The collapse of a key Atlantic current is no longer of “low likelihood” and the tipping point could be far earlier than forecast, according to scientists.
As The Guardian reports, the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC) may pass its tipping point far sooner than forecast, although the actual collapse may occur 50 to 100 years after that.
AMOC - of which the Gulf Stream is a constituent - is a major part of the global climate system, which brings warm tropical water to Europe and the Arctic, where it cools and sinks to form a deep return current.
A collapse would push Europe into extremely cold winters and dry summers, and could add 50cm to already rising sea levels.
It was already known that the climate crisis had resulted in it being at its weakest in 1,600 years.
The new research published in the journal Environmental Research Letters found that if carbon emissions continued to rise, 70% of the model runs led to collapse, while an intermediate level of emissions resulted in collapse in 37% of the models.
“Even in the case of low future emissions, an AMOC shutdown happened in 25% of the models,”the newspaper reports.
It quotes Prof Stefan Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, who was part of the study team, as saying that the results are “quite shocking, because I used to say that the chance of AMOC collapsing as a result of global warming was less than 10%”.
“Now even in a low-emission scenario, sticking to the Paris agreement, it looks like it may be more like 25 per cent,” he said.
“These numbers are not very certain, but we are talking about a matter of risk assessment where even a 10% chance of an AMOC collapse would be far too high,” he said.
“We found that the tipping point where the shutdown becomes inevitable is probably in the next 10 to 20 years or so. That is quite a shocking finding as wel,l and why we have to act really fast in cutting down emissions,” he said.
Read The Guardian here
