by P. Gosselin, Feb 2, 2025 in NoTricksZone
By Frank Bosse
(Translated from the original at Klimanachrichten)
We have kept you, dear readers, very promptly informed about AMOC conjectures.
Recently, we also informed you about a new study that found a stable Atlantic overturning circulation since the 1960s. It is not the only one in the recent past.
However, Prof. Stefan Rahmstorf from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) is a great advocate of the “The Day after Tomorrow” scenario of a collapsing oceanic current. As recently as June, 2024, he noted on X (formerly Twitter) that the AMOC mitigation saga “is even more dramatic than it ever was”.
He himself had been responsible for a whole series of papers as author or co-author, which also contributed to the scenario, and he initiated an “open letter” in the fall of 2024 that dramatically addressed politicians. We also reported on this.
Of course, the new findings could not couldn’t pass him by without comment. Under the headline “The AMOC is slowing down, is stable, yes, no, no, yes…” he commented on it on the blog “Real Climate”, which is run by scientists, including himself, Gavin Schmidt from NASA, and others.
What he has to say there can be stated in a nutshell: He defends his approaches and lists the problems of the more recent studies. That was to be expected. For example, he emphasizes that the new climate models (CMIP 6) hardly show any connection between “his fingerprint”, the sea surface temperatures of the “warming hole” in the North Atlantic (see the article here from 17 January 2025) and the actual current, but that the approximately 4 years older ones called CMIP5 do. He also questions whether the new ones are really more reliable in this respect than the older ones. However, the effort for the former was considerable.
He summarized:
I don’t believe that the newer methods are more reliable than the old ones (his, the author). … However, since we don’t have measurements going back far enough, there is still some uncertainty in this respect…“
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