New research warns that the collapse of air currents intertwined with the gulf stream could happen as soon as 2025, leaving “severe impacts on the climate in the North Atlantic region.”
In addition to freezing temperatures brought to the northern hemisphere, the buckling would also bring erratic rain and droughts across the world, Politico reported.
“This would lead to dramatic change in every nation’s ability to provide enough food and water for its population,” Penny Holliday, head of marine physics and ocean circulation at the U.K.’s National Oceanography Centre, told the outlet should there be a complete shut-off.
The overarching current in question, the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (Amoc) is currently at its weakest point in 1,600 years and a new forecast anticipates it will diminish to catastrophic levels.
“I think we should be very worried,” study author and professor Peter Ditlevsen of the University of Copenhagen in Denmark told The Guardian. “This would be a very, very large change. The Amoc has not been shut off for 12,000 years.”
The new study, published in the peer reviewed “Nature” added that although 2025 is the earliest estimation for the breakdown, it could come as late as 2095 as well.
Regardless, the timeline for the major climate change is happening well ahead of what experts had previously anticipated.
“The expected tipping point — given that we continue business as usual with greenhouse gas emissions — is much earlier than we expected,” co-author fellow U of Copenhagen professor Susanne Ditlevsen, told Live Science.
“It was not a result where we said: ‘Oh, yeah, here we have it’. We were actually bewildered.”
Another recent study on the phenomenon conducted by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found that the major change wouldn’t occur within this century.
One climate science professor is skeptical of the most current data, calling it a “‘what if’ exercise.”
“While the mathematics seem expertly done, the physical foundation is extremely shaky…we simply do not know and there is no serious discussion of these simplified models’ shortcomings,” Jochem Marotzke, director of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg, told Live Science.
“Hence, while the paper might be a valid ‘what if’ exercise in time series analysis in a specialized journal, it falls way short of its self-proclaimed goal of estimating the evolution of the circulation solely from observations.”