Extreme Climate Impacts From Collapse of a Key Atlantic Ocean Current Could be Worse Than Expected. New Study Warns Disruption of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Current could freeze Europe, scorch the tropics and increase sea level rise in the North Atlantic. The tipping point may be closer than predicted in the IPCC’s latest assessment. Bob Berwyn February 9, 2024 A new study affirms that a critical system of Atlantic Ocean currents that shunt warm and cold water between the poles is “on course” to a tipping point. If the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation fails because of increasing freshwater inflows from melting ice sheets and rivers swelled by global warming, the authors said it would disrupt the climate globally, shifting Asian monsoon rainfall patterns and even reversing the rainy and dry seasons in the Amazon. “It’s a global shift,” saidUtrecht University climate and physics researcher René van Westen, co-author of the research published today in Science Advances. Along with changes in rain distribution, an AMOC collapse could also make some other related ocean currents in the Atlantic, like the Gulf Stream, “partly vanish,” he said. “This leads to a lot of dynamic sea level rise, up to a meter in the North Atlantic under an AMOC collapse,” he said. “And you need to add that on top of the sea level rise already caused by global warming. So the problems are really severe.” The East Coast of the United States would be one of the regions most affected by rising sea levels if the AMOC shuts down, he explained, because warming waters, which expand and increase sea level, would pile up there instead of flowing northward. Warming coastal oceans can also contribute to extreme heat waves over land and fuel more intense storms and rainfall. Without warm water flowing toward the Arctic, he added, winter sea ice could expand as far south as England, and some regions of Europe would quickly dry out and cool by as much as 1.5 degrees Celsius per decade. Some of the projected impacts would be nearly impossible to adapt to, said Peter Ditlevsen, an ice and climate researcher with the University of Copenhagen Niels Bohr Institute and the author of a 2023 paper in Nature Communications that warned of a mid-century AMOC tipping point. “A lot of discussion is, how should agriculture prepare for this,” he said. But a collapse of the heat-transporting circulation is a going-out-of-business scenario for European agriculture, he added. “You cannot adapt to this. There’s some studies of what happens to agriculture in Great Britain, and it becomes like trying to grow potatoes in Northern Norway.” Under the current global warming trend, “It will be about 1 to 2 degrees Celsius warmer by 2050, and then maybe the AMOC tips and results in a slight cooling,” he said. The impact on the average global temperature wouldn’t be extreme, but Western Europe could cool to pre-industrial levels, and would get substantially less precipitation, he added. Other parts of the planet will warm faster, especially the southern hemisphere and tropics, since the heat transport system won’t be able to convey the increasing ocean warmth northward, he added. “It’s not science fiction,” van Westen said. Alarmist or not, “We need to show this is not only the Hollywood blockbuster, ‘The Day After Tomorrow.’ This is real, this can happen. And I think it’s important and urgent to keep saying to people, okay, we need to really tackle our emissions.” The AMOC distributes both warmer and colder water between both poles via a network of deep and near-surface ocean currents. The twin engines for the network are at high latitudes, where dense, cold and salty water sinks deep and pushes water horizontally across the seafloor. Those dynamics maintain the Circulation’s strength and the relative warmth of the Northern Hemisphere.The new study takes a detailed look at what happens when the balance is disrupted by greater quantities of freshwater flowing into the ocean, and the findings are a “major advance in AMOC stability science,” said Stefan Rahmstorf, head of earth system analysis with the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, and a professor of physics of the oceans at Potsdam University. The last AMOC breakdown occurred about 12,000 years ago and most climate scientists think it triggered the Younger Dryas cold event around the northern Atlantic, during which temperatures over Greenland dropped by 4 to 10 degrees Celsius in a matter of decades and glaciers temporarily advanced, while drier conditions spread across parts of the Northern Hemisphere......in the meantime, the United States is about to elect a raving fascist idiot as president who wants to negate all of the green reforms already implementeed and "drill baby drill", and there's invasions, war and violence everywhere - the world is going mad!                 https://insideclimatenews.org/news/09022024/climate-impacts-from-collapse-of-atlantic-meridional-overturning-current-could-be-worse-than-expected/?utm_source=InsideClimate+News&utm_campaign=fc035e3f05-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2024_02_10_02_00&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_29c928ffb5-fc035e3f05-327998718    ......AND click on..... 'Cliff-Like' Collapse of Critical Current System More Likely Than Thought: Study "The new study adds significantly to the rising concern about an AMOC collapse in the not-too-distant future," said one scientist. "We will ignore this at our peril."    

Deep-sea mining is the process of retrieving mineral deposits from the deep seabed – the ocean below 200m. Depleting terrestrial deposits and rising demand for metals mean deep-sea mining may begin soon, even though research suggests that it could destroy habitats and wipe out species. Deep-sea mining should be halted until the criteria specified by IUCN are met, including the introduction of assessments, effective regulation and mitigation strategies. Comprehensive studies are needed to improve our understanding of deep-sea ecosystems and the vital services they provide to people, such as food and carbon sequestration. Deep-sea mining is the process of extracting and often excavating mineral deposits from the deep seabed. The deep seabed is the seabed at ocean depths greater than 200m, and covers about two-thirds of the total seafloor. Research suggests deep-sea mining could severely harm marine biodiversity and ecosystems, but we still lack the knowledge and means to implement protections.Despite this, there is growing interest in the mineral deposits of the seabed. This is said to be due to depleting terrestrial deposits of metals such as copper, nickel, aluminium, manganese, zinc, lithium and cobalt. Demand for these metals is also increasing to produce technologies like smartphones, wind turbines, solar panels and batteries. As the deep sea remains understudied and poorly understood, there are many gaps in our understanding of its biodiversity and ecosystems. This makes it difficult to assess the potential impacts of deep-sea mining or to put in place adequate safeguards to protect the marine environment, and the three billion people whose livelihoods depend on marine and coastal biodiversity. The seafloor contains an extensive array of geological features. These include abyssal plains 3,500–6,500m below the sea surface, volcanic underwater mountains known as seamounts, hydrothermal vents with bursting water heated by volcanic activity, and deep trenches such as the Mariana Trench. These remote places support species that are uniquely adapted to harsh conditions, such as lack of sunlight and high pressure. Experts predict that many of these species are unknown to science. Based on current knowledge of the deep sea, the following impacts of mining activities could affect its biodiversity and ecosystems.......read on      https://www.iucn.org/resources/issues-brief/deep-sea-mining   

Scrubbers are dirty and dirt cheap, but as of 2020 more than 4,300 ships globally had installed them – up from 732 ships in 2018. “The writing has been on the wall for many years with scrubbers and their environmental implications,” says Andrew Dumbrille, adviser for the Clean Arctic Alliance, a coalition of environmental organisations working to protect the polar region from the impact of shipping. “The issue is that more ships are going to be installing scrubbers, and so the problems are predicted to get worse.” The race to install scrubbers only began recently. In January 2020, the IMO – the United Nations body overseeing shipping – announced a new global sulphur cap of 0.5%, reduced from 3.5%. To meet the target, it urged the global shipping fleet to switch to low-sulphur fuel. But it also allowed for “equivalent” compliance measures, as long as ships reduced their emissions. Scrubbers have proved to be the cheapest way to do so. The cost of buying and fitting a scrubber is £1.5m to £5m, whereas cleaner fuel is £250-£400 a tonne. The scrubber pays for itself within a year. “It’s been a loophole for industry to continue burning the cheapest, dirtiest fuels,” says Lucy Gilliam, of Seas at Risk, an association of European environmental organisations. Most vessels use an open-loop system, meaning that instead of holding waste in a tank to be disposed of at dedicated port facilities, the ships directly dump the acidic wash – up to 100,000 times more acidic than seawater – overboard, says Eelco Leemans, an Arctic marine researcher.                                                                Roughly 10 gigatonnes – 10,000,000,000 tonnes – of scrubber washwater are discharged into oceans annually, according to an International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT) report on global discharge waste – just less than the total weight of all the cargo transported by ships in a year.The toxins do not just disappear. Aside from being acidic, scrubbers contain heavy metals that accumulate in marine food chains. The Swedish Environmental Research Institute found that wash water from North Sea ships has “severe toxic effects” on zooplankton, which cod, herring and other species feed on. Meanwhile, a Belgian study found that scrubber discharges contain high concentrations of metals such as nickel, copper and chromium, which all devastate marine ecosystems.What most concerns experts, though, are polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). These have been linked to several types of cancers and reproductive dysfunction in marine mammals, including southern resident orca in the north Pacific and beluga whales. “A lot of the discharge is toxic and contains all these nasty substances,” says Leemans, adding: “It’s the whole cocktail together that makes it even worse.” An IMO spokesperson, Natasha Brown, says scrubbers were developed as an “equivalent” to comply with air pollution limits and the IMO is now looking at the wider issue in response to concerns. We could solve the problem of sulphur pollution by switching to cleaner fuels. But instead we’re just transferring the problem from one place to the other says Lucy Gilliam of Seas at Risk Approximately 80% of scrubber discharges occur within 200 nautical miles of shore, with global hotspots along major shipping routes, including the Baltic Sea, North Sea, the strait of Malacca and the Caribbean Sea, according to the ICCT......read on                    https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jul/12/shippings-dirty-secret-how-scrubbers-clean-the-air-while-contaminating-the-sea   

The rising ocean will extinguish more than land. It will kill entire languages.As the climate crisis forces migration, so native tongues wither, too. But it’s not too late to intervene.  Anastasia Riehl Rising sea levels already pose an existential threat to the populations of Tuvalu, Kiribati, the Marshall Islands and other low-lying Pacific atolls. In these places, however, it is not just homes, crops and community cohesiveness that are at risk: it is Tuvaluan, Kiribati and Marshallese – the languages native to these islands. The impact of the climate crisis on languages may be new, but the relationship between language and climate is old. As humans populated the Earth, climate and geography were enormous factors in where they settled and flourished. The equatorial region, with its consistent temperatures, predictable rainfall and abundant agricultural opportunities, was particularly agreeable. Humans thrived in these areas – inhabiting a valley here, an islet there – giving rise to thousands of different communities, and with them thousands of different languages.Today, vastly more of the world’s languages are spoken in the tropics than at higher latitudes. It is not just humans and languages that have prospered in nurturing climates but species of all kinds. Research on biocultural diversity finds striking parallels between the evolution of species and languages. Where a new species rooted and blossomed, so did a language. Of the roughly 7,000 languages spoken today, 70% are concentrated in only 25% of the Earth’s land area – precisely in those areas with the highest biodiversity. Unfortunately, this shared fate binds them in birth as well as death, with both species and languages facing extinction crises.If the story of climate and language has long been one of harmony, the climate crisis is the plot twist. In a tragic reversal, it is precisely those areas of the Earth that were the most hospitable to people and languages, to species of all kinds, that are now becoming the least hospitable. The climate called us in, and now the climate is casting us out.  The speakers will leave their islands before that happens. In fact, a changing climate, whether through rising seas, drought or catastrophic storms, will probably never be the sole culprit in a language’s death. Rather, the threat of the climate emergency is the threat of forced migration. As a population is compelled to abandon its lands and move into a new community – a neighbouring village, a refugee camp, an urban centre – its Indigenous language becomes harder to sustain. To make matters worse, a crisis of language loss was well underway even before global temperatures began to rise. More than half of the world’s languages are already considered endangered, with the most pessimistic estimates putting the figure at 90%. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jun/28/indigenous-languages-climate-crisis-threat-pacific-islands