Gulf Stream Current Could Collapse Anytime After 2025

[Andie]

https://www.livescience.com/planet-earth/climate-change/gulf-stream-current-could-collapse-in-2025-plunging-earth-into-climate-chaos-we-were-actually-bewildered

I covered Cambridge University's study of the Gulf Stream in the early 2000s on an earlier incarnation of this forum, scientists are expressing deep concern.

At the time they were expressing the same concerns and concluding that a great deal of in-depth study was needed. However, the general consensus was that the GS was slowing then and they were concerned about a collapse although timing was impossible to determine as they didn't have enough comparative data. 

Now, after 20 years of observation, they are expressing more confidence.  The outlook by the end of this century looks quite cold and if not in an ice age, certainly near.  This bears taking it seriously and society preparing to face a very cold future. 

"The expected tipping point — given that we continue business as usual with greenhouse gas emissions — is much earlier than we expected," co-author Susanne Ditlevsen, a professor of statistics and stochastic models in biology at the University of Copenhagen, told Live Science. 

"It was not a result where we said: 'Oh, yeah, here we have it'. We were actually bewildered."

"I don't consider myself very alarmist. In some sense it's not fruitful," Peter Ditlevsen, a professor of physics and climate science at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, told Live Science. "So my result annoys me, in some sense. Because it [the window for possible collapse] is so close and so significant that we have to take immediate action now."

[Andie]

https://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2004/05mar_arctic/

Much depends on how fast the warming of the Arctic occurs, according to computer simulations by Thomas F. Stocker and Andreas Schmittner of the University of Bern. In their models, a faster warming could shut down the major Atlantic current completely, while a slower warming might only slow the current for a few centuries.

[Andie]

Some scientists believe this shift in ocean currents could come surprisingly soon--within as little as 20 years, according to Robert Gagosian, president and director of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Others doubt it will happen at all. Even so, the Pentagon is taking notice. Andrew Marshall, a veteran Defense Department planner, recently released an unclassified report detailing how a shift in ocean currents in the near future could compromise national security.

https://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2004/05mar_arctic/