Open comment post: the AMOC shutdown and the future of agriculture
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It’s time to move on to pastures new from my Saying NO… book, as I mentioned in my last post. Seems like an opportune moment to try an ‘open comment’ post to signal the change of direction, an idea I trailed at the start of the year.
What I think emerged from that discussion was for me to suggest a broad topic and perhaps a few talking points from it and then to see where things went in the discussion. Kind of like a normal post! Back then, Ruben wrote “ I would love to hear your thoughts on AMOC shutdown, drought, more frequent extreme weather, and other growing challenges for agriculture. That might be a good topic for an open post.” Indeed I believe it would be, so let’s go with that.
In case this is unfamiliar, the ‘AMOC’ is the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, the major current system in the Atlantic Ocean, involving the northward flow of warm water and the southward flow of colder water which helps moderate the climate of both colder high-latitude countries and warmer low-latitude ones. Studies have suggested that present human-caused climate change could result in the shutdown of the AMOC, the consequences for both colder and warmer countries within this Atlantic system being, not to overstate the case … very bad.
A recent study that models AMOC shutdown has put the heebie-jeebies up a lot of people, including me – see Prof Stefan Rahmstorf’s summary here. Seems like we could be on course for an AMOC shutdown tipping point within the next seventy years with 95 percent confidence. The consequences within a century of the shutdown could be things like winter temperatures in northern Europe dropping by 10-30 degrees Celsius from the present, sea level rises of about a metre in some parts of the North Atlantic, the end of the Amazon rainforest, huge agricultural impacts, and other such worrisome things. And AMOC shutdown is only one part of the broader climate change picture.
There’s any number of things to talk about in relation to all this, and of course – the point of this post – I’m interested to know what others think. Six general questions for starters that are on my mind:
1. Given the profile of long-term commenters/readers on this blog – who generally seem quite aligned with my own positions (surprise!), viz. lacking in personal political power, unconvinced by essentially apolitical ecomodernist techno-fixes and solutionism, unconvinced that top-down government actions will adequately address climate change and other aspects of the meta-crisis – how does the possibility of the AMOC shutdown and other rapid climate tipping points potentially within our lifetimes affect how we spend our time, think about our actions or orient to present politics?
2. Assuming a drier and much colder North Atlantic world with much higher sea levels manifests rapidly within the next century or so, how do you see the social impacts playing out? Would ‘civilization’ and any kind of orderly agrarian world remain feasible across the North Atlantic and beyond? What would the processes of transition look like, socially? I’m particularly interested in discussing how contemporary political culture might deform, reform, crumble or persist in the face of rapidly devolving climatic and food crises. And also in what (if anything) we could usefully do individually or collectively now in terms of food and fibre production to increase resilience in the face of these looming crises.
3. Much of our discussion of climate change in the wealthy and privileged North Atlantic world rests on the notion that when the proverbial hits the fan, it’ll be the poorer people in the poorer parts of the world who will be disproportionately in the muck. That’s usually how things work out, and there’s a lot to be said for well-meaning concern about people less fortunate than ourselves. However, I think this framing risks recuperating a rather privileged and complacent view that bad stuff only really happens to unfortunate people in unfortunate countries somewhere else, while ‘we’ will somehow carry on much as we are. Yet with the AMOC shutdown it looks like Britain and other North Atlantic countries may be among the places worst affected globally by climate change. Maybe picture a scene of small, leaky boats full of white folks desperately trying to get south across the Mediterranean as the coastguards of North African countries attempt to frustrate them in the face of a popular ‘stop the boats’ local politics. Does this change our contemporary political optics at all?
4. Mentioning no names (I don’t want to get into another online spat already…), I’m often surprised at how many climate scientists (or scientists who talk about climate) on social and other media downplay climate risk and throw shade on so-called ‘doomers’. In relation to the AMOC shutdown, I’ve seen such scientists questioning the probabilities associated with the recent study. It’s reasonable to probe the minutiae but, as Prof Rahmstorf says, if we can’t rule the shutdown out at 99.9 percent probability (or higher, I’d venture to say), we have a big problem. Cavilling at whether it’s 95% likely, or something a bit less, is irrelevant in this context. Shades of Don’t Look Up. Which leads to my question: is our present culture, including some of its cleverest and best educated people, completely insane?
5. I’ve always been a bit sceptical about James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis – not so much the point that there are planetary homeostatic mechanisms but the implicit teleology or ‘earth consciousness’ implied. I haven’t seen anyone talking about this aspect of the geophysics, and maybe I’m getting this entirely wrong, but presumably AMOC shutdown would counteract warming at high latitudes and increase albedo in the Arctic, while the global human economy and therefore greenhouse gas emissions would tank, with a further cooling effect. So maybe the shutdown would contribute to climate stabilisation at Holocene levels and rapid AMOC renewal as measured by deep planetary time. A horrific interregnum for multiple generations of humans, but nice homeostatic work by Mother Gaia. Almost as if she’s thought this through…?
6. Finally, some people will no doubt say that the AMOC shutdown and other climate effects will spell the end of most agriculture, so we should use our high-tech electricity generating capacities – which for some reason they believe will not also end – to manufacture microbial food. I’m not convinced and am wondering if I should write a book about this?
So … I’m interested to see your thoughts. I will probably now take a break from blogging for a few weeks to think about my next writing project. And establish my lichen garden.