We're living in a fake world and pretending everything is fine.
Adam Curtis made a movie HyperNormalisation and we're living it also today.
Adam Curtis:
“HyperNormalisation” is a word that was coined by a brilliant Russian historian who was writing about what it was like to live in the last years of the Soviet Union. What he said, which I thought was absolutely fascinating, was that in the 80s everyone from the top to the bottom of Soviet society knew that it wasn’t working, knew that it was corrupt, knew that the bosses were looting the system, know that the politicians had no alternative vision. And they knew that the bosses knew that they knew that. Everyone knew it was fake, but because no one had any alternative vision for a different kind of society, they just accepted this sense of total fakeness as normal. And this historian, Alexei Yurchak, coined the phrase “HyperNormalisation” to describe that feeling.
Full film at https://youtu.be/to72IJzQT5k
You think they'd care for something as remote as the AMOC collapse?
Whenever a politician gets elected on the wish to fix housing, jobs, the pension system, the larger and larger divide between the ultra rich and the masses, either they are lying to you or are hopelessly naive they can achieve anything in their 4 years. At that point all they can do is just fill their pockets like everybody else is doing.
Worst case scenario seems to be that people will stop migrating to Europe.
That's not the problem, though. The problem is almost nothing else can. Livestock, staple crops, pollinating insects, etc.
There is a pretty big variation in average temperatures by country [0]. Somehow People everywhere from Thailand to Greenland manage to find food. All else failing it is a possibility to trade for calories. Let alone technology improvements that might save the day by accident.
I mean, it might make places uninhabitable over the course of a few generations, but things that change so slowly are't actually much of a threat on an individual level. Worst of the worst cases people can move or not have children - the statistics suggest that is an acceptable option to a lot of people.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_y...
Multi-decade time frame can only be thought of as catastrophic when it comes to change of this magnitude. Not to mention that ecosystems simply don't adapt on that timescale, it’s at least two orders of magnitude off.
The title is egregiously exaggerated. It implies humanity will go extinct if this happens, when it obviously won't. The actual article doesn't even come anywhere close to making that claim.
I think the bigger concern is what sudden climate shifts might do to agriculture. If some farmland becomes much less viable on a wide basis, that might be much harder to adjust to on the short term.
I can't help but think of all the historical societies that collapsed due to even mild pressure on the food supply.
They didn't have the logistical advantages we have today (storage and transport).
Okay, when prawns fished from the coast of Mozambique are no longer viable some other spot will, necessarily, become viable.
Historical societies did not have the technology to simply farm in another place when their current place become hostile to farming. We already do this.
The only danger we have is if the global area for farming decreases. I do not think this will happen - it will merely shift around.
Hence the egregious exaggeration of the title. Even large fractions of the population dying != "Bye Bye Humanity."
Out of curiosity, what happened 1000 years ago to make it so weak? 1000 years ago is still human time scales - there were people living in europe and north america at the time. We have written records from the europeans at least. Its not like this was 100,000 years ago.
The Syrian refugee crisis meant something like a million people fleeing into Europe and it caused massive political upheavals.
If North America and Europe enters an ice age, I think the preferred term is "climate-expatriates"
We don't know enough.
Seems like this kind of disaster engagement bait that’s super popular now
0: https://thatjoescott.com/2026/02/03/bye-bye-humanity-the-pot...
„Under high-emission scenarios, the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), a key system of ocean currents that also includes the Gulf Stream, could shut down after the year 2100.“
The will-it-won’t-it collapse of the AMOC is something to keep an eye on. But there are other pressing climate change issues to address in the near term, such as food security, ecosystem degradation, and rising disease rates.
All serious experts (including the nature study you linked a popsci article about) agree this is a problem that will have a devastating impact on humanity in the future. We're just quibbling about how devastating and how soon.
Article contents doesn't reflect the alarmist statement in the header.
"Don't be alarmist, it's just the curtains that are on fire. Besides, there's a good chance it might rain".
“Our paper says that the Atlantic overturning has not declined yet. That doesn’t say anything about its future, but it doesn’t appear the anticipated changes have occurred yet.”
The study is a stark contrast to a 2018 study that said the AMOC had declined over the last 70 years."
...
“Our results imply that, rather than a substantial decline, the AMOC is more likely to experience a limited decline over the 21st century—still some weakening, but less drastic than previous projections suggest.”
Am I the only person here who actually read it?
When that wave washed over New York, awesome! The freezing helicopter, woot!
I also liked the South Park parody.
Europe is already hotter than expected.
AMOC collapse in a heating world wouldn't mean much. It seems to me that whatever cooling from it will be offset by global warming.
AMOC could be a generally bad thing for biodiversity or crops, but it's not going to stop global warming.
"Climate disaster affecting a mechanism Europe depended for millenia to keep warm? No biggie, we are already have another climate disaster making Europe hotter, they'll just cancel each other out"
Not just second and third order effects, many can't even understand first level effects.
That said, a new ice age it will not be. If your local temperatures get closer to polar, and polar gets closer to tropic, I don't see the logic of it will cause an ice age. You can't have AMOC positive feedback loop from albedo if enough ice doesn't form.
And you didn't provide any mechanisms outside of ad hominems.
Not to mention past AMOC data is missing one key parameter - Humanity. On account of us not being there. What happens when humans are cold? They warm themselves usually with CO2 emitting heat sources. Last time AMOC was around only CO2 source was the volcano. They don't care about heat.
We know how to warm up the planet. It's cooling down without massive casualties that's hard.
Any change is seen as good or bad, only by the people who saw both ends of it and categorize the change as such. If a change happens through multiple generations, each generations sees only a part of the change. Specially the younger population can only see the change through the past decade or two. That explains why the youth are always merrier than the older folks who have a bigger burden of mempries.