The Gulf Stream Won’t Collapse in 2025: Why Were the Warners Wrong?
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Responsibility to Communicate Responsibly Unfortunately, extremely low probability and often poorly understood critical points are often interpreted as likely and imminent climate events, which is in itself incorrect. In many cases, when a study goes viral on social media, the nuances of scientific uncertainty, particularly the difference between hypothesis formulation and hypothesis testing, are lost to the general reader.
Those who have been keeping track of the latest developments in climate science may have been stunned by the startling headlines last week, citing a study announcing that the Gulf Stream could end as early as 2025. Recently there was a response to a publication in Nature Communications. Be very concerned, the New York Post announced: The collapse of the Gulf Stream could spark global chaos by 2025. As CNN in the US and CTV News in Canada reiterated, a critical system of ocean currents is headed for a collapse that will affect every person on the planet. One can only imagine how people already stricken with climate anxiety absorbed this apocalyptic news, as temperature records were being broken around the world. This latest worrying rhetoric provides a perfect example of how not to communicate climate science.
These headlines do nothing to raise public awareness, much less influence public policy to support climate solutions. We see the world we describe It is well known that climate anxiety is fueled by media messages about an impending climate crisis. This causes many people to stop doing something in this direction and give up – believing that we are all doomed and that there is nothing anyone can do about it. Media warning of impending doom has become the quintessential fuel for personal climate anxiety, and when amplified by sensationalist media messaging, it is fast emerging as a major factor in the collective zeitgeist of our era, the Anthropocene . This is also not the first time such headlines have come to the fore. In 1998, The Atlantic Monthly published an article warning that global warming could, paradoxically, lead to extreme cooling—a catastrophe that could threaten the very existence of civilization.
In 2002, editorials in the New York Times and Discover magazine predicted an upcoming collapse of deep-water formations in the North Atlantic that would lead to the next ice age. Based on unsubstantiated claims in these previous stories, BBC Horizon broadcast a documentary called The Big Chill in 2003, and in 2004 Fortune magazine published The Pentagon’s Weather Nightmare, which picked up where the previous was omitted in the articles. Seeing an opportunity for a thrilling disaster film, Hollywood stepped in to create The Day After Tomorrow which creatively violated every known law of thermodynamics. Streams Aren’t Dying (Soon) Although it was relatively easy to show that ice ages caused by global warming are unlikely, that hasn’t stopped some people from promoting this false narrative.
The latest series of worrying headlines may not focus on an impending ice age, but they suggest the Atlantic Meridional Reversing Circulation could collapse by 2025. This is an outrageous claim and at worst a completely irresponsible declaration. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has been assessing the possibility of an end to deepwater formation in the North Atlantic for decades. In fact, I was on the writing team of the 2007 Fourth Assessment Report where we concluded that: “It is very likely that the Atlantic Ocean Meridional Overturning Circulation (MOC) will slow down during the 21st century. It is highly unlikely that there will be a large scale abrupt change in the MOC during the 21st century. Almost identical statements were included in the 5th Appraisal Report in 2013 and the 6th Appraisal Report in 2021. Other assessments, including one published in 2013 by the National Academy of Sciences in Abrupt Impacts of Climate Change: The Anticipated Surprise, reached similar conclusions. The Sixth Assessment Report concluded that: Based on a decade-long record of the overall AMOC and longer records of individual AMOC components, there is no observational evidence of a trend in the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC).
Understanding Climate Optimism Hannah Ritchie, deputy editor and lead researcher at Our World in Data and senior researcher at the Oxford Martin School, recently wrote an article for Vox in which she looked at how people see the world and how they can facilitate change. have proposed a beautiful framework for their potential. Ritchie’s framework divides people into four general categories, based on a combination of those who are optimistic and those who are pessimistic about the future, as well as those who believe and those who do not believe we have today. We have the power to shape the future based on our decisions and actions. Ritchie persuasively argues that more people of optimism and change are needed to advance climate solutions. People with other beliefs are not effective in pursuing such solutions. More importantly, instead of creating a sense of optimism that global warming is a solvable problem, the extreme behavior of the pessimistic change group often does nothing more than drive the public toward the pessimistic change group.
Responsibility to Communicate Responsibly Unfortunately, extremely low probability and often poorly understood critical points are often interpreted as likely and imminent climate events, which is in itself incorrect. In many cases, when a study goes viral on social media, the nuances of scientific uncertainty, particularly the difference between hypothesis formulation and hypothesis testing, are lost to the general reader.
Disclaimer: IndiaTheNews has not edited this news. This news has been published from PTI-language feed.
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