Becoming a doomsday prepper edges further away from "flat out crazy" with every day of weird, weird weather.
Our climate has been extremely stable for a long time and I'm not expert but it is my understanding that chaotic systems can suddenly flip from stable to extremely unstable.
I think there will be a time, hopefully a long time away but possibly close, when the world realises that there' going to be disaster on an unprecedented scale and we all have reason to be very, very concerned.
If the entire Antarctic eastern shelf melts, there is enough ice there to raise sea levels by more than 70 meters. Some say this is 100 years away.... but ice doesn't melt all at once. I wouldn't be surprised if it comes alot sooner and what that world/civilization looks like I cannot imagine.
And if you have children, then 100 years away sounds very very soon because you know this is the world they will live in.
> Our climate has been extremely stable for a long time
Depends on your definition of "stable". We have no data on most aspects of the Earth's climate for most of human history. For example, we don't know what the frequency of storms was for any time period further back than a century or two (and the data is spotty further back than a few decades). What data we do have suggests that the 20th century was a period of unusual calm with respect to many aspects of climate, and that what we are seeing now is just a return to what has been normal for most of the period since the last Ice Age ended.
Even the findings presented in this article are limited: 1600 years sounds like a long time, but the last Ice Age ended 12,000 years ago. What has the AMOC looked like during all that time? We don't know.
> What data we do have suggests that the 20th century was a period of unusual calm with respect to many aspects of climate
Really? This is quite a strong statement. What data and what aspects of climate are you thinking of? Presumably not temperature. World temperatures rose at a rate unprecedented for millennia during the 20th C - I would hardly call that a "period of unusual calm".
> Only if you believe highly dubious temperature reconstructions, including their claims to be accurate to within fractions of a degree.
I do believe them because many sources from different proxies agree on the temperature record, the science is very well developed and a strong consensus across a very large majority of experts and separate disciplines has been achieved.
"Highly dubious" is how I would describe the fringe criticisms of this work.
> many sources from different proxies agree on the temperature record
Not for the recent period where we have actual accurate temperature data to compare to. Some proxies show warming for that recent period (but not quite the same as the actual temperature data), others (such as the "hockey stick" reconstructions) actually show cooling. The fact that they agree better where there is no actual temperature data to compare them do does not fix this problem.
> a strong consensus
Consensus means nothing in science. Science works by making accurate predictions. Climate science cannot make accurate predictions of future climate. Even the IPCC admitted this (finally) in the AR5 (and then proceeded to obfuscate it by basing its conclusions on "expert judgment" instead).
Something else to consider, a simple experiment you can do at home, with sorry implications. Get some soda, fill a glass with ice, then fill the rest of it with soda, give it a minute to stabilize, then put a thermometer in it. Then watch.
Does the temperature slowly converge to room temperature, in a linear fashion? Not at all. That isn't how phase shift works. The soda in the glass will remain at the same temperature for as long as there is still ice. If you got a heat lamp and put it right next to the glass, you would increase the speed at which the ice cubes are melting, but you would not raise the temperature of the soda. It's only when the ice is almost gone that the temperature rises. And then it rises a lot.
Likewise, global warming is limited so long as we still have ice caps to melt. But once those ice caps are almost gone, the temperature increase will be unrestrained.
> once those ice caps are almost gone, the temperature increase will be unrestrained
No, it won't. Even after all the ice is melted, the heat capacity of the Earth's oceans is huge. Plus your "heat lamp" analogy is a very poor one, the changes in radiative forcing at the top of the Earth's atmosphere are tiny compared to the total heat coming in from the Sun.
70M is well within the scope of the historical record. The models don’t project it. Personally, I’m trusting what the data shows happened last time the atmosphere had this much carbon in it over what our models show. And the data isn’t pretty.
Sorry, didn't see this -- you can research this yourself fairly easily once you know the right terms. You're looking for eustatic sea level as it correlates to CO2. I find people who research this themselves come away more convinced than if I just tell you the data or link to one specific study.
It's been around, but not quoted as often as the 8m of Greenland. The reason is that earlier they didn't think Antarctica would have considerable amounts of melt in a short (100-200 years) timeframe, but now it seems it's melting almost as quickly as continental ice everywhere, which means mere decades will be significant.
The western part of Antartica has many fast moving glaciers, some grounded below sea level, that might speed up with global warming. This part is likely to dump a bunch of water into the ocean in the next 1-2 hundred years, but it is only about 10% of the Antarctic water/ice volume. The Eastern side is much thicker and larger and looks like it might actually increase in volume with climate warming.
Warming sea water due to decreased salinity and infractions through the circumpolar current result in increased precipitation, which as you say results in an increase in volume of land ice - however this volume is accruing inland, while the coastal feet of glaciers and ice shelves continue to be undercut by said warmer water, which then allows their collapse, which allows increased flow, which allows retreat. Now - the worrying possibility which arises is that the combination of more on shore mass and less off/near shore buttressing will result in a net increase in flow, which will then contribute further to the positive feedback loop.
Honestly, nobody knows, our models are nowhere near granular enough. I prefer to err on the side of caution, and take a pessimistic view, but that’s just me.
I was referring to this new study of faster than previously thought rate, but it speaks nothing of volumes, just ice retraction speed. I think they'll post something with updated melt rate by volume at some point once they've calculated it.
Gravity means oceans are attracted to the icecaps. When icecaps melt, the level around them could even lower! and Europe might not even see much raise, because the natural equilibrium of oceans without icecaps is to have higher levels than today nearer to the equator. So I’m barely surprised with a 70m estimate due to gravity effects.
1. Status is relative, making $70k in rural Idaho enables a happier life than making $90k in San Jose.
2. In the post-apocalyptic world, many preppers will be relatively better off, having lots of practical skills like farming, mechanical know-how, survival skills, etc, vs professionals who thrive in a stable city but wouldn't last a month in the wilderness, can't hunt for food, start a fire, etc.
Therefore, the post-apocalyptic world becomes some sort of fantasy, where finally your skills are valued, and Joseph the lawyer will be begging you for help.
Because it's incredibly much easier to prepare myself and my family than leading a global effort to success. Especially given that a large part of the population in the US has turned it into parts of their identity politics to deny climate change is happening and humans are the cause of it.
There are many unselfish individuals in this world who work to fix things, but as a group, and a group of countries, we are so selfish that the problem of global warming will never be stopped.
Nor the many other gigantic crises that face the earth such as plastic pollution.
As there is no way the people of earth will unify to fix this, better start getting ready sometime in the next 20 years for a gigantic shift in where people see civilization is headed.
There’s also no way that any amount of your preparations will materially improve your chances. If you stockpile, and civilization collapses, you will be raided for your stockpiles by stronger, better armed people. There will always be stronger, better armed people. If you prepare to live off land, how is that going to work when the land is dead?
There’s no escape for you or your family, except averting disaster in the first place, or death. Unless your prepping amounts to a suicide pact, then it’s just a fantasy to keep you from being too afraid. As comforting fantasies go, prepping seems like a particularly expensive and time-consuming one. Unless you’re desperate for the illusion of control, your time and money is better spent elsewhere.
You should prepare for disasters as they really happen. Could you survive OK in Portoriko (or your local type of similar disaster)? Would you have way to generate power at least to have light and radio? Do you have friends in other countries/places that would help you relocate? Do you have water and food for few weeks to survive initial blast? What about medicine you need? Do you have cash to buy basics until electricity is setup again?
But you are right that if you prepare too well. So well that it's visible, it is likely that it will be taken from you. Or you can end up as that guy who prepared for zombie apocalypse and lost it all (100k USD invested) in hurricane.
It will never (with exception of all out nuclear war) be total world annihilation. Yet most people seems totally unprepared for stuff that just keeps happening. And it will likely be getting more frequent with climate change.
Why wouldn’t people band together to rebuild, share resources and fight off robbers? Have a little faith in people! That said, maybe the typical “prepper” dream is to be isolated in an apocalyptic scenario, but more likely neighbors need to get through a food or electric shortage.
Find me the casual opportunist in the apocalypse; it would all be starving lions, and a lot of lions. If you want a preview, study famous famines and sieges, like the siege of Stalingrad, and the Holodomor. I’ll say it again, prepping for something other than limited disaster (i.e. a hurricane or earthquake) is only realistically achieved by trying to avert doom, or buy a gun and as many bullets as your family has members.
> it would all be starving lions, and a lot of lions
90% of us would be better classed as the gazelle in this analogy. Even the lions would be fighting each other for dominance.
> If you want a preview, study famous famines and sieges, like the siege of Stalingrad, and the Holodomor
Most hardcore preppers either live outside a city or plan to escape the city pretty quickly, so I don't know what Stalingrad is supposed to prove. Were their people with remote bunkers and years of food supplies when holodomor happened?
Not with that attitude, we won’t. The ozone layer disaster never materialized because we fixed it. Giving in to fatalism on this is deeply disappointing.
It’s also worth noting that a lot of indicators are moving in the right direction for stopping global warming. It won’t stop before it’s become a significant problem. But we should be able to stop it before it becomes apocalyptic.
could you give some of those indicators, because I fail to find them (number of cars increases, energy consumption increases, CO2 in atmosphere increases, ocean "acidification" increases,...). I'd be so happy to have some good news !
Or, focus on your immediate community to survive an issue. This is something that I think about when I watch something prepper related on YouTube. People are stockpiling and building bunkers rather than building relationships with neighbors.
Well, if you'd approach the issue _sensibly_, then the answer could be "why not both?"
Disaster preparation is very much about community. A mistake or lack of luck can easily wipe out your "preparation." A disjointed community can eradicate it (and yeah, they'll spot your creepy 'grey man' shtick eventually). But a community could, and arguably should, prepare itself for possible disasters.
But what do I know, I just live in a place where if a levee breaks somewhere half the country will be taking boats to work.
At least when I lived back in New Zealand I had an emergency plan. I wouldn't call it a doomsday plan. With the likelihood of earthquakes and other natural disasters leaving you without help for days or weeks, it's only sensible. No need for global unrest to cause problems.
You don't need to be a doomsday prepper to be prepared. And you don't need a complete collapse of society for things to get uncomfortable for you.
You should have at least 3 days of food and water, as well as other essential supplies (blankets, first aid kit, radio) in a bag or convenient location, ready to go in an emergency.
I live in Florida. Only having three days of food during the Summer is irresponsible. A week of non-refrigerated is realistic. People who laugh about "prepping" haven't heard about hurricanes.
Having less than a week worth of rations (as in canned / dry food) is irresponsible regardless of where you live.
During the “great storm” we had in London where we had like maybe 5” of snow fall and everything stopped working I had people seriously complaining and telling war stories about going hungry because they couldn’t get food delivered...
Like seriously any small scale natural disaster or even a local utilities outage can cause issues to so many unprepared people it’s not even funny.
I keep some basic canned / dry food enough for about a week for 2 people, 20 liters of bottled water and several high capacity charged chargers and I live in W2 London.
You said it great. It's not only "i can still buy anything anytime and all my energies and water work" and "Mad Max". Being prepared does not mean I expect Mad Max world.
Even having a basic first aid kit at hand can mean the difference between life and death in a lot of cases. I keep a tourniquet and quick-clot gauze in my first aid kits because ambulance response times are commonly 30 minutes around here. If you have an arterial bleed you're going to be in pretty bad condition by the time the paramedics arrive unless you can control it. I've never seen an off the shelf first aid kit stock those items. Most of the off-the-shelf kits can barely treat a scraped knee.
It seems every decade they reverse their position on tourniquets.
I believe that they're discouraged because they tend to do more harm than good when applying a gauze and pressure is sufficient. People tend to go overkill.
However, there are situations where they save lives. This is why simply having first aid supplies isn't sufficient, but actually knowing what to do is essential as well.
That’s a extreme position. Use the experience of folks living in NYC after 9/11 and Hurricane Sandy.
Things to consider:
- Disruptions to communications.
- Disruptions in emergency police/fire/ems response
- Gasoline and diesel gone in 24 hours (or worse... I was on a coastal island where a hurricane suddenly turned -- all gas was sold within 6 hours of the hurricane warning!)
- Electricity disruption
- Mass transit shutdown
- Shutdown this of highways and other roads.
Basically, there’s a 72 hour “oh shit” phase (priority: your safety), 4-10 days of the new normal formulating (priority: protect your property), and then the new normal (deal with consequences, if any).
How to prepare depends on risk. If you live in a floodplain or on the coast, you should have a clue about how you’re going to need to think about a couple of weeks post flood or hurricane. In other places, it’s probably good to think about what to do when a snowstorm knocks out power for a week.
Personally I am hoping for large scale carbon capture. Environmentalists hate it because it’s too deus ex machina — if you believe it will happen then nothing we emit now matters. I take the tack that we _must_ figure it out because the alternatives aren’t tenable. As a species we do well when it’s clear what we have to do, and I’m bullish that we will figure out how to remove significant amounts of carbon from the atmosphere before climate change effects hit the insane point (insane = 100M sea level rise and mass migration that puts what’s happening now into the “small effect” bucket).
I wanted to believe this, but I think it could be too late. Doing so would require gargantuan amounts of energy that I think could only come from fusion but that is at best 30+ years away from first net energy. Even then it would take some time to build enough capacity, and lag effects in the environment mean we will almost certainly see some pretty effects in the next 100 years.
With today’s technology, yes. There’s good science being done right now that is much more efficient. And all our current approaches are chemical engineering, but I personally think organisms modified with CRISPR could be a better path. You’re just trying to get them to do what they already do, more quickly, and I think that’s in the realm of near-term science fiction instead of magic.
The problem with carbon capture is one of scale. Even though we're adding immense amounts to the atmosphere, it dissipates quickly. It's a minuscule percentage of air, only .04%. To remove significant amounts of carbon requires sucking in stupendous amounts of air.
I'm going to try to locate the billionaire bunkers that I am sure they have all built deep into mountains and take refuge with them before battling my way across a post apocalyptic landscape fighting zombies, accompanied by a ragtag bunch of survivors. I figure the Bezos bunker must be part of his 10,000 year clock mountain http://www.10000yearclock.net/learnmore.html
Of course I have no idea what to do because why the heck would you think about that unless you were an actual doomsday prepper?
Likely outcomes at that stage is gigantic food crisis and the catastrophe that would follow so you'd need to store quite alot of bags of rice to get through that.
A real doomsday prepper would have bought some land in the middle of nowhere (so hordes don't want/think to come there) and learned how to farm it. Storing six months of food or whatever is preparatory-theater and doesn't address sustainable survivel.
I have thought about this (but done nothing, partially because I don't have the resources).
This is my thinking too. Not just for you though, you need to be able to feed a self sustaining community (probably 100 or more people). Considered also taking some technological stores too. Water tech, refined metal stocks, manual and lower tech power tools. Maybe even some spare solar panels, inverters, battery electrolytes.
Though I haven't thought deeply enough to actually work out any timescales for the size of stocks required. Picking the right climate is probably the most important part though. Even if there is great change, some places are still going to be more arable than others, and surely that is at least partially predictable.
Putting all this effort into something which most likely will not come to pass in your or your children's lifetime is not constructive and will eventually sap the energy and resource needed to stay 'prepared'.
May I suggest taking up a lifestyle at this time and more or less in the place you are - assuming you're not in some jam-packed city where all hope is lost the moment society does break down for some time (New Orleans during Katarina is a good example of what will happen)? If you do live in such a place and will not consider to move out of it this won't work but if you have some space around you which you can call your own it makes sense to start using it in a productive way by growing something useful.
Dig a well if you can, a dug well is more reliable than a deep-drilled one as you can get water when the power fails (which it does quite often where I live out in the Swedish countryside thanks to storms or careless snow plough drivers and such).
If you don't live in a forested area you can start planting trees on less productive or hard to till soil, you'll need between 2 and 4 hectares to keep a house with around 200m2 of living area warmed to today's standards, less if you make the wise decision to lower them a bit. This does assume you have a wood-burning stove and cooking stove, of course - get those and use them regularly. Plant some fruit trees, berry bushes, a plot of potatoes (which you'll have to move around year after year as you should not grow potatoes in soil which carried them the year before or the one before that), root vegetables, easy stuff. For fun and profit you can add hops which will allow you to brew beer if you can get hold of barley - you could grow it yourself but it takes a lot of land and is a lot of work if you do everything by hand. Just make sure to think in practical terms, you're not trying to relive some Swiss Family Robinson fantasy but trying to live in a way which makes you and yours less dependent on the intricate workings of society, irrespective of whether any doomsday-scenario ever comes to pass or not. The less dependent you are of the trappings of 'modern' live, the less you'll suffer for the loss of such.
I saved the best bit for the end: you'll most likely be happier in the here and now by becoming more self-reliant and less dependent on 'modern' society and its... lures. That does not mean you have to become a Luddite or back-to-the-land hippy, it just means you won't feel lost by not being part of the herd which follows the latest craze, sports the latest gizmos and relishes in the latest fad. It also means you won't need to think about 'prepping' anymore, just like people who cycle to work won't need to think about going to the gym to get some exercise as they made it part of their normal life.
> The less dependent you are of the trappings of 'modern' live, the less you'll suffer for the loss of such.
I hear what you're saying; However, it's mostly pointless. Climate change will eat up survivalists and off the grid types just like everyone else. What will you do when antibiotics are no longer available or your crops fail due to fire or drought (more likely now)?
Not really hating on your approach or comment, I just think people would be better off writing their senate representatives about addressing climate change or attending a peaceful rally rather than hedging their bets on going bush to survive the apocalypse.
Learning to cultivate the land and live from it without depending on income and buying food is in and of itself something you can practice, with the benefit of greater health and reduced cost of living. The "benefit" of being "prepared" for doomsday is at best secondary to that.
I find i fascinating that I produce the best tasting peas in my garden, and it all originated from a small pea my son got from school. If I give a single pea to a modern person in the city, they most likely wouldn't have any idea of what to do with it.
Well, I don't really expect climate change to eat up me or mine. I live too high to be flooded, to far to the north to be fried, in a country with a low population density, on a farm with 21 hectares of land (7 hectare of which is under tillage, the rest forest). The climate may change, driven by whatever process - be it anthropogenic, natural fluctuation, diminished solar output or (most likely) a combination of these and other factors - but I do not see this lead to the disaster scenario you just sketched. The potential loss of antibiotics (which is wholly unrelated to the disaster scenario this discussion started with) would be annoying but not directly life-threatening. The chance of crops failing here due to drought is very small as nearly all scenarios with regard to climate change show the amount of precipitation in my area (currently around 900 mm/year) to increase instead of decrease.
Yeah, I have thought about it from a holiday house perspective. Make it a hobby farm, eventually move to it and work remotely.
Unfortunately, most people do live in cities where this is just out of the question. I also live in a city where arable land nearby is only borderline arable. Exactly the kind of place which is most exposed to most kinds of climate variability.
What good would the concept of "ownership" be in the face of societal collapse?
Push comes to shove, the only law will be "might makes right", so the only way to prepare for the worst is to be able to defend your assets. Being someone or friends with someone who has access to advanced weapons seems like a minimum requirement, but most important is to have a very wide social network with valuable skills to fall back on and start trading with.
A real doomsday prepper _is_ a subsistence farmer.
And hopefully one that doesn't rely on external inputs, and has a water supply that's not affected by climate change.
Learning how to farm it is essentially equivalent to currently farming it, or if not, then you need a few years of supplies to make it over the startup transient. With no reliable external input.
I imagine it would be difficult to predict what would be arable land after a climate catastrophe. If climate change is bad enough to affect the global food supply, chances are that means what used to be arable land isn't anymore.
Well I guess there are the sheep and cattle to eat, and they would go wild. But we have no native mammals, and the imported tahr and pigs are notoriously hard to hunt.
Tahr aren't hard to hunt if you know what you're doing.
It sounds cliche, but in order to hunt a tahr, you have to think like a tahr. Once you learn their habits they're fairly easy to find and easy enough to shoot.
There's really big numbers up some of the valleys too. I've seen mobs of up to 30 before, and they just tend to stand there like idiots while you're shooting at them.
Armed revolution is starting to look more and more like the only reasonable thing that could stop this runaway train. Politics is not working. There are many eco-terrorists out there and they have put a lot of thought into this:
Sure, it's all been a big conspiracy perpetrated by 97% of the world's Climate Scientists. But thanks to a plucky band of right-wing ideologists and oil companies, the truth will be exposed.
Seeing as this is HN and not Facebook, produce your data or go home.
And how do you explain that basically every village in the European Alps (or any other mountain range) has old pictures of how their glacier looked ~100 years ago, where you also see how much lower the tree line was etc. Or all the local legends about winter activities that somehow would never be possible nowadays. There is always some level of fraud in any scientific (or human) discipline but not on such a global scale.
> A huge amount of climate research data has been faked.
Evidence, please? And, just to get my bearings, are we talking about a relatively huge amount or an absolutely huge amount? Because unless it’s a huge amount relative to the overall body of evidence, it doesn’t change the epistemic landscape.
> A huge amount of climate research data has been faked. Multiple times “scientists” have been caught for this.
This was fake news before we had the term fake news. You're chosen news sources have been lying to you about this for a long enough time that you will probably never accept it.
Firstly, You're wrong. I'm not going to say you may be wrong, or that you're possibly wrong. Denying climate change is as wrong as claiming the earth is flat. The other replies to your comment should (but probably won't) convince you of this. As well as the vast consensus of scientific (actual, not "scientific") opinion.
Secondly, did you really create an account in order to make that comment? A tip for future comments: If you're going to make contentious claims, it's best to bring some citations to the table.
What is easy to understand, but hard to illustrate is cyclic patterns of impulse - response.
Without the impulse, no response. However, it is the response that drives the nature of the dynamics.
I've recently paid attention to this phenomenon, and believe the concept can be adapted also to human phenomena.
As heads-of-state Trump and Putin have misunderstood each other's communications for some time, it is only natural that they are distrustful.
Each one expects the words of the other to lead to a response they can understand.
I decided that I am certain enough to model a solution to the armed conflict in Syria on my blog. The analysis is based on my understanding of graph theory and studies of the nation state stakeholders in the conflict.
Consider this:
Any organization is a system of people in roles, let's call them members.
The members are expected to make decisions in accordance with their responsibilities.
All decisions rest on the available information.
The human mind is imperfect, including limitations in memory, and an emotional context for the information.
So, an organization is typically a tree of people making decisions, which together form a system.
A number of these systems are operating on and near Syrian territory. The dynamics may best be described as utter chaos.
Furthermore, I don't believe there has been any instance in the history of mankind where a rocket has performed a successful investigation of crimes.
It's well worth the karma hit if this may trigger someone to come up with better ideas than more rockets.
Simulating the future of the global agro-food system. Cybernetic models analyze scenarios of interactions between future global food consumption, agriculture, landuse, and the biogeochemical cycles of water, nitrogen and carbon. https://media.ccc.de/v/34c3-8935-simulating_the_future_of_th...
> As the little ice age ended and temperatures warmed, ice melted and freshwater flooded into the North Atlantic. The results suggest the current state of the AMOC is the weakest it has been over that whole long record. Whether today’s state is just a continuation of that reaction or whether global warming has also started to chip in is not clear, he says. Caesar, meanwhile, put the turning point toward a weaker AMOC in the mid-20th century, suggesting it is due to the influence of human-caused warming. Her team’s record, however, does not extend as far back.
It's always difficult reading climate analysis like these articles where it bounces back and forth between sounding confident of projections in the first half of the article, to how it's all still really speculative without consensus and needing better modeling in the latter half.
All I want is to know what the data says and a reasonable estimate of it's probability of being true. Yet it's almost impossible to separate what the scientists hope the data may to point to and what it reasonably does in it's current state.
I guess, as a casual reader, it'd be better to not jump on every new study that comes out and wait for future consensus to form.
I should have included above, but the wikipedia section on global effects shows how it varied by continent. Massive effects in Europe and South America, but with some evidence the Pacific wasn't as affected.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas
The earlier intro section there lays out the discovery and some types of evidence that led to the conclusion, and a theory based on geology from China that these rapid changes tend to accompany deglaciation.
20 degrees Fahrenheit shift within a decade, even if just for one continent... It's hard to fathom.
For a second I thought the headline referred to the circulation of The Atlantic, but then I realized, while a very good magazine, it probably hasn't been around for 1600 years.
> The studies differ on the timing of when that weakening began. Thornalley’s record, which spans those 1,600 years, suggests it started at the end of the little ice age, a period from about A.D. 1350 to 1850
So the weakening current started before the industrial revolution could have had an effect and well before any significant human caused CO2 and therefore was not caused by man.
From your link:
"These increases in greenhouse gas concentrations and their marked rate of change are largely attributable to human activities since the Industrial Revolution (1800)."
and
"Data for the past 2000 years show that the atmospheric concentrations of CO2, CH4, and N2O – three important long-lived greenhouse gases – have increased substantially since about 1750."
I don't think your link supports the statement "the weaking started well before the industrial revolution."
The link clearly shows that significant rise in CO2 did not occur until after 1900 so it could not have caused weakening ocean currents that began, at the latest estimate in 1850. I do not understand where anyone got the idea that a constantly changing climate is abnormal.
I'm not a climatologist but as I understand it when looking at the climate over the long scale there are cycles as the climate changes that are predictable by natural processes (including effects of the Earths orbit and co2 changes). Then from the 19th century the climate has been moving off the known path as understood by these cycles. The difference has been attributed to humans. The worry is that when you put the cyclic natural of climate change together with the human caused climate change then what you may end up with is a climate which is not conducive to food productive for the human population.
Traditionally, the circulating water gets colder as it reaches the arctic circle and submerges, since cold water has a higher density than warmer water.
But: melting ice in the arctic releases freshwater. This reduces the salinity at the surface of the Northern Atlantic. Water with lower salinity is lighter. Therefore, this water no longer submerges, and the circulation is slowed down.
The studies differ on the timing of when that weakening began. Thornalley’s record, which spans those 1,600 years, suggests it started at the end of the little ice age, a period from about A.D. 1350 to 1850, when solar and volcanic influences depressed temperatures across the Northern Hemisphere and glaciers and ice sheets expanded. As the little ice age ended and temperatures warmed, ice melted and freshwater flooded into the North Atlantic. The results suggest the current state of the AMOC is the weakest it has been over that whole long record. Whether today’s state is just a continuation of that reaction or whether global warming has also started to chip in is not clear, he says. Caesar, meanwhile, put the turning point toward a weaker AMOC in the mid-20th century, suggesting it is due to the influence of human-caused warming. Her team’s record, however, does not extend as far back.
Indications of the process having started (edited) before humans could be responsible for it (few hundred years ago).
By my rudimentary estimation (based on numbers from https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/grl... Figure 3) I believe the annual ice melt in the Arctic each year is approximately 10,000 km^3 of ice. Let's assume all of it flows into the Atlantic. Remove 10% of that volume to approximate the liquid volume of the ice, then convert to kilograms of water = 9x10^15 kg. Average ocean salinity is 35g of salt to 1kg of water. That comes out to ~3.15*10^14 (315 trillion) kg of salt. You can pick a percentage that flows into the Atlantic, but it would still require on the order of trillions of kilograms of salt.
And the answer is that if we turned all of our energy to salt production, it wouldn’t even be a drop in the ocean, and our efforts would of course liberate more CO2 and contribute to global warming. Of all the possible ways we could geoengineer (all of them bad ideas frankly) this has to be one of the worst, least effective, most limited, and least likely to succeed.
If we’re going to hasten our demise, we might as well try sulfate aerosols or something with a more global effect. We’d still end up killing ourselves, but at least it wouldn’t be quite so much like trying to get a sailboat to move by blowing on the sails.
There must be some quantity of salt we can dump a year to raise salinity. We should be rigorous, and find out what that quantity is. If we can change a climate, we can change an ocean.
1/100 of 1% of the world's oceans is a cube 32 miles on each side [0]. This volume of salt would weigh 317 billion tons [1]. World commercial production is .25 billion tons of salt [2].
So, to raise salinity by .01%, we'd need 1268 years of normal production (plus some when you exclude sea-water extraction).
The assumption there is a feasible application of something in a location to remediate a world wide problem is attractive but I think built on faulty logic. To try an analogy, gluing a broken cup back together doesn't make it never have broken.
Yes, we probably can re-salinate a flow to attempt to alter its dynamics. We'd also have altered its salinity profile in ways which have repercussions on e.g. cod fisheries, or krill, or other things. Thats the problem with complex biological systems with lots of interrelated parts: they don't reverse with simple tweaks because once you change one part, you change lots of parts in unexpected ways.
(I did once study this stuff back in the 80s and was very bad at it, but what I recall of even two-actor predator-prey relationships is that they are remarkably complex, cyclical, and do not just return to the same stable place if you alter them trivially. I believe this is probably even more true for physical systems like weather and climate)
While you are right that reducing CO2 emissions is a must, I'm uncertain if we don't have to actively remove it as well. If it's not already too late anyway. With the methane hydrate already on the move...
Of all of the disaster movies with terrible physics, The Day After Tomorrow is truly their king. Supercooled air depositing ice crystals on warm surfaces, oh yeah.
Our climate has been extremely stable for a long time and I'm not expert but it is my understanding that chaotic systems can suddenly flip from stable to extremely unstable.
I think there will be a time, hopefully a long time away but possibly close, when the world realises that there' going to be disaster on an unprecedented scale and we all have reason to be very, very concerned.
If the entire Antarctic eastern shelf melts, there is enough ice there to raise sea levels by more than 70 meters. Some say this is 100 years away.... but ice doesn't melt all at once. I wouldn't be surprised if it comes alot sooner and what that world/civilization looks like I cannot imagine.
And if you have children, then 100 years away sounds very very soon because you know this is the world they will live in.