When the Oceans Run Amok
By disrupting the Earth’s main heat transport system, humans risk creating a new Ice Age in Europe – while the rest of the planet overheats to intolerable levels
Far beneath the storm-tossed waves of the North Atlantic, a monster is stirring. A monster so vast and violent it could savage Western Civilization in ways not seen since the Dark Ages.
The monster is AMOC, the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, a vast conveyor-belt of a current, transporting warmth from tropic waters to render Western Europe habitable. As its name suggests, this water then cools, sinks and runs back through the deep ocean to the equator, where it warms and rises once more.
This process has been continuing, largely uninterrupted, since end of the last Ice Age, 9000 years ago, when Europe and Scandinavia became warm enough for farming and the building of the towns and cities, universities and industries that bred the ascent of western civilization.
In a series of strident alarums, four major groups of scientists have lately sounded unambiguous warnings that AMOC is showing clear signs of running amok, propelled by humanity’s apparently insatiable and ever-increasing greed for fossil energy.
AMOC is a gigantic system, delivering 50 times more energy than the entire human usage into the northeastern Atlantic and its littoral countries. But, like the rest of the planet, it has been growing warmer as extra heat trapped in the atmosphere by greenhouse gases is absorbed by the oceans.
This contributes to melting the Arctic, releasing all manner of dangerous side effects.[1] The cold water released by melting Greenland, Canada and the Arctic sea-ice, has formed a continent-sized bubble of cold, less saline water in the north Atlantic – and it is this which is weakening the flow of warmer water that keeps the west European climate temperate.
Scientists now fear the warm current could collapse, potentially without much warning. When exactly this will occur, nobody can yet predict with certainty – but one group of scientists found that there is a 95% likelihood that the AMOC will collapse at some point between 2025 and 2095. “We ought not to ignore such clear indicators of an imminent collapse,” they stated. [2]
The immediate impact will be storms of landscape-wrecking violence across Europe, followed by a freezing weather – potentially, a localised Ice Age. Recent floods are a foretaste of what is to come.
This will certainly disrupt and could destroy northwestern European farming, in one of the world’s most reliable foodbowls, with catastrophic consequences for its citizens and economy. Countries like Ireland, the UK, the Netherlands, Denmark and western France could become as barren and un-farmable as the far north of Norway is today.
The flow-on impacts would be global. Major shifts in tropical rainfall patterns, a serious decline in the ocean’s ability to absorb carbon – thus accelerating global heating – faster sea level rise and collapsing ocean fisheries are among them. Many fear an outpouring of European climate refugees from an area which is currently a major haven for those fleeing climate havoc in the tropics.
An AMOC collapse would “impact the entire world for centuries to come”, the scientists said.
Projection of the world in the latter C21st: +2.4 degrees of heating from doubled carbon emissions, and a freezing cold patch of water in the North Atlantic from a collapsed AMOC.
A team of 44 leading climate scientists [3] recently admonished Nordic Ministers “Given the increasing evidence for a higher risk of an AMOC collapse, we believe it is of critical importance that Arctic tipping point risks, in particular the AMOC risk, are taken seriously in governance and policy.”
“Adaptation to such a severe climate catastrophe is not a viable option,” they added.
Yet governments, the fossil fuels industry and world in general remain determined to ignore them, apparently doing all in their power to bring down human civilisation.
In Norway, the country worst affected by such a collapse, the Government issued 62 new oil drilling licences in 2023, up from 47 the previous year and reports 52 billion cubic metres of new oil and gas finds. On the opposite side of the globe, Australia – facing the advent of intolerable summer heat – has given the greenlight to 7 vast new coal mines, with 25 more queued up to go.
Meanwhile United Nations General Secretary Antonio Guterres warns that global greenhouse emissions have reached the highest level in history, with no sign of slowing. [4] The UN report indicates that it would take a cut of 57 per cent in emissions to stay within the +1.5 degree target set by the Paris Accord. This goal will “soon be dead”, it added.
The consequences are unthinkable. The UN report states baldly that the world is currently on track for +3.1 degrees. This will render regions such as the Middle East, North Africa and the Sahel, Australasia, along with large parts of India, China and Central Asia, largely uninhabitable and almost certainly unfarmable, unleashing tidal movements of billions of refugees and sparking conflicts on a global scale.
Yet, from November 11, petrostate Azerbaijan will host the largest gathering of fossil fuels proselytes ever, the so-called 29th UN Conference of the Parties on Climate Change. (COP29). The carbon sector has privately vowed to do all in its power to sabotage world attempts to prevent planet-scale climate destruction, setting the stage for a global death march that will make World War II look like a Sunday School outing. Its adherents are laughing at our attempts save a habitable Earth.
The few hundred hyper-rich individuals who dominate the world’s energy sector simply do not care – and nor do the governments they have suborned: Saudi Arabia, the US, Norway, Australia, Russia, China, Canada, India, Nigeria and many more beside.
So, while a failing AMOC heralds disaster for western Europe, it is simply another foreshadowing of the demon which fossil fuel production on such a scale has unloosed on the world.
And while we may not see mammoths jostling with the double-decker buses on Picadilly Circus any time soon, the consequences for all of humanity’s way of life, for our ability to eat and drink, and for world security are apocalyptic.
Yet we sleepwalk, complacently, towards them.
[1] See, for example, https://johnmenadue.com/is-arctic-methane-stoking-the-climate-crisis/ and https://johnmenadue.com/the-earth-has-bipolar-disorder-and-so-do-we
[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-39810-w
[3] https://en.vedur.is/media/ads_in_header/AMOC-letter_Final.pdf
[4] https://www.unep.org/resources/emissions-gap-report-2024