Well, good news where we can find it: a new analysis, published Wednesday in Nature, found that while climate change is indeed weakening the AMOC it is actually pretty unlikely that it will collapse any time this century.
“Here we show that the AMOC is resilient to extreme greenhouse gas and North Atlantic freshwater forcings across 34 climate models,” wrote authors from the UK’s Met Office and the University of Exeter. They found that even under relatively extreme scenarios, winds in the Southern Ocean maintain ocean upwelling there — that water brought up from the deep “sustains a weakened AMOC in all cases” that they modeled.
They found that the AMOC can only collapse if a corresponding current in the Pacific — a Pacific Meridional Overturning Circulation — were to form. The modeling found that a PMOC does in fact take shape, but in far too weak a form to actually offset the AMOC.
“Of course, unlikely doesn’t mean impossible,” the study’s lead author Jonathan Baker told the Guardian. He stressed the need to cut emissions urgently to ensure the current’s continued existence, and pointed out that though we might not be around to deal with it, next century’s inhabitants would probably prefer the AMOC stick around. “And even a collapse in the next century would cause devastating impacts for climate and society.”
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