Last year the mainstream public prints were full of Net Zero-inspired nonsense claiming that the Gulf Stream could collapse by 2025. Classic green fear-mongering of course inspired by the 2004 Hollywood blockbuster The Day After Tomorrow with its harrowing portrayal of weather-related natural disasters. The overturning of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) could plunge the North Atlantic into a new ice age and have dire weather impacts across the globe, according to a new study. The author, Peter Ditlevsen of the University of Copenhagen, told the constantly-alarmed Guardian: “I think we should be very worried.” But this was a scare story too far and even some scientists expressed doubt about it last year. Now, a new study has been published that points out this alarm about the collapsing Gulf Stream was contingent on unreliable climate models and any collapse could occur from now to infinity.
In other words, nobody knows, not least because the uncertainties are too large “to predict tipping times of major Earth system components from historical data”. Pick your data and the AMOC collapses tomorrow or the day after never. The new study is important since it effectively debunks much of the climate ‘tipping point’ alarm that is commonly used to scare humanity to adopt the insane requirements of Net Zero.
The paper is mainly concerned with the AMOC and the Gulf Stream but also refers to the Amazon rainforest and the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets. It will be very difficult to dismiss or get retracted since the four authors are connected to the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, a noted green activist scientific operation. Last year, for instance, when the AMOC scare was raging through mainstream media, Potsdam Professor Stefan Rahmstorf said the Ditlevsen study added to the evidence that the AMOC collapse “is much nearer than we thought”. We can’t even rule out crossing the tipping point in the next decade or two, he added.
The authors warn that “uncertainties” arise from models and mechanistic methods along with historical data. These all need to be taken into account and propagated thoroughly “before attempting to estimate a future tipping time of any potential Earth system”. In plainer language this can be read as a need to check the ‘garbage in’ before notifying the BBC and the Guardian of the ‘garbage out’. The big problem lies in the “multiple levels of uncertainty” inherent in extrapolating from historical data. Referring to the Ditlevsen paper that caused such a stink last year, the authors say they show that the uncertainties, mostly around sea surface temperature data, were too large to predict a tipping point for the AMOC.
Hellbound and Down 