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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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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.
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 is not a subreddit
Alright, it's a science community. Does that typo change anything?
Then you don't understand what happens when a significant-fraction of the planet's population loses the ability to grow food in their farms,
& militarily wages war on all who are "in their way" to live where food WILL grow.
AMOC shutting-down FORCES WW3, if it hadn't already-begun before then.
Even if Europe stays put & just accepts being destroyed, CCP's long-game will opportunistically wage war against the remnants of the West, for sake of breaking the world to their rule, replacing the US's rule.
"The destruction of the West is the midwife of Chinese dominion."
Throw Putin & other powerful imperialists into the mix, & the Accelerationist-nihilist-oligarchs, & removing food-security from Europe ( by eradicating the atlantic's warming of it in winters ) & the militarized-rabies that is produced does have extinction-level consequences.
there's another forcing-process underlying all this, too:
population-saturation-rage.
It's been seen in rats & humans.
In rats, if you have a closed-ecology ( just as we have, with our finite-planet ), & the rats have enough food to keep increasing their population-density,
they will..
..until they're TOO crowded, when suddenly they become crazy, & cannibalistic, until the population's butchered-down enough, & then they go back to sane ( there's a hysteresis-loop in the process ).
The same happens with humans: pressurize the human-population enough, & there's a "snap" from sanity to nihilism.
During the end of WW2, it happened in the European front, & the German word for the mind-mode produced is "lustmord", or deathlust.
That mis-identifies it, though: it's MURDER-greed.
I think that some of the Russians fighting in Ukraine are demonstrating it, perfectly.
It looks like the mass-shooting-epidemic in the US is demonstrating it perfectly, too.
So, what happens when entire regions get flipped into that mode, not just scattered individuals?
Mass-extinction.
"War becomes the drug.", as some realized, in Yugoslavia, years ago..
The feedback-loops amplify everything, until sanity no-longer is any sort of option, & the result of THAT population's enforcing its "answer" looks completely different from what we're used-to living among.
Sorry to be blunt, but the less we know objectivity, the greater the % of the population who'll be destroyed by our ignoring/denying ( including mine: this is global viability, not ideological )
_ /\ _
And you think this will happen simultaneously, to everyone on the planet everywhere at the same time? Including all the remote uncontacted tribes, isolated island nations, the herders and farmers in various hinterlands, and so forth? And once everyone gets "deathlusted" they'll all just act like crazed zombies, murdering and murdering until there's just two left and then they strangle each other in the wreckage?
You're demonstrating another example of interpreting "the end of my personally familiar comfortable lifestyle" as "the end of the whole entire world, full stop, it's all over and gone."
I'm sure there were people during the Bronze Age Collapse who thought it was the end of the world. And for their definition of "the world", I guess it was. But humanity is so much larger than your little personally-familiar corner of the world.
Bear in mind: extinction requires that the % needs to be exactly 100%. Exactly. 99% won't do it.