Climatologists and oceanographers from Utrecht University in the Netherlands have found that the Atlantic Meridional Circulation (AMOC), which is responsible for the balance of the global climate, is rapidly approaching collapse. This will lead to a “climate apocalypse” within 100 years, they predict.

According to NASA, the AMOC plays one of the key roles in the global conveyor belt of ocean currents that maintain the balance of salt and freshwater levels at various depths around the world and help regulate the planet’s temperature. Heat, carbon and nutrients, especially from the tropics, are transported to the Arctic Circle, where they cool and sink deep into the ocean. This helps distribute energy across the Earth and reduces the effects of global warming.

The engine of this conveyor is located off the coast of Greenland; Here, as the ice melts due to climate change, more and more fresh water flows into the North Atlantic, slowing down all processes. Deeper, fresher waters move south past North and South America, then east past Africa. Meanwhile, saltier and warmer ocean water from the Pacific and Indian oceans passes through southern Africa, returns to Florida, and continues up the east coast of the United States to Greenland. All this shows that the AMOC is already heading towards a sharp change, and according to calculations, this has not happened for more than 10,000 years.

The Dutch team conducted a study, the results of which were published in the journal Science DevelopmentsMeanwhile, computer models of the global climate simulated changes over a two-thousand-year period. The model showed that a slowdown in the AMOC could lead to a catastrophic sudden collapse in less than 100 years.

According to previous predictions by climate scientists, sea levels in the Atlantic will rise by one meter in some areas and large parts of coastal cities will be flooded. The rainy and dry seasons in the Amazon will reverse, leading to further degradation of the rainforest.

At the same time, temperatures around the world are fluctuating more chaotically, with much larger fluctuations than now. In northwestern Europe, the weather will get colder (temperature will drop by 9-27 degrees Celsius) and precipitation will decrease. It will be impossible to adapt to this as the changes will be critically fast.

But the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which regularly publishes reliable news on warming, said it was moderately confident a collapse would not occur before 2100 and generally downplayed future disaster scenarios.

Similar studies on the rapid containment of the AMOC and the most important component of the Gulf Stream have been published for more than two decades. They all have two features in common: first, they are based entirely on computer simulations; Secondly, they completely ignore the experience of warmer periods of the recent past, such as the Holocene climate optimum or Mikulin six to eight thousand years ago. interglacial period, 120 thousand years ago.

As you know, temperatures back then were higher than now, so much so that 120 thousand years ago there were hippos in the Thames and the Rhine, and Valdai was covered with hornbeams that quickly died from frost. So, if the new study was correct, AMOC would definitely have been stopped at that time. However, in practice, there was no clear decrease in temperatures in Europe. On the contrary, they were long and stable (even a cold winter could kill all the hippos and hornbills).

The real picture of the climate in Europe in this century should be close to the picture observed in the Holocene and Mikulin interglacial period: winters will gradually become almost frost-free and mild, and summer temperatures will rise much less than winter temperatures, and mainly due to this situation summer temperatures will be much less than winter temperatures will increase. causes an increase in night temperatures.