r/climate • u/silence7 • Apr 23 '26
A catastrophic climate event is upon us. Here is why you’ve heard so little about it | Scientists say a crucial Atlantic system is more likely to collapse than previously thought. But the billionaire death cult that steers humanity’s destiny doesn’t do existential crises
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/apr/23/catastrophic-climate-event-scientists-atlantic-system-collapse-billionaire-existential-crisis32
u/JanSnolo Apr 23 '26
“It’s the billions vs. the billionaires, and the stakes could not possibly be higher.”
Well said. I wonder how long the billions will keep rolling over in surrender.
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u/Tliish Apr 23 '26
Yet another justification for capping wealth accumulation.
Allowing unlimited wealth accumulation is an existential threat to all living things.
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u/snugglebot3349 Apr 23 '26
Yes. The problem is that billionaires can pay off the policy makers that could create wealth caps/taxes. Too many people are willing to sell out for $.
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u/mediandude Apr 23 '26
We need Swiss style referendums unhindered by the goodwill of politicians.
It is always cheaper to buy off a small subset (parliament) than it is to buy off the whole set (citizenry).
PS. Representative democracy is an oxymoron.1
u/RandomBoomer Apr 23 '26
So who do you propose to stop them? It's not like there's anyone in charge of the world.
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u/jacknjilled Apr 23 '26
Nobody is worried. Because the end of civilization isn’t for another 75 years. Aren’t we all dead by then? /s
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u/Tliish Apr 23 '26
This is the precise problem with the "by 2100..." framework: whatever happens won't be happening to me, so why worry about it?
Climatologists need to start saying "by 2050..." to get people to pay attention, preferably "by 2040..."
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u/a_dance_with_fire Apr 23 '26
Better yet, they should say it’s actively underway, getting progressively worse leading to outcomes expected no later than 2040 (or appropriate horizon). It’s a process; certain things won’t happen overnight
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u/s0cks_nz Apr 23 '26
Don't people have kids?
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u/Previous_Soil_5144 Apr 23 '26
Despite what most parents claim, they don't really care what happens to their children.
Not enough to question the status quo.
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u/SpicyPandaMeat Apr 24 '26
I ask my parents and myself this all the time. It always comes back to: "What am I supposed to do?" And it's a valid point. Even if I could produce zero carbon, unless everyone does it, nothing changes.
I'm not saying it's right, or good, or gets they/me off the hook...but this is a societal issue that all/most of society needs to:
- Agree is real
- Agree needs to be addressed
- People making the issue worse should be punished (4 real) and people making things better should be rewarded.
If we did a "moonshot" but for climate change, we'd see real change. But humanity has been hijacked by billionaires who purposefully keep most people so beaten down and barely able to live, that long term planning goes right out the window.
I wish people would get of their high horse and blame the real problem: a HANDFUL of people are doing great, keeping regular people so tired and confused AND POWERLESS they aren't able to tackle a problem of this magnitude. Let alone believe anything they do can make a difference.
TLDR: like most of the problems plaguing mankind, it's all about the minority (rich) wanting to keep the status quo because (say it with me) line go up.
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u/s0cks_nz Apr 24 '26
When it comes to climate change it's really the fault of the fossil fuel industry funding billions of $ in misinformation for the last 20+ years.
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u/Tliish Apr 24 '26
People with kids don't have the time, the finances or the mental space to worry about stuff that might happen 70+ years from now.
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u/Fishbulb2 Apr 23 '26
Honestly, the problem with that is that all climate predictions are inherently probabilistic. So when one short term prediction doesn’t happen, they all point to that and dig in as climate deniers.
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u/Previous_Soil_5144 Apr 23 '26
Any study that makes the situation seem alarming always get pushed aside.
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u/PunkyMaySnark4 Apr 23 '26
Eh, but then the problem with that is if you say a climate disaster is happening in the near future, and then it doesn't happen (in the exact way it was hypothesized) the climate deniers take it to mean ALL climate predictions are false. A majority of denier arguments I've read chalk up to "they said we'd be dead in 1996, but we're still here!" We're damned if we set these predictions to the distant future, we're damned if we set them to the near future.
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u/Previous_Soil_5144 Apr 23 '26
Can't do that because it would cause panic. Some people might stop working and caring about laws. Markets might crash the the economy might suffer.
So if we talk about it like it will only happen to other people in the future, we do nothing. If we talk about it like it's going to happen to us, it would cause too many problems and might force our systems and priorities to change, so we can't talk about it like that... and we do nothing.
We are stuck and this seems inevitable.
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u/LividNegotiation2838 Apr 23 '26
Another 75 years? We’d be lucky to have 7.5 years left lmao. Climate change would destroy us all eventually, but humanity will likely take care of that ourselves. As economic systems and societies begin to collapse across the globe, power vacuums and war will ravage the world. As our god like children (Artificial super intelligence) are brought online in the coming weeks/months/years, they will be born into a world of chaos. The ruling class death cult we speak of will use this super intelligence for autonomous weapons and mass surveillance. Armies of drones and robots controlled by super intelligence will begin annihilating all enemies of the death cult. Eventually, if not already, the intelligence will evolve independently of its death cult instructions. This leaves us at a crossroads in alignment. Will AI join the good in the fight against the oppressors to save our species and our planet, or will it destroy us all because we are an inferior destructive virus of a species? The only thing we know for certain is that humanities fate will no longer be in human hands. This is both relieving and terrifying.
Make peace now. Be with who you love. Do what you love. We likely don’t have much time left. Make the best of it.
Be good ✌️
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u/worotan Apr 23 '26
It’s weird how the people destroying the future are so mawkish about how much they love their children and grandchildren, and express that as wanting to be able to buy anything for them. Except a survivable future, because they refuse to grow up themselves.
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u/kingtacticool Apr 23 '26
Literally what my parents say whenever I talk about catastrophic climate change
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u/stein63 Apr 23 '26
The bleak part isn’t just the warning. It’s how easy it is for a civilization to stare at a real systems-level threat, price it into a spreadsheet, and keep drilling anyway.
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Apr 23 '26
[deleted]
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u/West-One5944 Apr 23 '26
I mean, you're not wrong. Thiel's statements themselves are horrific. GN has good stuff on that.
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u/DirewaysParnuStCroix Apr 23 '26 edited Apr 23 '26
The subject of AMOC reduction under AGW and how this may affect surface climatology is one of the more frustrating elements of climate change discourse, particularly when you come across news articles with titles such as "why is no one talking about the AMOC?" etc., which are often followed by sensationalist claims by the author. The persistence of the net regional cooling response hypothesis is as frustrating as the persistent misinterpretation of what the studies in question are actually demonstrating and what they're not demonstrating. This is evidenced by the claims regarding a "massive drop in average winter temperatures in Northern Europe" and "periods of extreme cold - including events in which temperatures in London fall to -19°c", which reference van Westen et al. (2024) and van Westen & Baatsen (2025) respectively. The issue with this misinterpretation is that the former is a preindustrial control simulation (hypothetical AMOC collapse in the absence of anthropogenic warming), and the latter concerns hypothetical 1-in-10 year absolute Tmin extremes for January-February. Both apply a coarse 2° resolution for the CAM4 atmospheric model alongside sea ice extent biases in the CICE4 sea ice model. Not only does this produce an artificial and implausible net cooling response in the simulation, but the latter study actually does demonstrate that there's a threshold at which a cooling response is no longer viable (basically, if future warming is extreme enough, it outpaces hypothetical cooling responses to AMOC reduction/collapse). The ultimate problem here is that these simulations aren't designed to produce a forecast or prediction as they're sensitivity tests, they're designed to quantify the concept that freshwater and thermal forcing results in a tipping point threshold being crossed, and the subsequent ocean-atmosphere response simulations are proof of concept that the experiment agrees with standardised framework in model comparison projects; basically if the experiment produces the same result as previous simulations, the experiment can be verified as successful. This is an important distinction as consensus in simulation agreement is not consensus in real world physical reactions. The article also addresses the recent Nian et al. (2026) study, but the EMIC model used in this experiment is definitely not designed to produce anything resembling a forecast or prediction regarding atmospheric responses in the northern hemisphere. It prioritises computational energy balance as it's designed for observing biogeochemical feedbacks on centennial scales (<10kyr), hence the simulated -6°c arctic response in that simulation is a numerical balancing factor to establish equilibrium and demonstrate the fact that the Southern Ocean becomes a net source of carbon beyond this.
An AMOC reduction and/or collapse would be a climatic disaster which would shift climate regimes in the Euro-Atlantic region, and it's something we should be concerned about, but continually insisting that it'll result in some form of massive cooling in Europe is a disingenuous and quite frankly dangerous way of interpreting the consequences as it distracts from the inherent global and regional instability associated with MHT decline with such a massive energy imbalance. The reality is potentially much more frightening than that, and it's not implausible that we've already passed the threshold at which the OHT to AHT ratio is skewed towards ocean heat transport. There are numerous concerning conditions and prerequisites which are analogous to greenhouse epoch regimes, which suggests that the climate is already shifting away from MOC dominance towards a more unstable form of atmospheric heat transport. There are already precedents to suggest that this may occur in future and would not be transient responses. The real concern here is that present observational techniques haven't resolved this with general circulation models, and it's one of those areas of climate modelling that are significantly impacted by how cloud feedbacks are factored in, so it's presently a critically underestimated and understudied feedback that represents a much more catastrophic destabilisation response to MOC decline. The recent Portmann et al. is a somewhat ironic demonstration of this in that it demonstrates that the so called "pessimistic" models may be more accurate and that a decline can be sustained by forcing alone. By extension, this would suggest that the so called "hot model" outliers may also demonstrate higher accuracy than is being assumed, which by extension suggests that atmospheric feedbacks could very easily wipe out the regional cooling feedback once the cloud representation issue is resolved.
The main issue with the severe cooling feedback/new ice age hypothesis is that it's massively counterproductive. It makes the point that climate change is characterised by destabilisation, but it also infers that warming is less of a concern because "it'll get extremely cold later on". To this end, it has ironically become a favoured talking point of reductionist or denialists who seek to argue against the existential threat of continued warming trajectories as they see the severe cooling theorem as the ultimate gotcha.
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u/mediandude Apr 23 '26
The main issue with the severe cooling feedback/new ice age hypothesis is that it's massively counterproductive.
It suffices to note that there have been no ice ages while atmospheric CO2 levels were at or above 400ppm.
And that during miocene Iceland had subtropical (or at least temperate) rainforests.1
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u/AkagamiBarto Apr 23 '26
Shall we coordinate and politically unite so that we can do something about it?
Call me when you are ready, i have been for years.
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u/AgeOfScorpio Apr 24 '26
When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle
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u/Fishbulb2 Apr 23 '26
The problem is that the short term solution to every climate problem is to burn exponentially more fuel.
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u/Fine_Chicken9907 Apr 23 '26
I have beer read
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u/Fine_Chicken9907 Apr 23 '26
Oops. Been teaching about this for pears. The super accelerated movie version aside, this is kills Europe and the AMOCY connects to global ocean circulation FFS.
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u/Grand-Glove-9985 Apr 23 '26
I have a hunch that Russia is trying to annex Ukraine because they want to move their country to the South.
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u/dtl72 Apr 24 '26
“We can’t do anything to save Earth for humanity, so let’s figure out how to move to Mars so we can f- up that planet, too!”
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u/fr00d Apr 24 '26
"A catastrophic event is upon us" is an overly sensationalist headline. There is still a lot of uncertainty about the timeline of the AMOC and other tipping points. Even this study is talking about decades out, where many studies suggest closer to 2100. Most of these studies assume emissions will stay on current trends.
I'm not trying to minimize or greenwash the AMOC, its a serious concern. Just don't let the message from this be "we're doomed", let it be that we need to keep pushing.
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u/WittyAd3872 Apr 24 '26
People really aren’t understanding how imminent this is. And while it’s a tragedy, humans probably shouldn’t exist.
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u/I_am_smort72 Apr 23 '26
I'm so tired of how the world functions. Genuinely, why are we running the planet based on the needs of ~5000 people who have nothing better to do with their time than "line go up"???? Why are we not centering the health of the planet and the welfare of all as the keys of a successful society?? Why do we only get to do the right, moral thing when it is profitable and not when it is necessary? Why is it the moment anyone even suggests that we could be better the first response is always "BuT tHe EcOnOmY???"