Where will we flee if they are right about the Atlantic?

 

Climate change
If the worst happens – where will we flee then?

Jonathan Jeppsson

Dig manager and climate columnist

This is a commentary text. Analysis and positions are the writer's.

Updated 11.46 | Published 09.37

AMOC, the system of ocean currents that transports heat up to our latitudes, risks collapsing, according to researchers. Which would lead to significantly colder temperatures in Sweden and northern Europe.

In september last year,  the Irish Minister for Climate and Transport Eamon Ryan published a post on the platform X.

It was about Irish people becoming climate refugees.

“If these new studies are correct, we could be in the worst of all worlds,” he wrote. “Instead of thinking about how to deal with climate refugees from the south, we might want to move south ourselves, out of the freezing cold.”
What was he talking about? Well, about

, the system of ocean currents that circulates the water throughout the Atlantic and transports heat up to our latitudes.

Recently, 44 scientists from15 coontries had sent a letter to a number of governments in northern Europe, pointing out that the risk of a collapse in the system had been seriously underestimated.

The change would be brutal. It would mean a catastrophe for Sweden and northern Europe, with temperatures more reminiscent of the west coast of Canada or Alaska. London could become ten degrees colder – in Bergen in Norway, the temperature could drop by 15 degrees.

The study the scientists referred to was not the only one. On the contrary, it was just one of several alarming reports that have poured in in recent years.

A 2023 study in Nature Communications analyzed 150 years of temperature data and determined with 95 percent certainty that the AMOC would collapse between 2025 and 2095 if greenhouse gas emissions continue at their current rate.

An earlier study, published in Science Advances in February, concluded that the AMOC is currently “on the verge of a tipping point.”

Another report, published in Nature Climate Change, found that early warning signals for a collapse are already in place.

Another study, based on so-called “proxy data,” which studied seafloor sediments, deep-sea corals, tree rings, and Greenland ice cores, had concluded that the AMOC is weaker than it has been in 1,000 years.

AMOC, which includes the Gulf Stream, can be disrupted by meltwater as the Earth's temperature rises.

Professor Stefan Rahmstorf at the Potsdam Institute believes that AMOC has begun to weaken over the past 60–70 years and that a clear example of this is the "blue spot" in the North Atlantic that defies global warming trends.

But far from everyone agrees.

There are those who believe that the measurement series for the strength of AMOC - the strength itself has only been measured since 2004 - is too short in terms of time and that the current has also strengthened in recent years. They argue that sea surface temperatures are not a good indicator of the circulation - there are even some who claim that it may be the case that AMOC will stabilize in the future. Swedish professor Anna Wåhlin is not the least least bit worried that meltwater from Greenland could cause the Gulf Stream to shut down.

The UN climate panel IPCC, on the other hand, believes that there is a clear slowdown in AMOC during this century. It is not “likely” that the Gulf Stream will collapse, but it cannot be ruled out either.

In other words, the uncertainty factors are large. But, as Stefan Rahmstorf puts it, uncertainty is not our friend. Uncertainty could mean that the tipping point is reached without us being prepared.

“The big question here – the billion dollar question – is how far away this tipping point is,” says Rahmstorf.

The fires in Los Angeles.

We often think that the future is so far away – 2030, when we were supposed to have halved our emissions (which of course will not happen) was seen as so far into the future when the Paris Agreement was signed. 2050, which we have seen as a completely abstract year, when we would have obviously succeeded in what we imagined with the help of our innovative capacity, is now closer to us than the year 2000.

With the fires in Los Angeles still not extinguished, we should try to live with the idea that we cannot take everything for granted – that there may actually be a risk, although perhaps not an immediate one, that we may one day be forced to flee.

Today we are closing our borders, but this requires some kind of intellectual resilience – it is not out of the question, as the Irish climate minister expressed, that one day it will be our children or grandchildren knocking on someone else’s door in the hope of being let in.

It is impossible to dismiss the risk that the problems we face cannot be “solved on the spot” here in Sweden – but require help from outside – as the land that many of us see as given to us may no longer provide enough food to support ourselves.

The cold cannot be denied asylum, it gets in anyway. Where should we go then?

“So much we have to trust in order to be able to live our daily lives without sinking through the earth!”, writes Tomas Tranströmer in the poem “Schubertiana”.

We have to trust that the snow masses stay where they are, that bridges and roads hold, that consensus stays alive, the poet says.

But we must trust in so much more: that the Amazon does not approach its tipping point, that forests do not slow down in absorbing carbon, that the fragile ice caps in Antarctica do not crumble, that methane emissions do not increase too quickly, or that the summer ice in the Arctic does not disappear.

All of this means that the notion that this century’s refugees will only flow from the global South to the safe North may be wrong – it is not impossible that this century will be about migration in a way that we cannot imagine.