Thread by @ShellenbergerMD

Did you hear that the north Atlantic Ocean currents that bring warm water north, and cool water south, is at risk of imminent collapse?

It is "total BS" according to even alarmist climate scientists

salon.com/2021/08/10/the…

Over the last week, activist journalists have hyped a supposedly ground-breaking study claiming that human-caused climate change has caused the “almost complete loss of stability” of Atlantic Ocean currents & that the "aquatic 'conveyor belt' could be close to collapse"

"If it shuts down, temperatures will plummet... the number of storms will increases... weather conditions will lead to food shortages... rising sea levels along the North American eastern seaboard will force millions to flee their homes."

salon.com/2021/08/10/the…

But Kevin Trenberth of US National Center for Atmospheric Research & Bill Gates advisor and Stanford climate scientist Ken Caldeira say it's BS

"They do not refer to any of our publications about the Atlantic and what is going on there and they get it all wrong" says Trenberth

Any real reporter would have checked with IPCC before publishing the garbage that news media published

"Due to internal variability.... large weakening can be found even at 0oC global warming"

That's from the first result when you google "IPCC AMOC"

ipcc.ch/srocc/chapter/…

The IPCC isn't blameless for the misinformation that has been promoted over the decades on this issue

Much of what they publish on the topic is alarmist word salad that buries the fact that AMOC is shaped by *natural variability*

To wit

ipcc.ch/srocc/about/fa…

I am less susceptible to alarmism about the collapse of what used to be called the "Gulf Stream" because it was the issue that first led me to be alarmist about climate change in the late 1990s

After I discovered it was determined by natural variability, I felt grossly misled

The misinformation about the AMOC is a cautionary tale about why almost everything you hear about "climate tipping points" is total BS. Most tipping points is speculation, not science, which is why IPCC & other scientific bodies don't treat it like science.

The high level of uncertainty on each "tipping point," and a complexity that is greater than the sum of its parts, make most tipping point scenarios unscientific.

That’s not to say that a catastrophic tipping point scenario is impossible, only that there is no scientific evidence that one would be more probable or catastrophic than other potentially catastrophic scenarios, including asteroid impacts, super-volcanoes, and pandemics.

In July 2019, NASA announced it had been caught by surprise when a “city-killer” asteroid passed by — just one-fifth of the distance between Earth and Moon. In December 2019, a volcano unexpectedly erupted in New Zealand, killing twenty-one people.

While we take reasonable actions to detect and avoid such disasters we generally don’t take radical actions for the simple reason that doing so would make societies poorer & less capable of confronting all major challenges, including asteroids, super-volcanoes, and pandemics.

The risk of triggering tipping points increases at higher planetary tem- peratures, and thus our goal should be to reduce emissions and keep temperatures as low as possible without undermining economic development.

The new good news is that carbon emissions have been declining in developed nations for decades & most energy experts believe emissions in developing nations will peak and decline, just as they did in developed nations, once they achieve a similar level of prosperity.

The greatest threat to declining emissions comes climate alarmists @GretaThunberg @billmckibben @Greenpeace @SierraClub @NRDC who fear-monger and are actively trying to shut down nuclear plants with funding from the nat gas & renewables industries

michaelshellenberger.substack.com/p/maybe-theyre…

The lesson from the fake news about the AMOC is that, at this point, you really can't trust anything the mainstream news media reports about climate change, nor what activist climate scientists say. They have misled the public for decades.