Our Oceans Are Tipped To Collapse: Can we still act?

the AMO could shut down. This is, and I really don't think this is an exaggeration, one of climate scientists biggest fears. An overheating planet could cause this vast ocean circulation to grind to a halt, causing major and largely irreversible disruption to the planet's weather patterns. And if you've seen headlines like these, or videos like these, you'll know that the fears are rising. But if you've just read these headlines, you might think that the science is settled, that the Amok collapse is coming, and there's nothing we can do about it. But I reached out to a bunch of scientists who are still battling to understand how big the threat is. And one of the few things that they do agree on is that we can still act to protect ourselves. I'm Adam. I have a PhD in atmospheric physics and I'm here to help you make sense of the changing planet that we all share. Today I want to take a look at one of the most critical but complex questions in climate science. Whether a massive ocean circulation, the AOK, will collapse. I want to talk to you about what we know, what we don't, and how we personally can start to make sense of this immense threat. I actually made a video about this a couple of years ago, but there have been a bunch of updates. Spoiler alert, they're not happy updates, but they're not as unambiguously bad as you'd think if you just read the headlines. So, the AMO is

the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation. It's the Atlantic section of the oceanceans's vast conveyor belt. And the word vast doesn't really do it justice. It carries over 1 million billion watts of heat across the globe. If that number doesn't help you, and it doesn't really help me, then picture the output of 1 million power plants. Yeah, it's still kind of hard to get your head around. By transporting these unbelievable amounts of heat towards the north of our planet, the Amok regulates the world's climate. This is especially important for keeping Europe's climate relatively mild. But as we'll see in a second, it has impacts far further field as well. So all in all, the AMO is extremely important. Five out of five, no notes would circulate again. But and

I guess you can see where this is going. Climate change comes in and says that's a pretty nice overturning circulation you've got there. Shame if someone were to switch it off. Well, I guess today we learned what my brain thinks climate change's voice sounds like. If hypothetically humans were to emit a bunch of greenhouse gases, those would heat the planet up, changing how the ocean loses heat, plus it would cause the Greenland ice sheet to melt and dump a whole bunch of fresh water into the North Atlantic. And all of that would disrupt how the Amok does its whole overturning circulation thing and slow the whole system down. And when I said hypothetically, what I meant is that is exactly what we're currently doing and what climate scientists are scared will happen. Now, the AOK slowing down would

be bad enough, but the biggest fear is that if things slowed down enough, the AOK could reach a tipping point. Tipping points are points in our climate system where once passed the planet would tip into another state and it would be very hard to get back to where we started. For the AOK, the fear is that the circulation could effectively shut down, switching to a much less active state that would be tough to switch back on. Now, often this collapse is depicted as something sudden, as if the Amok could shut down overnight, like in The Day After Tomorrow when Jake Gyllenhaal is literally chased by the cold. In reality, though, it would be several decades between passing the tipping point and a full shutdown. As we'll talk

about in a second, there's still a lot of questions and debate between researchers about what's going on with the AMOK. But there are two things all the scientists seem to agree on. One is good and one is bad. The bad thing that they agree on is that if the amox substantially slowed or even shut down, that would be devastating. It could cause things like sea levels to sore on the east coast of America, temperatures to plunge in Europe, bringing about extreme, brutal winters, disruptions in rainfall patterns, including to monsoon rains that millions rely on. It's worth emphasizing as well that our societies just aren't adapted to any of that and wouldn't be able to change to keep up. We've spent millennia building our civilizations based on a particular climate. And then if triggered, an amochdown could take place in just 50 to 100 years, completely disrupting the global climate that our farming, our cities, our ecosystems are adapted to. In general, when I talk to scientists, they're often wary about using big emotional language. So when I asked whether an AMO shutdown would indeed be catastrophic, I was pretty struck by how clear their answers were. Collapse would definitely be catastrophic. Major and widespread climate consequences and results show quite catastrophic impacts. Oh, and if you want to read the researchers full responses to my questions, as well as links to plenty more reading about the AMO, I've popped the links down below. But like I said, there is a good thing that scientists agree on too. And I'll be getting to

that in a minute. Okay. But we know that if the amox slowed or stalled, that would be bad news. But working out what will actually happen is, to use the scientific term, really bloody hard. The circulation is huge. Even measuring what it's doing today is difficult. We only have decent measurements of the circulation for 22 odd years, a blink of an eye in the time scales of the AOK. In comparison, it takes water around a thousand years to get around the entire ocean conveyor. So without enough direct evidence, researchers have instead been using circumstantial evidence to understand what the Amos up to looking at things like the temperature of the ocean surface and how much heat is transferred between air and water or looking back to the more distant past, clues left behind in natural materials like ocean sediments. Evidence is building that climate change has already substantially weakened the AMO. But some researchers still argue that this slowdown could be a natural shift. And others argue we can't even say if it's

changed yet. So if it's hard to work out what's already happening, it's of course hard to say what's going to happen. We need to take what evidence we have from the past and from today and combine that with computer simulations of the future. Now, for a long time, this would be where I'd do my reassuring bit. and explained that in the latest IPCC report which summed up the state of climate science in 2021, the research indicated that while a decline of the AMO is very likely, there was medium confidence that a collapse wouldn't happen this century. This would mean the odds aren't too high, but the risk is still so big that we need to take it very seriously. Except here's the thing. The more scientists study the AMO, the more we learn, the higher the odds of a collapse start to seem. You might have got this sense if you've seen some of the latest, frankly, pretty fearinducing headlines based on a recent study. This study looked at simulations where computers use our understanding of the physical processes of the oceans and atmosphere to see how the planet, including the AOK, would change as we keep heating things up. Now, these simulations aren't perfect. Each computer model does things a bit differently, and the simulations predictions for the Amox future were pretty all over the place. They generally showed it getting weaker but by massively different amounts. Now clearly some of these simulations of the future must be more accurate than others. But how do we tell which ones? To work that out, researchers looked at how well the computer models compared to important observations of the Atlantic Ocean today. This allowed them to pick out what they hope are the best simulations. And when they did that, this narrowed down the answer and made the answer far more bleak. These models simulated the AOK strength dropping by about half by the end of this century. That forecast is around 60% worse than when averaging across all the simulations. Now, this is pretty bad news. It suggests that the AMO is far less stable than would previously understood than we previously hoped. Still though, the study rests on the assumption that computer simulations can accurately capture what's in store for the AMO and of course that this approach did indeed select the most accurate computer models. Now, these are pretty big ifs, but I don't want to spend too long talking about this one specific study because the reality is that it's part of a pattern. There have been a bunch of studies over the past few years using different methods and bringing bad news about the AMOG. Like the study that showed that if we look into the more distant future, say to the year 2300, a shutdown becomes much more likely. or studies that use either physics or statistics to argue that the AMO is already on course. Fair tipping point. All these studies have made headlines and for good reason. The consequences would be really, really bad. In fact, we're also learning more and more about just how bad the consequences could be. New research indicates that the disruptions to the ocean would also lead to our seas releasing large amounts of carbon dioxide, disrupting our climate even further. Another study showed that a mock shutdowns as the world left the last ice age had devastating chilling effects on European winters. So, lots of

bad news. But the truth is, these aren't the only studies from the past few years. There have also been studies calling the AMO collapse into question. Like one that showed that even though the AMO could weaken substantially, simulations don't show it shutting down. Or the study that tried to unpick the last 60 years of the circulation and found that it hadn't started to decline yet. Now, these slightly reassuring studies do also make headlines, but I've had the impression that they get covered a bunch less. and a couple of the researchers I spoke with felt similarly. I'm genuinely curious what your experience is. Have you heard about Amok collapse before? And if so, what combination of bad and not so bad news have you seen out there? Oh, and if you are going to leave a comment, you might as well click on the like and subscribe buttons, too. It makes a huge difference to getting these videos out there and will help keep you in the loop on what's actually going on with climate change. So, the research on a possible amount collapse is definitely still somewhat nuanced. It's not the case that it's all pointing to it looking more likely as we gather more evidence. For something as massive, complex, and that we've been studying for so little time, it probably shouldn't come as a surprise that we don't have definitive answers. And this was reflected in the answers from the researchers I spoke with. One said they view a collapse this century as unlikely. Another said the odds of reaching a tipping point this century looked more like 5050, though the tip itself would then take around a century or so to unfold. So

based on everything I've read and everyone I've spoken to, we still have to say that we still don't know what's in store for the AMOG. But the amount of bad news is certainly beginning to add up. Where before we thought a collapse was devastating but unlikely, that evidence from the past 5 years or so means we now have to accept that it's looking more and more devastating and that it's a very real possibility. Stalwart Amok researcher Stefan Gdorf told the Guardian that a collapse has to be avoided at all costs. I argued this when we thought the chance of an AMO shutdown was maybe 5%. And even then, we were saying that risk is too high given the massive impacts. Now, it looks like it's more than 50%. Okay, I promise that we're almost at the good thing that scientists agree on.

Okay, let's be real. What the hell are normal people like us meant to do when confronted by this information? I can't tell you how to feel, but I can tell you how I feel when I look through this literature. I genuinely feel an overturning in my stomach, an unease made up of a mixture of fear and anger. One of the things making it tough is how high the stakes are, and yet how uncertain all of this is. It may seem weird that different scientists are saying different things, but this is how science works. When something is still being worked out, we gather as much evidence as we can. And when there's not enough watertight evidence, we look for clues wherever we can find them. But some of these clues might point us in different directions. And it takes time to unpick all that. And that's kind of the point in this channel. I feel like it's vitally important to peer behind the headlines and confront that nuance. And since I don't sell you all rubbish that you don't need through product placements or monetization, my ability to make videos like this is entirely down to incredible patrons like Eliia J. Scott. Head up here to join the team of climates. Now, the lack of clarity on the AOK reminds us just how important continued climate research is. I mean, sure, as a climate scientist by training, I'm definitely biased. But hey, we all live on this planet. I do think it would be objectively neat to know if a vast ocean current with profound influence on our entire climate were about to collapse. So, when I mention this feeling of anger, it's partly coming from knowing that we know what we don't know and how important it is to research it. And then also knowing that climate research itself is currently under attack, especially in the United States to an extent that we've never seen before. Basically, what I'm saying is when climate science funding is cut, that's not just a shame for climate nerds, it endangers all of

us. Research isn't just about sounding the alarm for the AMO. It could even point to some kind of intervention that could try to protect the circulation. Like some research suggests, closing the bearing straight could prevent a shutdown of the circulation. Though, it's important to point out that one, this research is in its infancy. And two, it's a pretty bonkers idea. There are big questions over important little things like whether it would be at all feasible and if there could be major unintended impacts. Okay, so that idea

is another thing that I'm sure climate scientists do not agree on. But like I say, they do largely agree that a shutdown would be catastrophic. So, let's finally get on to the good agreement. Every climate scientist I've spoken to, every study I've looked at confirms what we need to do to lower our risks. Limit the amount of greenhouse gases we pump into the atmosphere. Now, this might sound obvious, but it's important to translate that message to your personal reaction. Sometimes when we hear news like this, we feel that fear and anger and then we shut down. But if we do shut down, we're doing the worst possible thing. We're doing nothing. We know that the more we emit, the more risk we have of the AOK slowing and maybe even shutting down. Scary moments like these remind us, as if we needed a reminder, why it's so incredibly important to halt emissions and limit climate change. Speaking of which, right now scientists are debating whether we might be on the brink of a very different kind of tipping point. As conflicts and genocide rage on, fuel prices remain brutally high across the world. And the world is responding. From countries doubling down on plans for renewables to people like you and me investing in lowcarbon tech, things like heat pumps, solar panels, and electric vehicles. These low emissions options were completely unaffordable for the vast majority of people just a few years ago, and now they're rapidly becoming the norm. And for the first time last year, evidence suggests that renewables grew so much that fossil fuel electricity generation dropped. We, and I mean you and me, have a chance right now to contribute to the shifting currents of our energy system. Whether that's by working to bring down our own emissions, taking actions to push for the changes we need from the top, or sharing vital information about our climate. For example, a nuance detailed video from a climate scientist all about the AOK just as a random idea. But for real, I can't tell you what you ought to be doing. It depends so heavily on the specifics of your life and what's available to you. But I can tell you that when it comes to our climate, the worst thing you can do is shut down in the face of frightening headlines. And if you want to get a sense of just how much the world's energy systems are changing, how fast, then check out my video on how Trump has just maybe accidentally become the world's most effective climate activist. Okay, until next time. Bye. passing the How can I not push a globe off a