In this episode of Weathered, we travel to the Gulf Stream with the new PBS Terra show Sharks Unknown to experience the AMOC first hand. And we ask, what is the likelihood that the AMOC will collapse, and what would the consequences be?
In this episode of Weathered, we travel to the Gulf Stream with the new PBS Terra show Sharks Unknown to experience the AMOC first hand. And we ask, what is the likelihood that the AMOC will collapse, and what would the consequences be?
I was thinking about this the other day… historically, earth has warmed up slowly to a certain point, at which some unknown occurrence causes a shift to extreme cooling that turns into an ice age…
So what if the wildly rapid increase in the rate of warming causes this shift? Could happen at a lower overall temperature I imagine simply due to the time it would take for the overall temp to increase. Like the conditions that trigger glaciation might exist right now, but we’re estimating the shift to happen at a much higher temp, and the massive buffer that the earths mass represents hasn’t actually allowed warming to the expected overall temp even though the condition that triggers an ice age already exists.
The gulf stream could be that trigger. Less heat to the poles, ice stops melting and starts accumulating, and the bounce back puts glaciers in Arizona and albedo does it’s thing…
We could be observing the beginning of an ice age and calling it global warming. We don’t really know exactly what our impact on the climate is going to be, just that we’ve monkeyed with it enough to fuck shit up.