‘We don’t know where the tipping point is’: climate expert on potential collapse of Atlantic circulation

This is honestly one of the scariest headlines I have ever read.

I think it is cowardly to place the timeframe this could happen in as "within" decades though. Climate change is accelerating, emissions are increasing and global carbon sinks are transitiong to being sources of greenhouse gas emissions.

This could happen tomorrow. We could easily be crossing the tipping point as we speak, there is no sensationalizing this, it will be catastrophic.

I don't mean to get angry at climate scientists though, they are not allowed to convey fear or evoke the possibility of catastrophic change in the near-term, it is a precondition to being allowed to work as a scientist in a fossil fuel based society...but that means that when climate scientists release headlines like this it is as close to "we should panic" as realistically it is going to get which means we should legitimately be panicking.

Look at sea surface temperatures in 2023 and 2024, they are off the charts and it is becoming clear that the ocean is changing (and when I say "changing" I mean amounts of excess heat energy so large they are quantified by comparing to the yield of thousands and thousands of hiroshima nuclear bombs) in fundamental ways, and far quicker than scientists are really allowed to talk about without risking professional consequences.