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According to The Guardian, scientists called the new discovery “very worrying”, as a collapse would have catastrophic consequences for Europe, Africa and the Americas.<\/p>\n
The Atlantic meridional current circulation (Amoc) is a large part of the global climate system and was already known to be at its weakest level for 1,600 years as a result of the climate crisis. Scientists noticed warning signs of a tipping point in 2021 and know that Amoc has collapsed in Earth’s past.<\/p>\n
Climate scientists use dozens of different computer models to estimate future climate. However, for the complex Amoc system, these produce very different results, ranging from some showing no further slowdown until 2100 to those suggesting a large slowdown of around 65%, even as carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels gradually decline to zero.<\/p>\n
The research combined real-world ocean observations with models to determine the most reliable, and this greatly reduced the spread of uncertainty. They found an estimated slowdown of 42% to 58% by 2100, a level almost certain to end in collapse.<\/p>\n
Amoc is a large part of the global climate system and brings tropical water warmed by the sun to Europe and the Arctic, where it cools and sinks to form a deep undercurrent. A collapse would shift the tropical rainfall belt on which many millions of people rely to grow their food, plunge western Europe into extreme cold winters and summer droughts, and add 50-100cm to already rising sea levels around the Atlantic.<\/p>\n
Dr Valentin Portmann, at the Center Inria de recherche Bordeaux Sud-Ouest in France and who led the new research, said: “We we found that Amoc will fall more than expected compared to the average of all climate models. This means that we have an Amoc that is closer to a tipping point.”<\/p>\n
Professor Stefan Rahmstorf, at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, said: “This is an important and very worrying result. It shows that the ‘pessimistic’ models, which show a strong weakening of Amoc by the year 2100, are, unfortunately, the realistic ones, in the sense that they better match the observational data.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI am now increasingly concerned that we may pass that tipping point of Amoc closure where it becomes inevitable, in the middle of this century, which is quite close,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n
Rahmstorf, who has studied Amoc for 35 years, has said that a collapse must be avoided \u201cat all costs.\u201d condition”.<\/p>\n
“I argued that the chance of Amoc shutting down was maybe 5%, and even then we said the risk was too high, given the massive impacts. Now it seems to be more than 50%. The most dramatic and drastic climate changes we see in the last 100,000 years of Earth’s history have been when Amoc went into a different state,” says Rahmstorf. slows down because air temperatures are rising rapidly in the Arctic due to global warming. This means that the ocean cools more slowly there. Warmer water is less dense and therefore sinks to depth more slowly. This slowing allows more rainfall to accumulate in the saline surface water, making it less dense as well, and further slowing the sinking and forming a feedback loop in the Amoc.<\/p>\n
The Amoc system is very complex and subject to random natural variations, making accurate predictions impossible. However, a major weakening is now expected by scientists, and this could have serious impacts for decades to come.<\/p>\n
The new research, published in the journal Science Advances, explored four different ways of using real-world observations to evaluate models. They found that a method called ridge regression, which had been used little in climate science before, produced the best results.<\/p>\n
“Amoc is difficult to model because it is driven by subtle changes in water density caused by salinity changes across the Atlantic. The reduction in uncertainty in the new analysis results from identifying models that better reflect surface salinity in the South Atlantic, which scientists already knew it was important. That makes the work “very plausible,” Rahmstorf said.<\/p>\n
Rahmstorf said the slowdown in Amoc in 2100 could be even greater than in the new ‘pessimistic’ estimate. That’s because the computer models don’t include meltwater from the Greenland ice sheet that’s also cooling ocean waters: “That’s an additional factor that means the reality is probably even more bad.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Source: prizrenpost<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" According to The Guardian, scientists called the new discovery “very worrying”, as a collapse would have catastrophic consequences for Europe, Africa and the Americas. The Atlantic meridional current circulation (Amoc) is a large part of the global climate system and was already known to be at its weakest level for 1,600 years as a result […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":31860,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[666],"class_list":["post-31859","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world","tag-brief"],"views":125,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/prizrenpost.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31859","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/prizrenpost.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/prizrenpost.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/prizrenpost.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/prizrenpost.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31859"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/prizrenpost.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31859\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31861,"href":"https:\/\/prizrenpost.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31859\/revisions\/31861"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/prizrenpost.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/31860"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/prizrenpost.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31859"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/prizrenpost.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31859"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/prizrenpost.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31859"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}