Jason Anthony in his ever-excellent Field Guide to the Anthropocene substack wrote today about the pressing problem presented by the threat of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation collapsing. At first a slow motion slowing, it can very suddenly come to a halt with catastrophic ripple effect consequences for Europe and elsewhere
I wrote a lengthy comment to Jason's essay appended to it there. I've substantially copied my comment here because the AMOC and its future is a matter all of us should be vitally concerned with. Please go to the Field Guide for a detailed overview of this huge problem in the making.
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The grave challenges posed by changes in the atmospheric and oceanic transport systems are becoming clearer. The nature and topography of the swirling patterns are becoming clearer- the global plant and animal and microbial movements, migrations and spreads that are responding and changing with those currents are rapidly becoming evident.
We already are in a new world and better love it now, for rapidly it will be replaced by yet another. I think it likely, very likely the AMOC collapses in the next thirty years. Another tipping point, tipped. It is again almost certain we will see another collapse- this in the Amazonian forest, our planet's greatest land based carbon sequestration sink- another catastrophe.
Sudden climate crashes have occurred many times in the past-there is no rational reason to suppose we're now immune. A Younger Dryas seems likely for Europe. And if so Putin will be the least of its worries. Or maybe not..
What figuratively keeps me up at night is the worry that some people will take this situation seriously enough to take decisive action. A good thing, right? No, a catastrophic thing if those people are authoritarian rulers of powerful nation states that listen to their scientists and then decide to preemptively position their own countries for the now probable coming turmoil and upheaval. And they choose violence.
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My own counsel is that we accept that the planet is changing and indeed irrevocably changed. We're not going to be able to restore it to the world of our childhood. Too many species lost for one thing, too much pollution of air, sea, and land for another. At best we can and will successfully conduct partial remediations. We should accept that our world has changed and will change further still. We may fear and detest the changes but we should love our planet in all its faces as it ages. Ultimately we and it are citizens of Deep Time, nothing escapes change. Fight though we may to retain what we cherish, we cannot ultimately succeed, it's not possible to hold off change forever. Time and uncertainty hold us all. But this is not a counsel of passivity.
I counsel we love and must fight for the things that are present, and mourn them if we are unsuccessful, but also love those things that will come to replace them, the world of our near and distant descendents. Compassion for the lost. Love for the newborn.
Wise and heartfelt thoughts Michael! 👏