We have kept you, dear readers, very promptly informed about AMOC assumptions. [emphasis, links added]
Recently, we also informed you about a new study that found a stable Atlantic overturning circulation since the 1960s. It is not the only one in the recent past.
However, Prof. Stefan Rahmstorf from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) is a great advocate of the “The Day after Tomorrow” scenario of a collapsing oceanic current.
As recently as June 2024, he noted on X (formerly Twitter) that the AMOC mitigation saga “is even more dramatic than it ever was”.
The Guardian reminisces over The Day After Tomorrow of 20 years ago. The plot revolves around a breakdown of the Atlantic overturning circulation, AMOC.https://t.co/hPlRzG77jx
A topic hotter than ever; I just returned from a 3 day workshop on it.
Current state of the science: https://t.co/P3fbf4vTuU— Prof. Stefan Rahmstorf 🌏 🦣 (@rahmstorf) June 6, 2024
He has been responsible for a whole series of papers as author or co-author, which also contributed to the scenario, and he initiated an “open letter” in the fall of 2024 that dramatically addressed politicians. We also reported on this.
Of course, the new findings couldn’t pass him by without comment.
Under the headline “The AMOC is slowing, it’s stable, it’s slowing, no, yes, …” he commented on it on the blog “Real Climate”, which is run by scientists, including himself, Gavin Schmidt from NASA, and others.
What he has to say there can be stated in a nutshell: He defends his approaches and lists the problems of the more recent studies. That was to be expected.
For example, he emphasizes that the new climate models (CMIP6) hardly show any connection between “his fingerprint”, sea surface temperatures of the “warming hole” in the North Atlantic (see the article here from 17 January 2025), and the actual current, but that the approximately four years older ones called CMIP5 do.
He also questions whether the new ones are more reliable in this respect than the older ones. However, the effort for the former was considerable.
He summarized:
I don’t believe that the newer methods are more reliable than the old ones (his, the author). … However, since we don’t have measurements going back far enough, there is still some uncertainty in this respect…“
And that’s the crux of the matter!
He “doesn’t believe” in all honor, but knowledge of science would probably be more adequate! And yes, everything is uncertain, and “nothing precise is known”.
This is also stated by the well-known oceanologist Carl Wunsch in a paper published in August 2022:
In the coming decades, continuous monitoring of the entire coupled ocean-atmosphere system will be necessary to assess the true risks of AMOC collapse, but to date there is no evidence of imminent or overwhelming danger.“
There are many assumptions, a lot of back and forth in science, and when viewed in the light of day, a lot of “belief” or “non-belief”, i.e., the unmistakable indication of a lack of knowledge.
So when you, dear reader, are once again told by a trained psychologist in a news magazine that there is “an imminent danger in a few decades if things go badly” (see here) or here: “Europe’s heating is weakening”: be careful, people are pretending a ‘certainty’ that simply does not exist. As I said, it’s seldom about assumptions, beliefs, or non-belief.
Also, Prof. Rahmstorf rushed to say: “The Gulf Stream system is failing”, and not “The Gulf Stream system” could “somehow, somewhere, sometime” stall, the northern branch, the AMOC is perhaps stable or no, or yes (according to his own blog headline).
The AMOC is still in excellent health today, as the measurements from 2004 onwards show; these are the actual “hard facts”.
We should finally stop scaring people in the Atlantic, it doesn’t work with enlightened citizens like you, dear readers.
(Translated from the original at Klimanachrichten)
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