The solar rises over fishing boats in the Atlantic Ocean, Sept. 8, 2022, off of Kennebunkport, Maine. A system of ocean currents that carries warmth northward throughout the North Atlantic might collapse throughout this century, in keeping with a brand new examine, and scientists have stated earlier than such a collapse might trigger catastrophic sea-level rise and excessive climate throughout the globe.
| Photo Credit: AP
Those following the newest developments in local weather science would have been surprised by the jaw-dropping headlines final week proclaiming the “Gulf Stream could collapse as early as 2025, study suggests” — which responded to a latest publication in Nature Communications.
“Be very worried: Gulf Stream collapse could spark global chaos by 2025” introduced the New York Post. “An important system of ocean currents is heading for a collapse that ‘would affect every person on the planet” noted CNN in the U.S. and repeated CTV News here in Canada.
One can only imagine how those already stricken with climate anxiety internalized this seemingly apocalyptic news as temperature records were being shattered across the globe.
This latest alarmist rhetoric provides a textbook example of how not to communicate climate science. These headlines do nothing to raise public awareness, let alone influence public policy to support climate solutions.
We see the world we describe
It is well known that climate anxiety is fuelled by media messaging about the looming climate crisis. This is causing many to simply shut down and give up — believing we are all doomed and there is nothing anyone can do about it.
Alarmist media framing of impending doom has become quintessential fuel for personal climate anxiety, and when amplified by sensational media messaging, it is quickly emerging as a dominant factor in the collective zeitgeist of our age, the Anthropocene.
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This is also not the first time such headlines have emerged. Back in 1998, the Atlantic Monthly published an article raising the alarm that global “warming could lead, paradoxically, to drastic cooling — a catastrophe that could threaten the survival of civilization.”
In 2002, editorials in the New York Times and Discover magazine offered the prediction of a forthcoming collapse of deep water formation in the North Atlantic, which would lead to the next ice age.
Building on the unfounded assertions in these earlier stories, BBC Horizon televised a 2003 documentary entitled The Big Chill, and in 2004 Fortune magazine published “The Pentagon’s Weather Nightmare,” piling on the place earlier articles left off.
Seeing the alternative for an thrilling catastrophe film, Hollywood stepped as much as created The Day After Tomorrow in which each recognized legislation of thermodynamics was ever so creatively violated.
The currents are not collapsing (anytime quickly)
While it was comparatively straightforward to point out that it’s not doable for international warming to trigger an ice age, this nonetheless hasn’t stopped some from selling this false narrative.
The newest sequence of alarmist headlines could not have fixated on an impending ice age, however they nonetheless counsel the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation might collapse by 2025. This is an outrageous declare at greatest and a very irresponsible pronouncement at worst.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has been assessing the probability of a cessation of deep-water formation in the North Atlantic for many years. In truth, I used to be on the writing group of the 2007 4th Assessment Report the place we concluded—“It is very likely that the Atlantic Ocean Meridional Overturning Circulation (MOC) will slow down during the course of the 21st century. It is very unlikely that the MOC will undergo a large abrupt transition during the course of the 21st century.”
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Almost an identical statements have been included in the fifth Assessment Report in 2013 and the sixth Assessment Report in 2021. Other assessments, together with the National Academy of Sciences Abrupt Impacts of Climate Change: Anticipating Surprises, printed in 2013, additionally reached comparable conclusions.
The sixth evaluation report went additional to conclude—“There is no observational evidence of a trend in the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), based on the decade-long record of the complete AMOC and longer records of individual AMOC components.”
The currents are not collapsing (anytime quickly)
Hannah Ritchie, the deputy editor and lead researcher at Our World in Data and a senior researcher at the Oxford Martin School, not too long ago penned an article for Vox the place she proposed a chic framework for a way folks see the world and their capacity to facilitate change.
Ritchie’s framework lumped folks into 4 normal classes based mostly on mixtures of those that are optimistic and those that are pessimistic about the future, in addition to those that consider and those that don’t consider that now we have company to form the future based mostly on right this moment’s selections and actions.
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Ritchie persuasively argued that extra folks situated in the inexperienced “optimistic and changeable” field are what is required to advance local weather options. Those positioned elsewhere are not efficient in advancing such options.
More importantly, moderately than instilling a way of optimism that international warming is a solvable downside, the excessive behaviour (worry mongering or civil disobedience) of the “pessimistic changeable” group (corresponding to many inside the Extinction Rebellion motion), typically does nothing greater than drive the public in the direction of the “pessimistic not changeable” group.
A accountability to speak, responsibly
Unfortunately, extraordinarily low likelihood, and sometimes poorly understood tipping level situations, typically find yourself being misinterpreted as seemingly and imminent local weather occasions.
In many circumstances, the nuances of scientific uncertainty, notably round the variations between speculation posing and speculation testing, are misplaced on the lay reader when a examine goes viral throughout social media. This is just amplified in conditions the place scientists make statements the place artistic licence is taken with speculative potentialities. Possibilities that reader-starved journalists are solely too glad to play up in clickbait headlines.
Through impartial analysis and the writing of IPCC studies, the local weather science neighborhood operates from a place of privilege in the public discourse of local weather change science, its impacts and options.
Climate scientists have company in the development of local weather options, and with that company comes a accountability to keep away from sensationalism. By not tempering their speech, they threat additional ratcheting up the rhetoric with nothing to supply in phrases of general options or threat discount.
Andrew Weaver, Professor, School of Earth and Ocean Sciences, University of Victoria
This article is republished from The Conversation beneath a Creative Commons license. Read the unique article.
