Post #3130848

In their most famous AMOC paper, the vanWesten team in Utrecht were not stingy with printer ink cartridges to illustrate their findings with maps and line charts, also in the Supplementary. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1029/2025JC022651 The line charts in particular are of interest as they tell the story of the slow-ing AMOC during our lifetime. Unfortunately, they're in annual means. So the really expected increased number of heat events (due to the atmosphere re-arranging itself around the #ColdBlob) are smoothed over by whatever the winters will be like. What I read into it: during the slowdown, the extreme summer heat (that in my opinion kills the insects in Europe, and mammals and plants in large swathes of Southern Europe) is balanced by extreme cold events in winter. That's why the lines are plateauing until the OFF state is reached in the emission-scenario RCP4.5 (I circled them). A plateau – despite more extreme heat events happening – must mean a balance from the cold season. A plateau in annual anomalies does not mean zero change. I wrote more in the ALTtext. Note: RCP4.5 without #AMOC collapse should produce local annual anomalies of about 6C over pre-industrial, more than double the global outcome of 2.5C. Note also: the experiments included a return to no freshwater hosing. And that indeed undid the collapsing. All is not lost. we CAN still act. But we must do that today, like. Not in 5 years. Today. That's how close it is. #Climate #FossilFuels