On Saturday I witnessed something historic at the Arctic Circle Forum.
Dr. Stefan Rahmstorf from the PIK - Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany personally handed an open letter to Guðlaugur Þór Þórðarson, Iceland’s Minister for the Environment, Energy, and Climate and the other Nordic ministers part of Nordic Council of Ministers.
The letter, signed by nearly 50 climate scientists from across the globe, warns of the potentially severe consequences of the AMOC shutting down, with particularly devastating and irreversible impacts on the Nordic countries, as well as other regions worldwide.
What is the AMOC and why should you care?
The AMOC (Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation) is a critical ocean current system that transports warm water from the tropics to the North Atlantic, including the Nordic region.
This flow of warm water helps moderate the climate in Northern Europe and the Nordic countries, keeping temperatures milder than they would be at such high latitudes.
The AMOC determines life conditions for all people in the Arctic region and beyond.
However, the AMOC is at serious risk of collapsing due to global warming.
What would happen if the AMOC would shut down?
If the AMOC collapses, while much of the world would experience further warming, the North Atlantic region—including Greenland, Iceland, Scotland and Norway predominantly, as well as parts of Sweden, Finland, and Denmark—could face a dramatic drop in temperatures.
While some regions might see temperature increases of up to 2.4°C in annual means, these Nordic countries could experience a temperature drop as steep as -2.4°C. This would lead to much colder winters, more extreme weather events, and could severely impact local ecosystems, infrastructure, and economies.
These concerns don’t imply this will happen tomorrow, of course. However, some models indicate that an AMOC collapse could occur before 2100 (with 95% confidence), while other models suggest it could happen as early as 2050 (with 59% confidence, +/- 17%).
For instance, this year, Norway experienced one of its coldest winters in the last 25 years, which might be an early sign that the AMOC is already slowing down.
The Icelandic Minister himself acknowledged that such a temperature drop could significantly threaten Iceland’s habitability and expressed very serious concerns.
Have you ever heard the expression: "more serious than a minister"? Well, this could not get more serious than that.
I fully support the letter and urge the Nordic ministers—Romina Pourmokhtari, Ebba Busch, Tore O. Sandvik, Marianne Sivertsen Næss, Karen Ellemann, Lars Aagaard, Jacob Jensen, Guðlaugur Þór Þórðarson.—to take this risk seriously and take action to minimise it as much as possible immediately.
The ocean is as important to the climate as the atmosphere. But only now is it beginning to be studied properly.
