AIBU to feel frightened about the risk of AMOC collapse?

OP have a look at Parents for the Future, some of us are very concerned and want to take part in action on both a national and local level.

I’m still trying my best to do as much as I can to help the next generation. The AMOC collapse is truly terrifying. This year we will have another scorching year. It’s getting harder to grow food and I think prices will continue to rise. We need a WW2 level of fight against this. Sadly we have Trump, Putin and unspeakable morons like farage screwing everything up.
OP it’s worth looking at the Climate Change board - there are some very interesting posters.

That’s fine as long as your children don’t start panicking and wondering why the planet is dying etc in 30-50 years and start trying to blame the generation or two before them. Technically it’s no one’s responsibility to save the planet. But then you can’t start blaming the previous generations either. Either it’s everyone’s or no one’s responsibility.

I agree but what is anyone expecting young people to actually do? I tell my children it is not their responsibility to save the planet. All this Mother Earth crap. The earth doesn’t care if it’s supporting life or not. There is no point in anthropomorphising some rock and water.

Of course it would be terribly sad to have helped turn a Goldilocks planet into a hostile place, but as others have said the earth has previously had cycles of climate change where it wipes out all land life, only for aquatic life to evolve and a new dominant species to walk the earth. I just can’t break my heart over it even though I of course hope this doesn’t happen for billions of years.

@MistressoftheDarkSide "and wonder why we're continually being loaded with information designed to apparently keep us in - well, a state of fear."

I do wonder if this is another example of the shock doctrine theory described by Naomi Klein. The idea is that keeping whole nations in a state of shock enables governments to conduct mass economic change whilst people's attention is elsewhere.

Are we not at the end of an ice age right now? It’s natural. It was always going to happen. We were just born at the wrong time

Oh well in that case as long as it doesn't happen in the next 25 years or so, I don't care.

Hopefully my care about the environment for the last 40 odd years will see me through, and if the disposable generation are affected, hey ho.

There are places on earth already well below that where people live, as a species we would survive.
No kids, wouldn't care if i died tommorow tbh.

Looking forward to some snow tbh.

I don't see any point in worrying about things that are completely out of our control, people's anxiety nowadays is bad enough.

Most of us have enough on our plates holding down, paying bills and raising kids.

Sorry I don't have time to rtft but you may interested in this coming webinar

https://www.rmets.org/event/rmetsweather-change-webinar-april

The Met Office have done some recent AMOC online events too. Won't be for everyone but I find that engaging with the scientific research often helps me keep my perspective.

I’ve had debates with people on here before about this constant mentality of telling young people how “everything is fucked” will not help them actually ever do anything. But the response is always “well it is so why would we lie to them???”. So I can’t see this ever improving. It’s creating a weird victim mentality in young people as well. Everything is always the older people’s (boomers usually) fault so why should the young people do anything? The older people need to fix it for them because it was their fault to begin with! But the fact is in 30 years the “boomers” will all be dead and those young people now will be the ones in charge. And they’ll still be saying well yes everything is fucked but it wasn’t our fault!!! But that will be little help to the new generation of young people. They’ll just see the current older generation as not doing anything to help them. Again. Blaming a generation of dead boomers will mean nothing to young people in 2056. They’ll be looking to those older at that point to fix it.

So not that long ago London was in the minus 20s or lower for protracted periods

No, it wasn't. A major contributor to the the Thames freezing and the winter Frost Fairs was the old London Bridge. It had more arches, which were narrower, which partially dammed the river- before the Bridge, it's flow was very slow which gave the water the chance to freeze.

It also effectively created rapids past the arches which were dangerous to navigate.

The term "mini Ice Age" can be misleading too because it makes us think wlthe UK coped well - even thrived - under polar climate conditions. We didn't - we had glaciers last time we had those temperatures here, that was prehistory.

If you look at the data, the temperatures from those centuries when we had mini ice ages were much milder than you'd expect and much, much, better than those predicted in the climate crisis. Unfortunately, the two don't compare.

I am worried too but the research I’ve done suggests it won’t immediately cause ice age. The rest of the world is warming…what it will do is cause more extremes - extremes of low temperature, storms, changing the pattern and timing of monsoons in India…so potential for lots of social and political consequences. I honestly think a sudden ice age is the least and most extreme version of the problems with this. Civil unrest, fighting over resources, food insecurity, weather extremes.

Yes my teens ask me constantly which recycling bin is which as they just cannot be bothered with any of it. I guess my generation were raised that the planet was in trouble but if we act we can save it, but the new generation are constantly told everything is fucked so what's the point. But then they talk about having children...

I agree with this. I was always surprised on here reading how everyone has teens who are so environmentally aware and cry if their mother dares to not recycle a half inch piece of cardboard etc. They all refuse to fly and only have second hand phones. Never drink or smoke or vape. They all admonish their parents for daring to do anything against the environment.

And then I walk out in the real world. Where teens are wearing endless disposable fashion, vaping constantly, eating fast food, throwing litter on the floor etc. While blaming “boomers” for using plastic milk bottles.

The science is in agreement that AMOC has destabilised somewhat; that it could collapse; and that the worst of the effects would come some decades after collapse.

Now, there are some fairly big disagreements about how much destabilisation has happened, and how close it might be to collapse.

It's something that policy-makers should be taking into account, making contingency plans for, and most importantly putting lots of monitoring in place to study what's happening.

Oh dear. Its not an internet conspiracy theory.

You’ve just made yourself look a bit dim with this comment, to be honest. It’s been all over mainstream media for the last week. It’s not about taking a digital detox, what a patronising comment.

OP, you're focusing on on one paper out of many. Just because it is the most recently published paper on the issue does not mean that it reflects the current scientific consensus.

By way of analogy, think of opinion polls on elections. During a political campaign, there will be a plethora of polling companies trying to forecast the ultimate winner. They will each have their own methodology, be taken at different times, survey different people and produce different outcomes.

Each individual poll is a relevant data point, and recency is relevant, but its not as if the most recently published one can suddenly be said to definitively capture current public sentiment - even more so if it appears to be an outlier.

E.g., if 9 pollsters published polls implying Party A has between a 5% and 15% chance of winning an election, then pollster 10 published one showing a 50% chance...that might shift the average, but it isn't the new consensus.

And modeling elections is far less complex than global environmental systems.

This study is a concerning data point, and may be part of a wider, concerning trend - but you're (unintentionally) cherry-picking the most pessimistic data point, that appears something of an outlier, and interpreting it as definitive.

I think like many things on here, teens and kids being earnest about the planet is literally another world (no pun intended), I only really hear about this on adverts or this forum

Back in the real world, and I work with children and their families (not teaching), they're smoking, vaping, wearing disposable crap, eating disposable crap, having kids willy nilly. Dare to suggest second hand or not replacing that phone to be met with bemusement or affront.

The irony.

I used to worry about this but I teach teens - honestly they don’t give a crap. They love their Shein and Temu shit. I have always bought second hand. DH and I rarely replace anything but my DD would happily wear a t-shirt once and throw it in the bin if I allowed her. I used to think it was us “oldies” who ruin the Earth but I really don’t think our future generations care either. Influencer culture has a lot to answer for!

A full collapse before 2100 is high impact but medium likelihood scenario (from low) in latest projections. It’s not a certainty. The science isn’t exact and it’s not fully known at what point the tipping point would be reached.

But we definitely know if we continue to have continued reliance on fossil fuels and methane release we will reach it faster and increase the medium likelihood to high and that very rapid decarbonisation is the only way to be sure of not reaching the tipping point. (Some increases are unfortunately already locked in) so it’s a question of looking at something that may very well happen to something that will definitely happen.

therefore the time to act is now. I work for an environmental organisation- it’s not a case of ‘belief’ it’s a case of scientific modelling and scenarios. Never have we affected the planet so quickly at at such a scale as we have in the last 100 years. The AMOC collapse would have catastrophic effects but it’s not the only tipping point. We are destroying the very things we need to survive. Yes we are experiencing serious effects already (millions of people currently displaced due to drought and flooding and this is going to increase in my lifetime but I’m more worried about my child and those to come. How could I not do something if I know (not ‘believe’) this?