1y ago

Gulf Stream weakening now 99% certain, and ramifications will be global

www.livescience.com Gulf Stream weakening now 99% certain, and ramifications will be global

A new analysis has concluded that the Gulf Stream is definitely slowing, but whether it's due to climate change is hard to tell.

A new study has confirmed that the Gulf Stream, a crucial ocean current that helps regulate climate and sea levels, is weakening. The flow of warm water through the Florida Straits has slowed by 4% over the past four decades. This slowdown has significant implications for the world's climate, and scientists are concerned that it may be a sign of further weakening to come.

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1y ago

Gulf Stream weakening now 99% certain, and ramifications will be global

www.livescience.com /planet-earth/gulf-stream-weakening-now-99-certain-and-ramifications-will-be-global

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1y ago

Gulf Stream weakening now 99% certain, and ramifications will be global

www.livescience.com /planet-earth/gulf-stream-weakening-now-99-certain-and-ramifications-will-be-global

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82 comments

But profits are up, how could this have possibly happened? People aren’t buying enough of our green washing products, that must be it!
- Has anyone tried bribing the gulf stream with some of these massive profits? Everything has a price
  
  Let's hire a private security firm to find some dirt on that son of a bitch. We'll find some fucking dirt to get him going!
  
  No, no, that would be too expensive. Let’s ~~bribe~~ lobby our ~~bought~~ elected representatives to pass laws saying it can’t do that. That’ll work
  
  If the gulf stream wants a share of the profits, it needs to pull itself up by its bootstraps and put the work in itself.
  
  If the tax payers want to give me trillions then I can set up some giant fans along the gulf to push the water around

At this point, I don't think anything short of losing coastal cities will whip apathetic people into climate action.
- Very optimistic of you.
  Joking aside, apathy isn't the problem. That is, the issue isn't that people don't care. Ordinary people care a great deal. The problem is that the cost of the action that would be sufficient to change things is too high personally for those ordinary people to take.
  People just don't want to be gunned down by riot police or go to prison for assassinating oil executives. The solution to this problem isn't paper straws and recycling (and it never has been). Further, abandoning cars isn't feasible for stroad-bound Americans. Abandoning beef is, but your family switching to chicken and fish won't even twitch the needle.
  Point is, the kind of change that's needed is societal--the kind of revolutionary change that's paid for in streets full of blood. In the "Well if enough people just ..." argument, the enough people is hundreds of millions. We have to become a fossil fuel eschewing society. Whole industries have to collapse.
  The companies responsible for climate change can be counted on one person's fingers and toes, and they're names any adult can guess in a few tries.
  We're not storming their doors because we don't want to be recipients of the state violence these companies will muster to stop us.
  Flooding cities might change our minds, but probably only for the people who actually live there. The sad truth is the rest of us will sooner consign Miami to the depths than orphan our children for their grandchildren's sakes.
  Things will change when we starve, but probably not a moment sooner.
  
  Bang on. The Earth's population in 1950 was about 2.5 billion. We have more than tripled that number now, largely enabled by agricultural, medical, and transportation technology powered by stored energy in the form of fossil fuels. Global ecological footprint analysis shows that we "overshot" Earth's sustainable capacity limit in around 1970.
  It is impractical (and probably impossible) with current technology to sustain >8 billion people on Earth without fossil fuels. And, it is impossible to keep burning fossil fuels without inducing devastating climate change. So, unless we can replace almost all fossil fuel burning with another incredibly powerful and non-harmful energy source (like fusion, I guess?), we are screwed. I agree with you that the ecological debt we have incurred will likely be paid in lives lost to starvation and conflict over food.
  
  Maui is the truth of what will happen to the rest of us.
- Covid-19 has made me even more cynical than ever. It has shown that people would rather die than accept reality. And compared to climate change, the effort to protect against covid was minuscule on an individual level. But still, too many people couldn't be asked.
  
  For me, the biggest one is the push for a return to office. I see it as a great opportunity to contact the economy and reduce resource consumption and carbon production with a lot of white collar support. But the owners just aren't having it and insist on a return to the status quo, even though it's obvious we're killing the environments we need to survive with this status quo.
  
  When a much more deadly pandemic comes it'll be an extinction event
  
  Assed*
- Just looked it up on Wikipedia and "Hurricane Katrina displaced over one million people from the central Gulf coast to elsewhere across the United States, becoming the largest diaspora in the history of the United States."
  Having a million Americans lose their homes wasn't enough to even move the needle on climate action. Same way that over a million Americans died of COVID and many people still claim it's a "hoax". I'm convinced that the propaganda is just too much to ever overcome.
  I really, really, really want to be proven wrong - but I think you could literally have entire nations be made uninhabitable, and rather than welcoming refuges and making policy changes to avoid climate disaster, we'll find a way to bury our heads in the sand and complain about immigrants taking our jobs.
  
  Yeah, but those were brown people that were displaced, nobody gives a shit about them /s
  
  Every time I read these articles I just keep waiting for all the other people to finally catch on to how fucked we are and a critical mass of people to actually do something meaningful. Still waiting.
  As a result I was feeling frustrated and scared. But now I have come to bitterly accept we are probably going to kill ourselves off (mostly or completely) after mass suffering. At best, I figure whoever is left goes insane because 99% of all species will have gone extinct and the earth will have become a barren, silent, cheerless wasteland.
  Hopefully we have exploited natural resources to a degree where it will be out of reach for the next sentient species. They won't find pip or gold or other minerals just lying around so maybe they will remain primitive and low population.
  
  It's so crazy at my job where we do infrastructure stuff. We know it's getting worse. Areas are flooding that should not be flooding, rolling blackouts/greyouts are becoming more common, stuff is overheating that didn't overheat in the past.
  Head of engineering keeps pushing us to think about this stuff. Build in more cooling, make stuff waterproof that shouldn't have to be. I don't know how bad it is going to get but I do know that I will be working up to the end.
- It wont happen like in Day After Tomorrow.
  The beaches will get shorter, the docks will get deeper, then some warehouse will get flooded along with some homeless camp.
  Land prices will shift, people will move, it'll be a curiosity.
  That island nation on the Pacific? Oh well.
  
  I haven't even seen that movie. Never thought it was going to happen suddenly.
- Given that we're already losing entire island nations, I'm not sure even that will do it.
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiribati
- Maybe I'm a pessimist, but I don't think they ever will.
  It's probably not going to be a whole city at once. It's going to be a building here, a building there, barely escalating beyond local news unless it's a famous building (Mar-A-Lago?). There's going to be more and worse hurricanes, but climate deniers will point out how they weren't as bad as Katrina or Maria or Sandy. Insurers have already started leaving those areas, changing policies, and/or hiking rates.
  The big exception will be if another New Orleans levy breaks. But people will blame the very idea of that city existing below sea level as being an inherently bad idea (which.... I don't think is entirely wrong) and use that to deflect away from the influence of climate change.
  People still denying climate change today are either financially invested in doing so, or will need a ridiculous and dramatic event to convince them. Something like you would see in a disaster movie, like a 300ft tall Tsunami.
- I think it'll take multiple private islands getting wiped out before the people holding the levers of power will give a fuck.
  
  People holding the levers have backup bunkers in New Zealand... take a guess why.

But for a fraction of time humanity generated profits for shareholders. The End.
- Really is our story and our end. Jfc

Whelp, enjoy extinction everyone.
- Psh, the capitalists will save us all with their record profits and zeros at the end of their bank accounts! I'm sure that's not why these rich assholes aren't trying to race into space or anything.
  
  Which is still incredibly stupid. Even with climate change Earth is a better environment for humans than fucking space. But making things better on Earth would mean doing something good to people that are not them and they can't have that.

Global revolt against the few inbred old wealth
- I hate to say it, but even if somehow the top 1% or .1% disappeared, we'd probably stay on the same trajectory.
  
  Revenge is fine.
  
  But it would make us feel better!

This means Europe will freeze.
- Only in the winter. Summers will be burning hot.
- Brexit benefits.
  
  Good thing we left, now we won't have to deal with the European climate :)
  
  Lol
- Invest in coat makers, you say?
- Concentrate heat in one section of your house. Make that room comfortable so people in your household want to hang out there. It might seem counterintuitive but freeze a large pot of water so you can keep your food from spoiling in a blackout. Which means it is a good time to make sure you can still heat your home without electricity. If possible setup a space heater in your bathroom around shower time, you want to be warm when you are wet. If you lose all heat it is family snuggle time, kids sleep in the same bed as parents. Make sure you have quilts.
  When you travel take an ice pack and microwave it to warm, keep it in your pocket. If you have a car make sure you have space blankets and a large candle with the ability to light it. Remember that clothing can keep you warm and cold so in a warm situation take your extra layer off.
  I survived Alaska and the Northern Appalachia, if a dumb ass like me can survive it you can as well.
  
  You'll be good you got this bro

- Wait wait wait
  1%
  There's hope.
- It hasn't been fun since we started paying taxes!

The people that need to care- don’t. And the people that DO care, are unable to do enough to change the outcome.
We’re fucked.

Original scientific work: https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2023GL105170
It has a plain language summary, nothing as far as dramatic. I definitely didn't find any actual study predicting a collapse.
Plain Language Summary
The Gulf Stream is a major ocean current located off the East Coast of the United States. It carries a tremendous amount of seawater and along with it heat, carbon, and other ocean constituents. Because of this, the Gulf Stream plays an important role in weather and climate, influencing phenomena as seemingly unrelated as sea level along coastal Florida and temperature and precipitation over continental Europe. Given how important this ocean current is to science and society, scientists have tried to determine whether the Gulf Stream has undergone significant changes under global warming, but so far, they have not reached a firm conclusion. Here we report our effort to synthesize available Gulf Stream observations from the Florida Straits near Miami, and to assess whether and how the Gulf Stream transport there has changed since 1982. We conclude with a high degree of confidence that Gulf Stream transport has indeed slowed by about 4% in the past 40 years, the first conclusive, unambiguous observational evidence that this ocean current has undergone significant change in the recent past. Future studies should try to identify the cause of this change.

one thing i don't see mentioned much is the fact that while Europe gets colder, the real problem will be that it's going to get very, very dry.. the supercharged hurricane cycle should bring some devastating seasonal flooding though..

Hopefully I'm safe-ish in Québec…
It's sad to see all these climate tipping points taking hold with humans not even (really) trying to slow them down, forget reversing them.
Continiously bickering over pointless things. With wars taking over unexpectedly one after another (in retrospect, maybe not that unexpected). China just itching for anything to start their own little "special operation" next door. While some other militarized countries/organizations are too trigger happy and in fear of missing out on the action.
We may indeed not make it past the hyperobject that is Climate Change simply because we are too busy blaming inflation, opposing political views, illusions of our own imagination and an unending amount of irrationality. Since it is inconvenient/difficult to try and understand slightly complex concept such as taxation, vaccination, immigration, or even just a map amongst so many things, let alone complex systems feeding into each other such as the Human-Ecology-Climate systems.
Moreover, the prevalence of misinformation doesn't help.
Nevertheless, let us hope for better times. 🥹
- you're not.
  If you're on earth, you're not safe from catastrophic climate change unfortunately.
  our only hope is a absolutely radical shift towards decarbonisation, however the drive of capitalism and greed is an unstoppable force.
  Enjoy normal life while we still have it at this point.
- We're not safe anywhere because people move. Borders ar nothing more than a concept.

Wait a minute, This seem like a scene of The Day After Tomorrow?
- After becoming YouTube educated on this matter.. Not to that extent. The main thing to notice in the short term is the slowing of the gulf stream will reallocate 'sea level' on either side of the ocean.. Which sounds like a 3ish ft increase on the west, and the same as a decline for the east.
  I'm not a water science person though, so I'm just mimicking words.
  
  Woohoo go east coast! We're safe!
- Wrong movie. This is like The Core.

Is this... It?

What if we all finally stood together and peed facing the same direction?
- Google AI says the following:
  It would take 5,700 years for the entire world's population to pee enough water to change the ocean's current. However, the amount of water consumed by the population would be equal to the amount of water they pee, so the net change in ocean level would be zero.
  
  That's great news. We didn't want to exacerbate already-rising sea levels. We just need to pee harder to bring that 5,700 years down.
  
  Relevant xkcd: https://what-if.xkcd.com/8/
- We'd just be pissing in the wind.

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