OPINION - The London Question: What happens if climate change gets out of control?
I know it seems strange to speak of London getting colder when January felt like a Siberian winter and February very much picked up where that left off. London's cold, what's new? Fair question. To explain what I'm talking about we need to go on a quick jaunt around the Atlantic.
This is all about a giant, invisible, ocean current in the Atlantic Ocean. If we could see it, it would look like a huge piece of spaghetti draped from the northern to southern hemispheres and back again. It's called the AMOC (Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation) and it works like our planet's central heating system. It circulates water from north to south and back again in a long cycle within the Atlantic Ocean.
Its primary job is to move heat around the world, pushing 17 million cubic meters of water northwards every second. It makes sure the climate of Western Europe is much warmer than it would otherwise be. London is about the same distance from the equator as the cold regions of Canada, yet enjoys a much warmer climate because of this system.
But there's a problem — the AMOC is slowing down, stopping it doing all that stuff well. It's actually in its weakest state in nearly 2,000 years. How do we know this? Well there's a really big cold blob (no, seriously, it even has its own Wikipedia page) in the North Atlantic that we can actually see. It's the only place on Earth to have cooled in the past 20 years — indicating that heat transfer magic I mentioned before isn't doing what it should be doing. Some scientists have taken this a step further and think AMOC may even collapse.
The Day After Tomorrow was based on this exact event. Is the day after tomorrow, actually now tomorrow, or next week?
This big, old, invisible ocean current is a tricky customer because no one can quite agree on when that might be or how quickly it's slowing. We haven't been measuring it long enough to get actual estimates and instead have to rely on ice sheet data from 60,000 years ago. Depending on which scientist you speak to, you get dates as early as 2025, others offer up something around the 2050s and the official line from the IPCC (the fun people at the UN's climate team) is 'sometime before 2100' — not very helpful.
Reading between the lines and on the balance of probability, most, if not all, climate scientists seem to suggest we're looking at a case of when — and not if — here. I'll say right now, I'm pretty confident it's not going to be this year (don't cancel the in-laws at Christmas just yet) but it could very feasibly be something that happens in the mid-century and that makes it a very real problem, and a problem some of us will witness.
Remember the film in 2004, The Day After Tomorrow, the one that gave us early Jake Gyllenhaal? Well, that film was based on this exact event — an AMOC collapse.
Is that where we're heading? Is the day after tomorrow, actually now tomorrow, or next week?
It would leave London looking like northern Canada, with temperatures falling to -20C
All of that is a lot to digest, sorry. You're going about your day, already worried about climate change and I've just told you a giant invisible thing you can't see, and that maybe you hadn't even heard of, is suddenly going to plunge us into a deeper ice age.
Well, let's start with the good news: the events in that film happen over the course of a Hollywood two weeks. Even if the AMOC went belly up tomorrow, we wouldn't begin to feel the effects for several decades. So in that respect the film is just that: fiction. At some point though, things would eventually kick in…
While a snow day might sound fun, it would present dire consequences for agriculture, leaving us unable to grow many crops
A full-scale collapse would be nothing short of a planetary disaster: London and the rest of England could see temperatures drop by up to 10 degrees celsius. London would start looking like northern Canada (where winters regularly go below minus 20 degrees celsius).
While a snow day might sound fun, it would present dire consequences for agriculture, leaving us unable to grow many crops; it'd be like trying to grow potatoes in Norway. Not happening.
Land suitable for arable farming could plunge by a quarter, reducing crop value by £346 billion a year. There'd be a big increase in winter storms, because while we get cooler, the southern hemisphere gets warmer. Plus, there rainfall would reduce substantially — by 123mm during the growing season of crops. The sea level in the Atlantic Ocean would also rise as much as 70cm, submerging pretty much every borough along the Thames.
So there we go, maybe the day after tomorrow isn't actually tomorrow, but it may come sooner than you think. This system is as delicate as it is powerful, as fragile as it is strong and the scales are so finely balanced.
Much like so many other things on Planet Earth, the AMOC joins the long list of those we urgently need to take care of, and in my view has to be near, or even at the top of that list.
James Stewart is a broadcaster and climate scientist
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