Here in Britain, we are blessed by winters that are usually a lot milder than most northern hemisphere regions that share the same latitude. A comparison that is often made is between London and Boston, Massachusets. London is further north than Boston, but winter temperatures are usually a lot colder in Boston. The main reason for this is AMOC, the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, an ocean circulation system that redistributes heat between different regions of the Atlantic Ocean. Warm water moves up from the tropics, passing Britain, Ireland, and Norway and releasing heat into the atmosphere, until it nears Greenland, where it cools and sinks before passing down the Eastern seaboard of North America to return to the tropics.
Climate scientists have known for some time that AMOC is weakening. This is probably due to circulating sea water being diluted by melting Greenland ice. This causes less sea water to sink, slowing the circulation. The most recent research study suggests that if Greenland ice sheet melt continues, a tipping point will be reached when AMOC breaks down completely (as last occurred 12,000 years ago). If this happens there will be dramatic consequences for the climate of north west Europe. Average February temperatures in London, for example, would probably fall by around 1.5°C per decade over the ten decades following AMOC breakdown.
With the present state of knowledge, it is impossible to predict when AMOC breakdown might occur. All that can be predicted is that we are close to the tipping point, and that breakdown will inevitably occur at some point, if global temperatures continue to rise, and the Greenland ice sheet continues to melt.
New forms of denial
It is not so long ago that climate change denial was common in Britain. Most people nowadays, all too familiar with more extensive wildfires and more severe floods, accept that the climate is changing. Denial still exists, but its form has changed. One response that is frequently expressed goes along the lines of ‘What’s the problem if temperatures are 2°C higher? It means I can holiday here in Britain rather than having to fly to Spain’.
Not only does this ignore the wider consequences of 2°C global warming, it assumes that a global temperature rise will affect all parts of the globe equally. That is a belief that would be confounded by AMOC breakdown - a huge fall in temperature in Britain would result from a comparatively small rise in global temperature.
It is, perhaps, only to be expected that a mass media outlet like the Daily Mail would misinterpret the findings of the Utrecht University research. Its headline, ‘The real-life Day After Tomorrow: The Gulf Stream could COLLAPSE as early as 2025 - plunging Europe into a deep freeze, scientists warn’, is seriously misleading. There are four errors in the space of one admittedly lengthy headline - framing the research study as illustrating an unrealistic Hollywood movie scenario, confusing the Gulf Stream with AMOC, emphasising a date only a year away, and implying a ‘deep freeze’ would occur immediately after a collapse.
The reality is different:
The Day after Tomorrow compresses into a 2 hour movie experience what would in real life take decades to play out.
If/when AMOC collapses, the Gulf Stream will continue, as it is driven partly by the rotation of the Earth, as well as by AMOC.
The research study emphasises that AMOC collapse could occur at any time, but that we have no idea when that would be (is the Mail setting up a “Scientists falsely predicted we would be in a deep freeze by now’ headline for next year?).
The study also suggests that temperatures in North West Europe would not collapse straight away after an AMOC collapse, but decline over the following 100 years.
Misleading though the Mail headline is, the actual article , on the whole, provides a reasonably faithful summary of the Utrecht University scientists’ research. Read the below-the-line comments, though, and you would think that hardly any of the commenters had read beyond the headline. Either that, or that they are incapable of understanding the difference between the globe and part of the globe, or between ‘could’ ‘if’ and ‘will at some time’.
Here is a small sample of the comments (there were over 3,800 of them in the first 24 hours after the article appeared online). It is a tiny proportion of the total, but reasonably representative.
“Just like that, we found a solution to global warming.’”
“So now we’re going to have another Ice Age’
“ But Al Gore said we will be like Venus if we don’t quit eating cows”
“Last week it was global warming,. This week it’s deep freeze.”
“Thank God. I no longer fear global warming.”
“Yes it could collapse by 2025 and I could also discover a 10lb diamond in my back yard next week also.”
“Isn’t this what we want? A deep freeze will begin to restore the ice caps! Sea level rise is resolved.”
“Um, I’m confused -I thought that we were in a period of global warming. Oh, I get it - now it’s double trouble: global warming AND global cooling to come at the same time.”
“Now it’s going to freeze? They need to make up their mind.”
“Well there’s no point getting an EV then?”
“I just read they are warning of global boiling. They should get their lies straight.”
“Yea, but wouldn’t global warming balance it out. What a joke”
I used to think it was Daily Mail journalists that were responsible for the climate change denial of their readers. Reading the comments under this latest climate-related article, it is clear that many of their readers (and the editors who pen the headlines) will get it wrong, even when their journalists get it (mainly) right..