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Collapse of critical Atlantic current is no longer low likelihood, study finds
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 28 Aug 2025
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We haven't even made it to 1 million years, yet it doesn't matter what you think or how you reassure yourself you'll be fine, nature will wipe us and adapt. There's a reason act of nature are attributed to gods
At this point I'm just ready for it to hurry up and get it over with.
This current isn't critical to the survival of the human species.
Pretty critical to a decent percentage of it though.
And I don't know about you but generally I'd like to thrive rather than just survive.
The person I'm responding to said "nature will wipe us and adapt." That implies that they're expecting extinction as a result of this.
Yes, it'll be harmful to a decent percentage of humanity if the current fails. That's not even remotely on the same scale of concern as human extinction.
As a result of this alone? Maybe not. As climate change as a whole? Likely.
Considering the amount of misinformation, sanewashing, and outright bullshit that comes with any climate change discussion I'm past the point of caring about linguistic pedantry.
Their point is valid, your point is pedantic.
This thread is about AMOC, not about climate change as a whole.
This is a science subreddit. I would hope that not every thread that's remotely related to climate change would immediately devolve into a generic "oh no climate change is going to doom us all" mess, and would instead talk about the actual subject at hand.
This is not a subreddit
Alright, it's a science community. Does that typo change anything?
Right, but if you read the article it's not "remotely related" but directly.
This is an article about climate change. And your comment comes incredibly close to the MAGA sanewashing we see regularly. I'm glad after this discussion to see you're not a nutter, but the need to call your comment out still felt necessary.
It's been a peeve of mine for many years - decades, probably, as long as I can recall - for people in discussions like this to equate the end of their comfortable familiar current lifestyle with the literal end of the world, or the end of the human species. And then when I point out that those things are not equivalent, to flip immediately to "oh, so you're saying there's no problem at all?"
It's all or nothing, black or white, absolute catastrophe or life without a care. Neither extreme is useful. How are we supposed to accomplish anything without recognizing nuance? That's not "sanewashing", that's trying to be rational.
That's fair. Nihlism and accelerationists are very irritating in a scientific setting. But I would also say Lemmy is not likely to only have logic and reasoning behind most comments.
Seems like a shame that it is so difficult to get past the assumption that someone is representing a generic political agenda by deploying empty rhetoric rather than raising a disagreement with the specific thing they said they object to from their own perspective.
This isn't even remotely true. Extreme freezes and droughts will destroy crop growth and livestock across the globe. Mass starvation will be inevitable and the ones who will starve won't be the descendants of the people getting rich off of destroying the climate today. It'll be your grandkids (or nieces and nephews).
In the comment you're responding to I said:
So what you're telling me is that you think that climate change will make Earth so extreme that humans - who currently live in every biome from the Sahara desert to the high arctic tundra - aren't going to be able to survive anywhere on it.
This community is named "science" so I'm going to ask you to back that extraordinary claim up, please.
Extinction doesn't need to happen in seconds, like when a big space object collides with earth. It can also happen gradually. Major environmental alterations like weakened amoc and global warming will make many more regions of the earth uninhabitable, for example when the temperature rises over 46°C regularly or when there are regular droughts or floods. A lot of land where hundreds of millions of people currently live on, will be completely submerged, desertificated or barren. And these changes won't just affect humans, but also whole ecosystems that we need to survive, for example fishing grounds, forests or, if you think about the extinction of species, especially insects, arable land in all parts of the world.
Our civilization as we know it right now can not survive catastrophes like these in the long term, and we cannot be certain that human life will remain possible on the planet without being completely dependent on artificial habitats, food, water sources etc.
Emphasis added. So, not all of it then.
I already gave the examples of the Sahara an high arctic tundra as places humans can survive. We lived there just fine without advanced technology, even - the Inuit and Bedouin for example.
Again, is the whole entire Earth going to be worse than those places?
I'm telling you that if nothing is done about it, global warming, the extinction of species and other factors will raise the likelihood of humanity's extinction to a higher level than it has been in tens of thousands of years, over the course of the next few hundred years. We can only speculate about how earth will be like in three hundred years and if there are places left that remain inhabitable for humans.
The inuit rely on fish, which are on track to become extinct in this century even. People survive in the Sahara by bringing lifestock/food and water with from elsewhere, but the desert grows from year to year.
You're "telling me." Okay. Got anything to back that up other than just your say-so, though?
Yes, lots of sources. They're easy to find if you start by thinking about who would know the most of a subject.
Go ahead, then.
Seems critical to a lot though...
Yes, we're talking about mass death. We're not talking about extinction of the human species
...unless those that are dying decide to use nuclear weapons to obtain resources for their States
Even then, we don't have enough nuclear weapons to cause human extinction. We didn't even have enough back in the 1980s when nuclear stockpiles were at their peak and the stockpiles have been reduced drastically since then.
This is another case where destroying civilizations is nowhere near being equivalent to destroying our species.
Ooof, don't spread misinformation. We absolutely have enough nuclear weapons to cause nuclear Holocaust right now.
A nuclear holocaust, sure. But not one big enough to cause human extinction.
Since this is a science community, I guess I'll lead by example. Here are some numbers.
Here's an article that tries to project the effects of a full-scale nuclear exchange at the height of the cold war in 1988. Net result is that by 2040 human civilization is back on its feet. We have a lot fewer nuclear weapons now than we did back then. A more recent study predicted 90 million deaths from a US-Russia nuclear war, which is a tragedy but not a particularly big blip on the world population graph.
Here's a page showing humanity's nuclear arsenal over time. It's currently down to the same level it was in roughly 1958. And note, the bombs in 1958 were generally much higher-yield than the ones we have now because the precision of delivery was very poor back then - they had to be large to be sure to hit their target. And half of the current-day arsenal is in Russia, which has notoriously poor reliability for their weapons due to extreme corruption so I wouldn't expect all of those to function.
Nuclear winter has been drastically overblown in popular culture. We've had volcanic eruptions put comparable amounts of particulates into the air and the effects haven't been anywhere near what the nuclear winter doomsayers have predicted.
Bear in mind that anyone launching nuclear weapons isn't going to be doing it with the goal of wiping all of humanity out, they'll have more limited military goals. There will be specific countries that they're targeting, and specific facilities within those countries, and they won't be selecting those based on how "extinct" they make people. The Russians would "waste" a whole lot of nukes on relatively empty land in Montana, for example, trying to destroy the missile silos there. They'd have no reason to nuke targets in Africa. There'd be plenty of civilization left to rebuild after a nuclear war.
Alright. Your turn, where's your information showing that humanity faces extinction from this?
I recommend reading Daniel Ellsburg's Doomsday Machine.
From the Wikipedia article it appears he's taking the "nuclear winter" approach. I pointed out the criticisms of that in my comment above. But even his notably extreme version still doesn't support the notion that this would lead to literal human extinction. It also appears he's rather out of date, he hasn't been a nuclear war planner since 1971. If you look at my sources above about humanity's nuclear arsenal over time you'll see how significant that is.
Please keep that at forefront here. This subthread is about human extinction, not about "oh no I guess we have to reinvent steam power" or some other drastically less-bad outcome like that. I have never said that I don't think a nuclear war would be bad, of course it would be bad. My position is that it's not going to render humanity extinct.
You really don't understand how nuclear weapons work and how absolutely devastating their fallout actually is. Its not a movie or video game where a few survive in underground bunkers and the rest just "mutate". The fallout from a total nuclear war would wipe out every human life in a couple of decades either through extreme radioactive poisoning or through extreme famine from the irradiation of any and all arable land.. Bacteria and tardigrades might survive. Sure as shit nothing else will.
Absolute irony. Your depiction of the global effects of fallout is from sci-fantasy, at best. Do you have any sources that are not on the IMDB?