AMOC Tipping: What Is It All About, and Who Is Right?

Patricio wrote:
The ocean has been trying to tell us something for years, and the argument over what exactly it is saying has generated more heat than the warming it describes. The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation -- the AMOC -- has become one of those scientific topics that journalists discovered, politicians weaponized, and the public absorbed in distorted form. Like climate change itself, it deserves better than the tribal treatment it has received.

Start with what the AMOC actually is. It is not a single current but a vast system of ocean circulation, carrying warm surface water northward from the tropics toward Europe and returning cold, dense water southward along the ocean floor. It is, in the most literal sense, a heat pump for the North Atlantic. Europe's relatively mild climate—the reason London enjoys a temperate climate rather than the harsh, chilling winters of Labrador or Newfoundland at the exact same latitude—owes a significant debt to it. Disrupt it seriously, and you cool northwestern Europe even as the rest of the planet warms. That is not a metaphor. It has happened before, in geological time, with measurable consequences.

The concern, then, is not invented. As the planet warms, the Greenland Ice Sheet melts at an accelerating rate, dumping freshwater into the North Atlantic. Freshwater is less dense than saltwater. Less density means less sinking. Less sinking means a weaker overturning circulation. The question science has been wrestling with is whether this weakening is gradual and recoverable, or whether it crosses a threshold -- a tipping point -- beyond which the AMOC reorganizes into a fundamentally different, persistently weak state regardless of what we do next. The difference between those two scenarios is the difference between a manageable problem and a civilizational one.

The alarmist version of this story arrived in force in 2021, when a paper in Nature Climate Change by Niklas Boers claimed to find statistical early-warning signals in observational data suggesting the AMOC was already approaching such a tipping point. Two years later, Peter and Susanne Ditlevsen published a paper in Nature Communications warning of a potential collapse as early as mid-century. These papers received enormous press coverage. The Day After Tomorrow -- the 2004 disaster film depicting Europe flash-freezing within days of an AMOC shutdown -- was invoked so frequently it became a journalistic reflex. The nuance was largely left on the cutting room floor.

What the coverage rarely mentioned was that the IPCC's Sixth Assessment Report, published the same year as the Boers paper, had already assessed an abrupt AMOC collapse before 2100 as unlikely -- and assigned only medium confidence even to that finding, explicitly acknowledging that the proxies and statistical methods behind the tipping-point claims were contested within the scientific community. The alarmist papers were not the consensus; they were one end of a live debate that the mainstream assessment had deliberately declined to resolve.

That debate has since moved, and it has moved in a direction the alarmists will find uncomfortable. In 2024, van Westen and colleagues published a peer-reviewed study in Science Advances using physics-based early-warning indicators and finding signals consistent with the AMOC being on a tipping course -- the most rigorous version of the alarmist argument to date. It deserves to be taken seriously. But in February 2025, Baker and colleagues answered it in Nature, examining AMOC behavior across 34 climate models under extreme greenhouse gas and freshwater forcing. Their finding: the AMOC is resilient. Southern Ocean winds drive upwelling that sustains the overturning circulation even under severe stress, preventing complete collapse across essentially all the models tested. A full AMOC collapse, they concluded, is unlikely this century. That is not one modeler's opinion. That is 34 models and a publication in the most scrutinized scientific journal on earth.

Then came the preprint from the Danish and Swedish Meteorological Institutes, posted in February 2026. Guo and colleagues ran an Earth system model with something most AMOC studies lack: an interactive, dynamically coupled Greenland Ice Sheet producing realistic meltwater fluxes. They pushed global warming all the way to 10 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels -- far beyond anything projected for this century -- then reversed course with negative emissions and watched what happened. The AMOC weakened steadily as temperatures rose, reaching states that technically qualify as "collapsed" by standard threshold definitions. And then, when cooling began, it recovered. Promptly. Without the irreversible transition that tipping-point theory predicted. Even with Greenland continuing to pour meltwater into the North Atlantic during the early stages of cooling, the overturning came back.

This is a conceptual distinction worth sitting with. "Collapsed" by a threshold definition -- say, flow dropping below 6 Sverdrups at a given latitude -- is not the same thing as "tipped" in the dynamical sense that makes the word frightening. A light switch that you can flip back on is not a tipping point. What the new modeling literature is finding, increasingly, is that the AMOC under realistic CO2 forcing behaves more like a dial than a switch.

That is the good news. The bad news -- and there is always bad news -- is Greenland itself. In the Guo study, the ice sheet behaves in exactly the opposite way from the AMOC. It does not recover. Warming melts it, stabilization keeps melting it, and cooling merely slows the bleeding without restoring what was lost. The committed sea-level rise from even a modest overshoot scenario is measured not in centimeters but in meters, on centennial timescales. At six degrees of warming, the model projects roughly 3.5 meters of eventual sea-level rise from Greenland alone, even after temperatures return to pre-industrial levels. At seven degrees, nearly five meters. The ice has a memory that the ocean circulation apparently does not.

So who is right? The answer, as with most honest assessments of complex systems, is that it depends on which question you are asking. The scientists who warned that the AMOC was more vulnerable than standard climate models suggested were pointing at a real gap -- most CMIP models do not include interactive Greenland meltwater, and that omission genuinely mattered. They were right to push the question. Where the alarmist framing overreached was in the implied irreversibility, the civilizational finality, the suggestion that a tipping point was not merely possible but imminent and effectively inevitable. The more recent, more sophisticated modeling does not support that conclusion. The AMOC weakens under warming, sometimes substantially, but it does not appear to snap into a permanent off state under the forcing trajectories relevant to this century.

What the new research most forcefully does not say is that we can relax. The authors of both the Baker and Guo studies are explicit about this in ways that did not make the headlines. Rapid emission cuts remain essential -- not to prevent AMOC collapse, which now looks less likely than feared, but to limit the weakening that will occur, to limit the Greenland melt that cannot be undone, and to avoid the multi-meter sea-level commitment that is locked in the moment the ice crosses certain thresholds. The case for urgency has not dissolved. It has simply been rerouted from the ocean circulation to the ice sheet, which was always the slower and more permanent threat.

The atmosphere, as someone once observed, does not negotiate. Neither does the ice.

References:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-021-01097-4
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-39810-w
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adk1189
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08544-0
https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-7830432/v2
https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/
https://interactive.carbonbrief.org/amoc-explainer/index.html

Patricio wrote:
The ocean has been trying to tell us something for years, and the argument over what exactly it is saying has generated more heat than the warming it describes. The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation -- the AMOC -- has become one of those scientific topics that journalists discovered, politicians weaponized, and the public absorbed in distorted form. Like climate change itself, it deserves better than the tribal treatment it has received.

Start with what the AMOC actually is. It is not a single current but a vast system of ocean circulation, carrying warm surface water northward from the tropics toward Europe and returning cold, dense water southward along the ocean floor. It is, in the most literal sense, a heat pump for the North Atlantic. Europe's relatively mild climate—the reason London enjoys a temperate climate rather than the harsh, chilling winters of Labrador or Newfoundland at the exact same latitude—owes a significant debt to it. Disrupt it seriously, and you cool northwestern Europe even as the rest of the planet warms. That is not a metaphor. It has happened before, in geological time, with measurable consequences.

The concern, then, is not invented. As the planet warms, the Greenland Ice Sheet melts at an accelerating rate, dumping freshwater into the North Atlantic. Freshwater is less dense than saltwater. Less density means less sinking. Less sinking means a weaker overturning circulation. The question science has been wrestling with is whether this weakening is gradual and recoverable, or whether it crosses a threshold -- a tipping point -- beyond which the AMOC reorganizes into a fundamentally different, persistently weak state regardless of what we do next. The difference between those two scenarios is the difference between a manageable problem and a civilizational one.

The alarmist version of this story arrived in force in 2021, when a paper in Nature Climate Change by Niklas Boers claimed to find statistical early-warning signals in observational data suggesting the AMOC was already approaching such a tipping point. Two years later, Peter and Susanne Ditlevsen published a paper in Nature Communications warning of a potential collapse as early as mid-century. These papers received enormous press coverage. The Day After Tomorrow -- the 2004 disaster film depicting Europe flash-freezing within days of an AMOC shutdown -- was invoked so frequently it became a journalistic reflex. The nuance was largely left on the cutting room floor.

What the coverage rarely mentioned was that the IPCC's Sixth Assessment Report, published the same year as the Boers paper, had already assessed an abrupt AMOC collapse before 2100 as unlikely -- and assigned only medium confidence even to that finding, explicitly acknowledging that the proxies and statistical methods behind the tipping-point claims were contested within the scientific community. The alarmist papers were not the consensus; they were one end of a live debate that the mainstream assessment had deliberately declined to resolve.

That debate has since moved, and it has moved in a direction the alarmists will find uncomfortable. In 2024, van Westen and colleagues published a peer-reviewed study in Science Advances using physics-based early-warning indicators and finding signals consistent with the AMOC being on a tipping course -- the most rigorous version of the alarmist argument to date. It deserves to be taken seriously. But in February 2025, Baker and colleagues answered it in Nature, examining AMOC behavior across 34 climate models under extreme greenhouse gas and freshwater forcing. Their finding: the AMOC is resilient. Southern Ocean winds drive upwelling that sustains the overturning circulation even under severe stress, preventing complete collapse across essentially all the models tested. A full AMOC collapse, they concluded, is unlikely this century. That is not one modeler's opinion. That is 34 models and a publication in the most scrutinized scientific journal on earth.

Then came the preprint from the Danish and Swedish Meteorological Institutes, posted in February 2026. Guo and colleagues ran an Earth system model with something most AMOC studies lack: an interactive, dynamically coupled Greenland Ice Sheet producing realistic meltwater fluxes. They pushed global warming all the way to 10 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels -- far beyond anything projected for this century -- then reversed course with negative emissions and watched what happened. The AMOC weakened steadily as temperatures rose, reaching states that technically qualify as "collapsed" by standard threshold definitions. And then, when cooling began, it recovered. Promptly. Without the irreversible transition that tipping-point theory predicted. Even with Greenland continuing to pour meltwater into the North Atlantic during the early stages of cooling, the overturning came back.

This is a conceptual distinction worth sitting with. "Collapsed" by a threshold definition -- say, flow dropping below 6 Sverdrups at a given latitude -- is not the same thing as "tipped" in the dynamical sense that makes the word frightening. A light switch that you can flip back on is not a tipping point. What the new modeling literature is finding, increasingly, is that the AMOC under realistic CO2 forcing behaves more like a dial than a switch.

That is the good news. The bad news -- and there is always bad news -- is Greenland itself. In the Guo study, the ice sheet behaves in exactly the opposite way from the AMOC. It does not recover. Warming melts it, stabilization keeps melting it, and cooling merely slows the bleeding without restoring what was lost. The committed sea-level rise from even a modest overshoot scenario is measured not in centimeters but in meters, on centennial timescales. At six degrees of warming, the model projects roughly 3.5 meters of eventual sea-level rise from Greenland alone, even after temperatures return to pre-industrial levels. At seven degrees, nearly five meters. The ice has a memory that the ocean circulation apparently does not.

So who is right? The answer, as with most honest assessments of complex systems, is that it depends on which question you are asking. The scientists who warned that the AMOC was more vulnerable than standard climate models suggested were pointing at a real gap -- most CMIP models do not include interactive Greenland meltwater, and that omission genuinely mattered. They were right to push the question. Where the alarmist framing overreached was in the implied irreversibility, the civilizational finality, the suggestion that a tipping point was not merely possible but imminent and effectively inevitable. The more recent, more sophisticated modeling does not support that conclusion. The AMOC weakens under warming, sometimes substantially, but it does not appear to snap into a permanent off state under the forcing trajectories relevant to this century.

What the new research most forcefully does not say is that we can relax. The authors of both the Baker and Guo studies are explicit about this in ways that did not make the headlines. Rapid emission cuts remain essential -- not to prevent AMOC collapse, which now looks less likely than feared, but to limit the weakening that will occur, to limit the Greenland melt that cannot be undone, and to avoid the multi-meter sea-level commitment that is locked in the moment the ice crosses certain thresholds. The case for urgency has not dissolved. It has simply been rerouted from the ocean circulation to the ice sheet, which was always the slower and more permanent threat.

The atmosphere, as someone once observed, does not negotiate. Neither does the ice.

References:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-021-01097-4
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-39810-w
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adk1189
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08544-0
https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-7830432/v2
https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/
https://interactive.carbonbrief.org/amoc-explainer/index.html

Im a BM and Patricio wrote:
The ocean has been trying to tell us something for years, and the argument over what exactly it is saying has generated more heat than the warming it describes. The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation -- the AMOC -- has become one of those scientific topics that journalists discovered, politicians weaponized, and the public absorbed in distorted form. Like climate change itself, it deserves better than the tribal treatment it has received.

Im a BM and Patricio wrote:
Start with what the AMOC actually is. It is not a single current but a vast system of ocean circulation, carrying warm surface water northward from the tropics toward Europe and returning cold, dense water southward along the ocean floor. It is, in the most literal sense, a heat pump for the North Atlantic. Europe's relatively mild climate—the reason London enjoys a temperate climate rather than the harsh, chilling winters of Labrador or Newfoundland at the exact same latitude—owes a significant debt to it. Disrupt it seriously, and you cool northwestern Europe even as the rest of the planet warms. That is not a metaphor. It has happened before, in geological time, with measurable consequences.

Im a BM and Patricio wrote:
The concern, then, is not invented. As the planet warms, the Greenland Ice Sheet melts at an accelerating rate, dumping freshwater into the North Atlantic. Freshwater is less dense than saltwater. Less density means less sinking. Less sinking means a weaker overturning circulation. The question science has been wrestling with is whether this weakening is gradual and recoverable, or whether it crosses a threshold -- a tipping point -- beyond which the AMOC reorganizes into a fundamentally different, persistently weak state regardless of what we do next. The difference between those two scenarios is the difference between a manageable problem and a civilizational one.

Im a BM and Patricio wrote:
The alarmist version of this story arrived in force in 2021, when a paper in Nature Climate Change by Niklas Boers claimed to find statistical early-warning signals in observational data suggesting the AMOC was already approaching such a tipping point. Two years later, Peter and Susanne Ditlevsen published a paper in Nature Communications warning of a potential collapse as early as mid-century. These papers received enormous press coverage. The Day After Tomorrow -- the 2004 disaster film depicting Europe flash-freezing within days of an AMOC shutdown -- was invoked so frequently it became a journalistic reflex. The nuance was largely left on the cutting room floor.

Im a BM and Patricio wrote:
What the coverage rarely mentioned was that the IPCC's Sixth Assessment Report, published the same year as the Boers paper, had already assessed an abrupt AMOC collapse before 2100 as unlikely -- and assigned only medium confidence even to that finding, explicitly acknowledging that the proxies and statistical methods behind the tipping-point claims were contested within the scientific community. The alarmist papers were not the consensus; they were one end of a live debate that the mainstream assessment had deliberately declined to resolve.

Im a BM and Patricio wrote:
That debate has since moved, and it has moved in a direction the alarmists will find uncomfortable. In 2024, van Westen and colleagues published a peer-reviewed study in Science Advances using physics-based early-warning indicators and finding signals consistent with the AMOC being on a tipping course -- the most rigorous version of the alarmist argument to date. It deserves to be taken seriously. But in February 2025, Baker and colleagues answered it in Nature, examining AMOC behavior across 34 climate models under extreme greenhouse gas and freshwater forcing. Their finding: the AMOC is resilient. Southern Ocean winds drive upwelling that sustains the overturning circulation even under severe stress, preventing complete collapse across essentially all the models tested. A full AMOC collapse, they concluded, is unlikely this century. That is not one modeler's opinion. That is 34 models and a publication in the most scrutinized scientific journal on earth.

Im a BM and Patricio wrote:
Then came the preprint from the Danish and Swedish Meteorological Institutes, posted in February 2026. Guo and colleagues ran an Earth system model with something most AMOC studies lack: an interactive, dynamically coupled Greenland Ice Sheet producing realistic meltwater fluxes. They pushed global warming all the way to 10 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels -- far beyond anything projected for this century -- then reversed course with negative emissions and watched what happened. The AMOC weakened steadily as temperatures rose, reaching states that technically qualify as "collapsed" by standard threshold definitions. And then, when cooling began, it recovered. Promptly. Without the irreversible transition that tipping-point theory predicted. Even with Greenland continuing to pour meltwater into the North Atlantic during the early stages of cooling, the overturning came back.

Im a BM and Patricio wrote:
This is a conceptual distinction worth sitting with. "Collapsed" by a threshold definition -- say, flow dropping below 6 Sverdrups at a given latitude -- is not the same thing as "tipped" in the dynamical sense that makes the word frightening. A light switch that you can flip back on is not a tipping point. What the new modeling literature is finding, increasingly, is that the AMOC under realistic CO2 forcing behaves more like a dial than a switch.

Im a BM and Patricio wrote:
That is the good news. The bad news -- and there is always bad news -- is Greenland itself. In the Guo study, the ice sheet behaves in exactly the opposite way from the AMOC. It does not recover. Warming melts it, stabilization keeps melting it, and cooling merely slows the bleeding without restoring what was lost. The committed sea-level rise from even a modest overshoot scenario is measured not in centimeters but in meters, on centennial timescales. At six degrees of warming, the model projects roughly 3.5 meters of eventual sea-level rise from Greenland alone, even after temperatures return to pre-industrial levels. At seven degrees, nearly five meters. The ice has a memory that the ocean circulation apparently does not.

Im a BM and Patricio wrote:
So who is right? The answer, as with most honest assessments of complex systems, is that it depends on which question you are asking. The scientists who warned that the AMOC was more vulnerable than standard climate models suggested were pointing at a real gap -- most CMIP models do not include interactive Greenland meltwater, and that omission genuinely mattered. They were right to push the question. Where the alarmist framing overreached was in the implied irreversibility, the civilizational finality, the suggestion that a tipping point was not merely possible but imminent and effectively inevitable. The more recent, more sophisticated modeling does not support that conclusion. The AMOC weakens under warming, sometimes substantially, but it does not appear to snap into a permanent off state under the forcing trajectories relevant to this century.

Im a BM and Patricio wrote:
What the new research most forcefully does not say is that we can relax. The authors of both the Baker and Guo studies are explicit about this in ways that did not make the headlines. Rapid emission cuts remain essential -- not to prevent AMOC collapse, which now looks less likely than feared, but to limit the weakening that will occur, to limit the Greenland melt that cannot be undone, and to avoid the multi-meter sea-level commitment that is locked in the moment the ice crosses certain thresholds. The case for urgency has not dissolved. It has simply been rerouted from the ocean circulation to the ice sheet, which was always the slower and more permanent threat.

Im a BM and Patricio wrote:
The atmosphere, as someone once observed, does not negotiate. Neither does the ice.

References:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-021-01097-4
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-39810-w
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adk1189
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08544-0
https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-7830432/v2
https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/
https://interactive.carbonbrief.org/amoc-explainer/index.html

Im a BM and Patricio wrote:
AMOC... It gets a lot of attention, usually more heat than light.

I don't know if I'm ready to die on that hill, yet.

I will be very curious to see if any slick, pre-packaged rebuttals are offered, as they are widely available for download, cut and paste, maybe read them later to see what you reposted kind of thing.

Im a BM and Patricio wrote:
Instead, I'll step back for a big picture view of the global ocean current. And go back to a time when there WAS a GLOBAL ocean current.

Im a BM and Patricio wrote:
The dinosaurs would have baked at the levels of CO2 they had in the air, but polar refrigeration kept the surface sea water cool enough for nice climate. The artic circle and antarctic circle were BOTH ringed with temperate forests. Tropical sea water surface temperatures never stagnated with low flow to accumulate much heat. The ocean current was VERY different in those days.

Im a BM and Patricio wrote:
North and South America used to have a gap between them. A gap big enough to allow a huge volume of flow for a truly GLOBAL current, splitting off from the tropics to spread heat far and wide, north and south. No sea ice. The only glaciers to be found were at high elevation. Surface sea water from the tropics got cooled off near the poles before flowing back toward the equator.

Im a BM and Patricio wrote:
That gap between the Americas started getting narrower as plate tectonics pushed continents around. By ten million years ago it had gotten narrow enough to start changing things. By three million years ago it was closed. Things haven't been the same since then. CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere plummeted to the lowest in geologic history. C-3 plants were starting to experience substantial loss to photorespiration, making them less competitive where C-4 plants would find a huge new niche to occupy. Sea ice formed in polar seas, and glaciers started growing as sea level fell. It would be a whole new cycle of climate change unlike anything experienced during the hundreds of millions of years when there was a Global Current passing between the Americas.

sealover[\b] and [b]Patricio wrote:
This is another discussion that died in its infancy.

Paleoclimatology is a tough nut to crack.

sealover[\b] and [b]Patricio wrote:
Yes, if we had the concentrations of CO2 in the air today that the DINOSAURS had, we would have runaway global warming.

sealover[\b] and [b]Patricio wrote:
The dinosaurs had pleasant climate in the forests of Antarctica because a global current passed between the Americas. Without it, they would have had that runaway global warming with so much CO2 in the air.

sealover[\b] and [b]Patricio wrote:
There is no longer any unified global current that flows between the Americas.

sealover[\b] and [b]Patricio wrote:
That changed EVERYTHING about climate and steady state temperature associated with any particular concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere.

sealover wrote:AMOC... It gets a lot of attention,

sealover wrote: usually more heat than light.

sealover wrote: I don't know if I'm ready to die on that hill, yet.

sealover wrote: I will be very curious to see if any slick, pre-packaged rebuttals are offered,

sealover wrote: Instead, I'll step back for a big picture view of the global ocean current. And go back to a time when there WAS a GLOBAL ocean current.

sealover wrote:The dinosaurs would have baked at the levels of CO2 they had in the air,

sealover wrote: but polar refrigeration kept the surface sea water cool enough for nice climate.

sealover wrote: The artic circle and antarctic circle were BOTH ringed with temperate forests.

sealover wrote: Tropical sea water surface temperatures never stagnated with low flow to accumulate much heat.

sealover wrote:The ocean current was VERY different in those days.

sealover wrote: North and South America used to have a gap between them.

sealover wrote: A gap big enough to allow a huge volume of flow for a truly GLOBAL current,

sealover wrote: ... splitting off from the tropics to spread heat far and wide, north and south.

sealover wrote: No sea ice.

sealover wrote: The only glaciers to be found were at high elevation.

sealover wrote: Surface sea water from the tropics got cooled off near the poles before flowing back toward the equator.

sealover wrote: By three million years ago it was closed.

sealover wrote: Things haven't been the same since then.

sealover wrote: CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere plummeted to the lowest in geologic history.

sealover wrote: Paleoclimatology is a tough nut to crack.

sealover wrote:Yes, if we had the concentrations of CO2 in the air today that the DINOSAURS had, we would have runaway global warming.

sealover wrote: The dinosaurs had pleasant climate in the forests of Antarctica because a global current passed between the Americas. Without it, they would have had that runaway global warming with so much CO2 in the air.

sealover wrote: That changed EVERYTHING about climate

sealover wrote: and steady state temperature

sealover wrote: ... associated with any particular concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere.

IBdaMann wrote:

sealover wrote:AMOC... It gets a lot of attention,

Nobody has heard of this fabrication. Are you pressing for the movie rights?

sealover wrote: usually more heat than light.

... says the guy who doesn't even know what "heat" is, but who insists he is a "thettled thientitht."

sealover wrote: I don't know if I'm ready to die on that hill, yet.

It would be better to just troll on that hill for now.

sealover wrote: I will be very curious to see if any slick, pre-packaged rebuttals are offered,

How does one "rebut" pure fiction? Has anyone rebutted the Lord of the Rings?

sealover wrote: Instead, I'll step back for a big picture view of the global ocean current. And go back to a time when there WAS a GLOBAL ocean current.

How are you going to "step back for a big picture view of the global ocean current" when you insist that there no longer is one?

sealover wrote:The dinosaurs would have baked at the levels of CO2 they had in the air,

This is a nice combined subjunctive fallacy + omniscience fallacy + greenhouse effect fallacy. Well done.

sealover wrote: but polar refrigeration kept the surface sea water cool enough for nice climate.

Spoken like you were there.

sealover wrote: The artic circle and antarctic circle were BOTH ringed with temperate forests.

So I'm not the only one who saw the satellite imagery of the distant, unobserved past.

sealover wrote: Tropical sea water surface temperatures never stagnated with low flow to accumulate much heat.

Did you just imply that heat can be accumulated? It can't. Did you never consider the communication value in learning what "heat" actually is?

sealover wrote:The ocean current was VERY different in those days.

That's what all of the hundreds of millions of prehistoric ocean science buoys revealed.

sealover wrote: North and South America used to have a gap between them.

Yep. After the gap closed, the lobsters on the north side of Panama evolved one way and the lobsters on the south side of Panama evolved differently.

sealover wrote: A gap big enough to allow a huge volume of flow for a truly GLOBAL current,

So, Panama had a global current? Wow.

sealover wrote: ... splitting off from the tropics to spread heat far and wide, north and south.

Too funny! S - P - R - E - A - D heat. All you need now is to claim to be a scientist.

sealover wrote: No sea ice.

Oh, that's right, you were there.

sealover wrote: The only glaciers to be found were at high elevation.

Oh, that's right, you were there, combing every inch of the earth.

sealover wrote: Surface sea water from the tropics got cooled off near the poles before flowing back toward the equator.

Hasn't this always been the case?

sealover wrote: By three million years ago it was closed.

There was a huge "Welcome Panama!" party.

sealover wrote: Things haven't been the same since then.

The 1600s ended and things haven't been the same since then.

sealover wrote: CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere plummeted to the lowest in geologic history.

That's right, you were there, measuring CO2 levels all around the globe at all altitudes.

sealover wrote: Paleoclimatology is a tough nut to crack.

Is there a Paleochristianity, or a Paleoislam?

sealover wrote:Yes, if we had the concentrations of CO2 in the air today that the DINOSAURS had, we would have runaway global warming.

Too funny! All you need to do now is to claim to be a scientist.

sealover wrote: The dinosaurs had pleasant climate in the forests of Antarctica because a global current passed between the Americas. Without it, they would have had that runaway global warming with so much CO2 in the air.

Too funny! Can you explain in chemistry terms how CO2 increases the average equilibrium temperature of the globe, or are you not a chemist?

sealover wrote: That changed EVERYTHING about climate

I notice that you wrote "climate" without any modifier. You didn't write "a climate" or "the climate" ... you simply wrote "climate" in the same way Christians write "God" or Muslims write "Allah." Is that what you intended?

sealover wrote: and steady state temperature

What do you mean by "steady state temperature" with respect to the earth, past and present?

sealover wrote: ... associated with any particular concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere.

What does concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere have to do with any temperature?

Im a BM and sealover and Patricio wrote:
For context: Patricio posted an essay with information suggesting that the fear a shutdown in the flow of critical ocean currents was going to provoke catastrophic changes was overhyped.

Im a BM and sealover and Patricio wrote:
Indeed, for decades there has been some maverick scientist with a new interpretation of how these currents flow, and a terrifying prediction of imminent harm from major changes about to happen.

Im a BM and sealover and Patricio wrote:
Indeed, it was supposed to have already destroyed things before 2012.

The current currents are pretty resilient.

Im a BM and sealover and Patricio wrote:
I would interpret what Patricio was trying to do with this thread does not put him in the "alarmist" camp.

Im a BM and sealover and Patricio wrote:
However, it did provide IBdaMann with another opportunity to display his condescending arrogance and scientific illiteracy.

Im a BM and sealover and Patricio wrote:
IBdaMann missed the opportunity to attack some stupid "alarmist" propaganda that is really out there, and qualifies as "religious" fanatacism.

Im a BM and sealover and Patricio wrote:
There really are kooks who are distorting actual science regarding ocean currents to make predictions of imminent catastrophe.

Im a BM and sealover and Patricio wrote:
They have been doing it for decades, but each new generation of ocean current alarmists has new discoveries to distort to support their doomsday predictions.

Into the Night wrote:

Im a BM and sealover and Patricio wrote:
For context: Patricio posted an essay with information suggesting that the fear a shutdown in the flow of critical ocean currents was going to provoke catastrophic changes was overhyped.

You then promptly hyped it up again.

Im a BM and sealover and Patricio wrote:
Indeed, for decades there has been some maverick scientist with a new interpretation of how these currents flow, and a terrifying prediction of imminent harm from major changes about to happen.

You can't blame your problems on anybody else, Robert.

Im a BM and sealover and Patricio wrote:
Indeed, it was supposed to have already destroyed things before 2012.

The current currents are pretty resilient.

You cannot 'collapse' a current.

Im a BM and sealover and Patricio wrote:
I would interpret what Patricio was trying to do with this thread does not put him in the "alarmist" camp.

An alarmist post DOES put you in the alarmist camp, Robert.

Im a BM and sealover and Patricio wrote:
However, it did provide IBdaMann with another opportunity to display his condescending arrogance and scientific illiteracy.

Inversion fallacy. You can't blame your problem on anybody else, Robert.

Im a BM and sealover and Patricio wrote:
IBdaMann missed the opportunity to attack some stupid "alarmist" propaganda that is really out there, and qualifies as "religious" fanatacism.

Apparently you can't pay attention to his posts.

Im a BM and sealover and Patricio wrote:
There really are kooks who are distorting actual science regarding ocean currents to make predictions of imminent catastrophe.

Science cannot be distorted.
You deny theories of science.
Your alarmism is your problem.

Im a BM and sealover and Patricio wrote:
They have been doing it for decades, but each new generation of ocean current alarmists has new discoveries to distort to support their doomsday predictions.

A discovery cannot be distorted.
You are the one that made the alarmist post, Robert.

Im a BM and sealover and Patricio wrote:
It is hilarious to me that neither IBdaMann nor Into the Night were able to comprehend enough of Patricio's post to realize that it is CRITICAL of hyping up fears of catastrophic consequences of changes to ocean currents. I dare say that Patricio's post could be characterized as "anti alarmist" regarding AMOC.

Im a BM and sealover and Patricio wrote:
I am reminded that MOST of the new members who joined after I did were actually hard core "skeptics" who did NOT accept the conclusion that human activity has caused any kind of climate change. They were looking for a fight with actual climate change alarmists who blamed everything on human activity.

Im a BM and sealover and Patricio wrote:
Instead they found a different kind of fight waiting for them here.

They were expected to renounce any belief that climate can change at all.

Im a BM and sealover and Patricio wrote:
Only the purest of the pure qualify for that kind of science denial.

Im a BM and sealover and Patricio wrote:
You are not allowed to believe that climate can ever change by any means.

Im a BM and sealover and Patricio wrote:
You are not even allowed to believe in fossil fuel deposits created from the material contained in ancient organisms.

Im a BM and sealover and Patricio wrote:
You are not allowed to believe it is possible to know if the Earth is more or less than a million years old.

Im a BM and sealover and Patricio wrote:
HARD CORE SCIENCE DENIAL.

"There is no such thing as... (you name it, they deny it)"

Into the Night wrote:

Im a BM and sealover and Patricio wrote:
It is hilarious to me that neither IBdaMann nor Into the Night were able to comprehend enough of Patricio's post to realize that it is CRITICAL of hyping up fears of catastrophic consequences of changes to ocean currents. I dare say that Patricio's post could be characterized as "anti alarmist" regarding AMOC.

Ocean currents can't 'collapse', Robert.

Im a BM and sealover and Patricio wrote:
I am reminded that MOST of the new members who joined after I did were actually hard core "skeptics" who did NOT accept the conclusion that human activity has caused any kind of climate change. They were looking for a fight with actual climate change alarmists who blamed everything on human activity.

Your socks are not new members.
Climate cannot change.

Im a BM and sealover and Patricio wrote:
Instead they found a different kind of fight waiting for them here.

They were expected to renounce any belief that climate can change at all.

Climate cannot change.

Im a BM and sealover and Patricio wrote:
Only the purest of the pure qualify for that kind of science denial.

Inversion fallacy. You are describing yourself again.

Im a BM and sealover and Patricio wrote:
You are not allowed to believe that climate can ever change by any means.

Climate cannot change.

Im a BM and sealover and Patricio wrote:
You are not even allowed to believe in fossil fuel deposits created from the material contained in ancient organisms.

Fossils aren't used as fuel.

Im a BM and sealover and Patricio wrote:
You are not allowed to believe it is possible to know if the Earth is more or less than a million years old.

The age of the Earth is unknown.

Im a BM and sealover and Patricio wrote:
HARD CORE SCIENCE DENIAL.

"There is no such thing as... (you name it, they deny it)"

Inversion fallacy. You are describing yourself again.
You cannot blame your problems on anybody else, Robert.

Im a BM wrote:

Into the Night wrote:

Im a BM and sealover and Patricio wrote:
It is hilarious to me that neither IBdaMann nor Into the Night were able to comprehend enough of Patricio's post to realize that it is CRITICAL of hyping up fears of catastrophic consequences of changes to ocean currents. I dare say that Patricio's post could be characterized as "anti alarmist" regarding AMOC.

Ocean currents can't 'collapse', Robert.

Im a BM and sealover and Patricio wrote:
I am reminded that MOST of the new members who joined after I did were actually hard core "skeptics" who did NOT accept the conclusion that human activity has caused any kind of climate change. They were looking for a fight with actual climate change alarmists who blamed everything on human activity.

Your socks are not new members.
Climate cannot change.

Im a BM and sealover and Patricio wrote:
Instead they found a different kind of fight waiting for them here.

They were expected to renounce any belief that climate can change at all.

Climate cannot change.

Im a BM and sealover and Patricio wrote:
Only the purest of the pure qualify for that kind of science denial.

Inversion fallacy. You are describing yourself again.

Im a BM and sealover and Patricio wrote:
You are not allowed to believe that climate can ever change by any means.

Climate cannot change.

Im a BM and sealover and Patricio wrote:
You are not even allowed to believe in fossil fuel deposits created from the material contained in ancient organisms.

Fossils aren't used as fuel.

Im a BM and sealover and Patricio wrote:
You are not allowed to believe it is possible to know if the Earth is more or less than a million years old.

The age of the Earth is unknown.

Im a BM and sealover and Patricio wrote:
HARD CORE SCIENCE DENIAL.

"There is no such thing as... (you name it, they deny it)"

Inversion fallacy. You are describing yourself again.
You cannot blame your problems on anybody else, Robert.

"Climate cannot change." - Into the Night

No, it cannot. Not as long as climate obeys Into the Night's Royal Decree.