Democrats May Believe Climate Change Is Real. They Don’t Act Like It.

Terrible news about the likely collapse of a profoundly important ocean current shows the limits of liberal rhetoric about “solving” climate change.

This week, scientists reported that the collapse of a critical Atlantic current system is more likely than many of them feared. The Atlantic meridional overturning circulation, or Amoc, sends warm water from the Southern Ocean near Antarctica up to the Arctic Sea and then returns the cooled water back again. It’s responsible for shaping the weather patterns that much of society has been structured around, like the tropical rainfall belt and Northern Europe’s relatively mild winters. Amoc was already believed to be weakening as a result of warming oceans, increasing rainfall, and melting sea ice. Yet while projections of a more significant slowdown have ranged wildly, new research, incorporating real-world observations, suggests that it will slow by an estimated 42 to 58 percent by 2100. By the middle of this century, the Amoc slowdown could pass a point of no return, whereby its collapse becomes virtually inevitable.

It’s hard to overstate the seriousness of this finding. “This is an important and very concerning result,” Stefan Rahmstorf, of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, told The Guardian. “It shows that the ‘pessimistic’ models, which show a strong weakening of the Amoc by 2100, are, unfortunately, the realistic ones.”

These pessimistic models could entail dire consequences: brutal, frigid winters in Northern Europe;........

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