of concern because you aren't realistically speaking geared up to move yourself into a position where you do have influence. If you don't you end up with the global equivalent of a burn-out and it might start to affect your ability to make decisions about things that you do have influence over because it is paralyzing to be confronted with such overwhelming looking possible catastrophe in your life time.
Treat it like the weather prediction for next month, if it happens it happens and then you can react. If it starts to show up in the weather prediction for tomorrow it is time to factor it into your present day decisions.
> Question for the community: how does one navigate such uncertainty?
Not climate scientist, but researcher in ML (another highly hyped and arguably more noisy field).
After Bourbon, the hard truth is expertise + don't.
Unfortunately journals/conferences/venues are an extremely noisy mechanism which in general aren't realistically much better than arxiv (at least over here). Peer review isn't journals/conferences, it is peers reading and evaluating the works. Reviewers are doing a service and often not giving a work significant time as they got other stuff to do. The only real way to know if a paper is valid or not is to be an expert in the subject matter (more focused than the field) and to read it __and the code__. All too often it is a nuanced point that is the crux of a paper, and would be entirely missed if you're not deep in that subcommunity. I know this answer sucks, but that's what it is.
Fwiw, I wouldn't realistically change your strategy as a layman. It's probably the best you got. Maybe only thing is don't think "journal publication == 100% true" but rather "journal publication == probably right." The process is noisy and there's no way around this.
To me this is the great utility of the IPCC reports. If you look at the full report you can find subsections on many aspects of climate change and a discussion of the state of the field complete with citations compiled by an expert.
> Instead I use “appears in a credible journal” as a basis for trusting the apparent direction of travel
Using that is like using 'Someone raised a concern in a meeting' as a basis for believing something.
Anyone can raise a concern, or publish a paper. What matters is whether or not other people are convinced by the paper. Consensus.
Use 'scientific consensus' as your weather-vane. (PS. The scientific consensus on climate change is 'things aren't looking great, we need to turn the bus around, we aren't turning the bus around'.)
... Or go learn and become an expert in the field for yourself. It should only take ~20,000 hours of making a lot of mistakes along the way.
Welcoming nuance, reading the whole thing, and not venturing conclusions as a laymen.
This thread is a good example: the person you're replying to isn't saying it's bad work, or that the work claims certitude. In fact, it disclaims it, it's a statistical model. It's just that pop "scientists" may overestimate it its in Nature and people don't read.
FWIW and IME: not by trying to reduce the uncertainty through study.
I spent a few years studying climate models. I have lots of background in mathematical modeling and numerics, but not climate per se, so this was a big undertaking but possible. I have to admit that -- although I can now read and understand papers better -- it hasn't been particularly illuminating.
The global climate is changing. The long-term impact of these changes is difficult to know, particularly because there are many plausible bifurcation points. Beyond some basics, the TL;DR is "we just don't know exactly what will or won't happen, or when, but it's probably not going to be good for most people on the planet and things are probably going to start getting bad within 1-2 hundred years".
In my mind it's really just a case where being a conservative is the best approach.
Look at it this way. The link to the article appeared on HN 15:59:54. braaannigan's comment appeared on 17:07:56. Thus, it took this HN user not more than 60 minutes to conclude that this article is of low quality and should not have been published in Nature. Nature's editors, the article's authors, and its peer reviewers disagree. braaannigan is anonymous and do not put their reputation on the line. Nature's editors and the article's authors do. If appeal to authority is a valid argument then I believe one side wins this debate in a landslide.
Based on my initial reading so far this seems like the best take.
However, I’ll offer an alternative perspective.
This paper identifies that IPCC does not expect a collapse in the 21st-century. That alone should be our largest biasing factor when we’re asking - from a time horizon perspective - what should we be doing?
So then, why now? I think it’s compelling that they identified two preconditions for a collapse they have been monitoring, and now are indicating that we are on the trajectory towards collapse, given what we were looking for for indications and warning.
As a former military officer, the key thing that you get from intelligence is long-term forecasting and indications and warnings for negative or dangerous actions by your adversaries and risk-taking by your allies.
So following that same logic, then if two of the largest indications and warnings for a future energy transfer collapse/flip scenario, based on the best modeling we have today, are indicating that we are on that trajectory, then it seems appropriate for the most well respected journal to relay that fact.
As a former military officer, does it concern you at all that in this case if the time comes that we must mobilize, like yesterday, instead of issuing orders and having them followed, we may have a 4 to 12 year lag as the orders filter through our "democracy", which is composed largely of a bunch of children arguing over their respective fantasy land realities (as illustrated among our best and brightest here every time the topic comes up)?
I feel like "a chain is only as strong as its weakest link" is in play here in a very big way.
Sorry, Nature can't try to pull the Buzzfeed/Buzzfeed News schtick.
They can't have a clickbait journal where they use their name to lend it credibility it would otherwise not have, and then claim no this isn't "Nature" and try to keep their credibility.
The journal is Nature Communications, which has a much lower impact factor than Nature. Many of the papers rejected from Nature are encouraged to be automatically transferred to Nature Communications. One nice thing about Nature Communications is that one can read the reviews: https://static-content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1038%2Fs414...
> physical models are the most reliable basis for prediction
Simpler models can yield better predictions than complex ones, even when the complex model is more "realistic". The many tunable parameters and complex feedback loops can increase uncertainty compared to a simple model.
Many of the physical models are of similar complexity to the model in this paper - the sort of analytical model that you run in a few minutes on your laptop, not on a super-computer. It's not a question of complexity it's about whether a statistical model that is not constrained by well-understood constraints is a high-value model
Skepticism on this was called out in WaPo's article on the same subject:
Other experts on the AMOC also cautioned that because the new study doesn’t
present new observations of the entire ocean system — instead, it is extrapolating
about the future based on past data from a limited region of the Atlantic — its
conclusions should be taken with a grain of salt.
A lot of publicly-published forecasts of climate change have been ridiculously - and I would emphasize hilariously so - conservative on their numbers and predictions. Pretty much every “worst case scenario” morphs into a “best case scenario” over a year or three, before being dropped wholesale for being unrealistically optimistic due to how fast climate change is accelerating.
So can this happen “sooner than expected”, along with the massive raft of climate change outcomes that are cropping up 20, 50, and even 100 years “earlier than expected”?
Let’s just say that if climate change was on the stock exchange, I’d be dumping serious money into its futures. Nothing seems to be truly “off the table” anymore, even the truly outlandish outcomes are becoming terrifyingly prescient.
It's Nature Communications, not Nature itself. Relevant quote:
> If a paper is rejected from one Nature journal, the authors can use an automated manuscript transfer service to submit the paper to Nature Communications via a link sent to them by the editor handling the manuscript.
We've been very surprised as to which studies made it to nature over the past decade. I can't help but conclude that the influence of (politial) bias has been steadily growing over the years. (Fwiw, i'm personally taking the climate change subject extremely serious).
It's not worth anything, since the conservative rear guard and even outright deniers say the same thing these days. If you mean to separate yourself from such people, you'll have to put it differently.
Would help taking your observations seriously if you provided some credentials, studies published, etc. Otherwise, and of course I say this with all respect, you're just some guy on the internet (spreading FUD, but that's another story)
Part of the challenge of this climate information is that it's so bloody complicated. Yes, Nature is doing a scientific write-up, but even reading the abstract all I get is "severe impacts on the climate in the North Atlantic region". What does that mean? Ok, well, why don't I at least look up the AMOC in the first place.
Quick dash over to wikipedia [1] and I find out that...
> The Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC) is part of a global thermohaline circulation in the oceans and is the zonally integrated component of surface and deep currents in the Atlantic Ocean.
While I am not a scientist, I consider myself fairly well-read and not an idiot. But when the first sentence of a Wikipedia article needs an ELI5 translation by ChatGPT... you know you're in for a reading adventure.
(But by the 3rd paragraph Wikipedia has a relatively understandable "what if this goes wrong" breakdown)
> Predictions based on observations rely on detecting early-warning signals, primarily an increase in variance (loss of resilience) and increased autocorrelation (critical slowing down), which have recently been reported for the AMOC. Here we provide statistical significance and data-driven estimators for the time of tipping. We estimate a collapse of the AMOC to occur around mid-century under the current scenario of future emissions.
The abstract also says that the collapse would impact the north Atlantic region, but in what way? Assuming the prediction is accurate, what changes could we expect to see in that scenario? Wikipedia suggests that temperatures in northern Europe would drop significantly + sea levels would rise, but is that all? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_meridional_overturnin...
Ireland and Great Britain are at about the same latitude as Labrador in Canada, but benefit from heat transported across the North Atlantic from the Caribbean by warm water. Absent the current that is transporting that warm water, one would expect the GB climate to more closely resemble Labrador’s. In other words, much colder.
The problem is people mix up the overturning part of the AMOC and other overlapping streams.
And while the AMOC is powered quite a bit by water cooling down in the Arctic etc. the other streams are also to a huge degree powered by earth rotation AFIK.
In other words they won't stop, and likely won't slow down that much either. And that is if the AMOC stops instead of just slowing down quite a bit.
E.g. the rotation consisting of Gulf, Canary, N. Equatorial stream and N. Atlantic drift won't stop, but it will reach less far north and potentially colder. Similar for the other "rotations" like that (e.g. Brazil<->Africa) which the overturning stream overlaps with, through some parts might somewhat change their forms and water temperatures.
Or in other word while the absence of the AMOC can cool down GB/Ireland it won't remove all effects.
Expecting similar climate to other (coast) areas on the same latitude is ... not that useful. There are many different ocean current not affected by a stopping overturning current affecting the weather, additional even on coastal areas the wetter isn't always dominated by the ocean climate but can sometimes be largely affected by a constant strong weather front from the country side (both hotter and colder) and in some places that is a common occurrence due to the geography.
It still will likely be ... unpleasant in various ways.
not gonna lie, a scenario where a big nasty effect of climate change pastes Europe first might make the powers that be wake up to the impending disaster faster. For the folks with the big money one death in Europe might be more shocking than 100 deaths in India.
One of the predictions related to global warming that seems to surprise people is that most of the predicted sea level rise is attributed to the thermal expansion of warmer sea water.
So when we think about major changes in how the ocean absorbs and distributes heat, we’re also thinking about how sea level will change in certain areas vs others. If the ocean starts storing a lot more heat around Cuba than Great Britain, Cuba will experience more sea level rise than Great Britain does.
I don't think that is true. The oceans around Cuba and Great Britain are not separate bodies of water. Volumetric expansion from heating gets flattened out across all connected bodies of water by gravity. You could see differences of geography in how much different lakes expand, though.
I don't know. Consider that a given mass of water would undergo the same gravitational force regardless of whether it is colder/denser/smaller/lower or whether it is hotter/less-dense/larger/higher. Also, as an analogy, consider how much the tidal range [0] varies between areas of the ocean which are absolutely connected as a single body of water. Note particularly the contrast between tides in the Mediterranean and the Atlantic Ocean at large on each side of the Iberian Peninsula, even though they are totally connected through the Straight of Gibraltar.
Climate change was sometimes dismissed (or reduced) by saying that’s it an issue for our grandchildren. With those error bars (NOW to +40 years), the immediate nature of the problem and the required response should hit home. Given recent heatwaves, I think nature is starting to hit us with the clue stick. I hope the important people are listening.
Readit News
1) The AMOC is one of the most studied parts of the world ocean and predictions about its collapse have been made since Stommel in 1961. I think in general any study on its imminent collapse should be taken with a grain of salt and it would be wise to wait for further replication and the consensus of the community. You can google AMOC collapse and find articles stretching back decades.
2) This may be my bias a dynamacist but I am skeptical of purely statistical models of AMOC collapse. The AMOC is complex and trying to predict the time of a complete collapse is a significant simplification (especially when, as the authors note, a slowdown rather than shutdown of the AMOC seems more likely from our current understanding).
Nevertheless this is a very interesting study and contribution to the field.
Edit: @abathur posted a wonderful link below that I wanted to spread further: https://www.sciencemediacentre.org/expert-reaction-to-paper-...
I felt the article was clear collapse is not imminent, not even in this century.
I felt it noted focus was not on imminence, but on changes worth mentioning in aspects of interest.
Perhaps the difference is this article is talking of timing for transitions of significance, rather than the forthcoming collapse more likely to arrive sooner after such transitions?
Ocean currents bring lots of warm water from the south towards Europe making it quite a bit warmer than other places at similar latitudes. Cities in Europe are quite a bit further north than most people think.
Lots of other side effects as well would happen but be less known or surely predicted by models.
AMOC is part of a tremendous thermal-energy circulation system from the tropics to the arctic within the Atlantic Ocean, and tying to global ocean circulation patterns. Specific impacts are difficult to identify, but could well be hotter tropics (and likely: stronger and more frequent hurricanes and extreme storms), colder North Atlantic (including a loss of the moderating influence of the Gulf Stream on Northern European climates, hence potentially far colder and more severe winters). There are also likely impacts on marine life, agriculture, general wildlife patterns (plant and animal), amongst others. Regional sea-level rise is another possible impact (through thermal expansion if I understand correctly).
Effectively: a predictable and beneficial pattern to which human and nonhuman life and existence has evolved over many thousands of years, if not longer, may be on the verge of complete disruption. That's an event without precedent for on the order of 10,000 years (since the end of the last major glaciation period).
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Ni%C3%B1o>
More on prospective impacts of an AMOC collapse:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_meridional_overturnin...>
<https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1181-8>
<http://phys.org/news/2016-01-greenland-ice-sheet-affect-glob...>
Global warming is the effect of decreased solar radiation (as compared to how much solar energy is absorbed), thus more energy added to the Earth. A new ice age in Norther Europe might slightly increase that area's albido, which would increase solar radiation and in theory mitigate global warming. But truth is, the effect of that change in albido will be very small compared to the effect of the atmospheric CO2 (which traps the solar radiation).
Europe may be colder, but somewhere else is going to be much, much hotter.
Dead Comment
You want to both use your credentials to be taken seriously in your posts, but also you want to avoid too much scrutiny of who you are.
Apply some philosophy on top of your "science" and you may learn something new and potentially interesting about your claim.
Not sure why people are eager to believe literally some guy on the internet. Maybe the people are afraid to believe the other guys, you know, the ones published in Nature.
When I say physical models here by the way I'm referring to physically-based mathematical models as well as numerical models.
It seems that the authors have done a good job in developing their model. My issue is with Nature deciding to publish it. If this paper was not published in Nature it would receive little attention within or without climate science - in fact many such statistical models are published each year without much comment. However, Nature have published a paper that I think many ocean scientists would feel draws dramatic conclusions from a weak basis but will now inevitably draw much more attention than more insightful papers.
MIT professor Carl Wunsch accused Nature in 2010 of near-tabloid science with a tendency towards sensational papers built on weak foundations. However, I've felt that Nature's choice of publications on climate in recent years has been high quality. This paper feels like a big step-down from that standard.
Question for the community: how does one navigate such uncertainty?
Treat it like the weather prediction for next month, if it happens it happens and then you can react. If it starts to show up in the weather prediction for tomorrow it is time to factor it into your present day decisions.
Not climate scientist, but researcher in ML (another highly hyped and arguably more noisy field).
After Bourbon, the hard truth is expertise + don't.
Unfortunately journals/conferences/venues are an extremely noisy mechanism which in general aren't realistically much better than arxiv (at least over here). Peer review isn't journals/conferences, it is peers reading and evaluating the works. Reviewers are doing a service and often not giving a work significant time as they got other stuff to do. The only real way to know if a paper is valid or not is to be an expert in the subject matter (more focused than the field) and to read it __and the code__. All too often it is a nuanced point that is the crux of a paper, and would be entirely missed if you're not deep in that subcommunity. I know this answer sucks, but that's what it is.
Fwiw, I wouldn't realistically change your strategy as a layman. It's probably the best you got. Maybe only thing is don't think "journal publication == 100% true" but rather "journal publication == probably right." The process is noisy and there's no way around this.
Using that is like using 'Someone raised a concern in a meeting' as a basis for believing something.
Anyone can raise a concern, or publish a paper. What matters is whether or not other people are convinced by the paper. Consensus.
Use 'scientific consensus' as your weather-vane. (PS. The scientific consensus on climate change is 'things aren't looking great, we need to turn the bus around, we aren't turning the bus around'.)
... Or go learn and become an expert in the field for yourself. It should only take ~20,000 hours of making a lot of mistakes along the way.
This thread is a good example: the person you're replying to isn't saying it's bad work, or that the work claims certitude. In fact, it disclaims it, it's a statistical model. It's just that pop "scientists" may overestimate it its in Nature and people don't read.
This is one of the key reasons I come to HN. Yes, for the news, obviously ;) But mostly for the various insights on that news.
I spent a few years studying climate models. I have lots of background in mathematical modeling and numerics, but not climate per se, so this was a big undertaking but possible. I have to admit that -- although I can now read and understand papers better -- it hasn't been particularly illuminating.
The global climate is changing. The long-term impact of these changes is difficult to know, particularly because there are many plausible bifurcation points. Beyond some basics, the TL;DR is "we just don't know exactly what will or won't happen, or when, but it's probably not going to be good for most people on the planet and things are probably going to start getting bad within 1-2 hundred years".
In my mind it's really just a case where being a conservative is the best approach.
However, I’ll offer an alternative perspective.
This paper identifies that IPCC does not expect a collapse in the 21st-century. That alone should be our largest biasing factor when we’re asking - from a time horizon perspective - what should we be doing?
So then, why now? I think it’s compelling that they identified two preconditions for a collapse they have been monitoring, and now are indicating that we are on the trajectory towards collapse, given what we were looking for for indications and warning.
As a former military officer, the key thing that you get from intelligence is long-term forecasting and indications and warnings for negative or dangerous actions by your adversaries and risk-taking by your allies.
So following that same logic, then if two of the largest indications and warnings for a future energy transfer collapse/flip scenario, based on the best modeling we have today, are indicating that we are on that trajectory, then it seems appropriate for the most well respected journal to relay that fact.
I feel like "a chain is only as strong as its weakest link" is in play here in a very big way.
They can't have a clickbait journal where they use their name to lend it credibility it would otherwise not have, and then claim no this isn't "Nature" and try to keep their credibility.
Simpler models can yield better predictions than complex ones, even when the complex model is more "realistic". The many tunable parameters and complex feedback loops can increase uncertainty compared to a simple model.
See for example "To explain or to predict?" by Shmueli (2010, https://doi.org/10.1214/10-STS330)
Other experts on the AMOC also cautioned that because the new study doesn’t present new observations of the entire ocean system — instead, it is extrapolating about the future based on past data from a limited region of the Atlantic — its conclusions should be taken with a grain of salt.
Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2023/07/2...
So can this happen “sooner than expected”, along with the massive raft of climate change outcomes that are cropping up 20, 50, and even 100 years “earlier than expected”?
Let’s just say that if climate change was on the stock exchange, I’d be dumping serious money into its futures. Nothing seems to be truly “off the table” anymore, even the truly outlandish outcomes are becoming terrifyingly prescient.
> If a paper is rejected from one Nature journal, the authors can use an automated manuscript transfer service to submit the paper to Nature Communications via a link sent to them by the editor handling the manuscript.
> Article | Open Access
It's not worth anything, since the conservative rear guard and even outright deniers say the same thing these days. If you mean to separate yourself from such people, you'll have to put it differently.
Would help taking your observations seriously if you provided some credentials, studies published, etc. Otherwise, and of course I say this with all respect, you're just some guy on the internet (spreading FUD, but that's another story)
Dead Comment
Did Einstein rocket off at the speed of light before coming up with relativity?
All those things were later refined as they were the correct cognitive framework with inaccurate physical models behind them.
Quick dash over to wikipedia [1] and I find out that...
> The Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC) is part of a global thermohaline circulation in the oceans and is the zonally integrated component of surface and deep currents in the Atlantic Ocean.
While I am not a scientist, I consider myself fairly well-read and not an idiot. But when the first sentence of a Wikipedia article needs an ELI5 translation by ChatGPT... you know you're in for a reading adventure.
(But by the 3rd paragraph Wikipedia has a relatively understandable "what if this goes wrong" breakdown)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_meridional_overturnin...
The abstract also says that the collapse would impact the north Atlantic region, but in what way? Assuming the prediction is accurate, what changes could we expect to see in that scenario? Wikipedia suggests that temperatures in northern Europe would drop significantly + sea levels would rise, but is that all? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_meridional_overturnin...
And while the AMOC is powered quite a bit by water cooling down in the Arctic etc. the other streams are also to a huge degree powered by earth rotation AFIK.
In other words they won't stop, and likely won't slow down that much either. And that is if the AMOC stops instead of just slowing down quite a bit.
E.g. the rotation consisting of Gulf, Canary, N. Equatorial stream and N. Atlantic drift won't stop, but it will reach less far north and potentially colder. Similar for the other "rotations" like that (e.g. Brazil<->Africa) which the overturning stream overlaps with, through some parts might somewhat change their forms and water temperatures.
Or in other word while the absence of the AMOC can cool down GB/Ireland it won't remove all effects.
Expecting similar climate to other (coast) areas on the same latitude is ... not that useful. There are many different ocean current not affected by a stopping overturning current affecting the weather, additional even on coastal areas the wetter isn't always dominated by the ocean climate but can sometimes be largely affected by a constant strong weather front from the country side (both hotter and colder) and in some places that is a common occurrence due to the geography.
It still will likely be ... unpleasant in various ways.
Depends on the drop and the rise.
Open a world map, and draw parallels passing where large Northern European cities are. [1]
E.g. Canada's Montreal roughly corresponds to Paris.
[1] Or this gif from reddit: https://preview.redd.it/dm7xwsmp3aa81.gif?format=mp4&s=a1673...
So when we think about major changes in how the ocean absorbs and distributes heat, we’re also thinking about how sea level will change in certain areas vs others. If the ocean starts storing a lot more heat around Cuba than Great Britain, Cuba will experience more sea level rise than Great Britain does.
If the conditions that create the heat differential are persistent, the height difference will persist as well.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tidal_range
"We estimate a collapse of the AMOC to occur around mid-century under the current scenario of future emissions."
"The mean of the bootstrapped estimates of the tipping time is 〈tc〉 = 2050, and the 95% confidence interval is 2025–2095."