Steve Genco
2 min readAug 13, 2023

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I’m posting this reply here so I can add a little documentation …

I have to quibble with your characterization of a 95% confidence interval between 2025 and 2095 as a "massive" period of time that "practically speaking ... means nothing". It's worth recalling that in terms of Earth climate history, that 70 years is an eye-blink. Not since the Eocene has the planet seen so much climate disruption, and it has never seen this much climate change in such an infinitesimal stretch of time.

This article by Burke et al. is a fascinating read for anyone who wants to understand exactly how anomalous our current climate situation is. There are several versions of this graphic floating around, but I particularly like this one:

All of human history has occurred within the stable bosom of the mid-holocene (that short yellow line), including, among other features, the AMOC that freed Europe and Northeastern America for an earlier Holocene Ice Age.

So no, a 95% chance of losing the AMOC within this century does not mean "nothing". It means we can expect all the catastrophic effects you describe ... with a near certainty within the next 75 years. That is, if we continue to sit on our hands.

We have only one lever we can pull if we want to impact any of this. That's to curb our GHG emissions. We cannot undo the heating that's already baked in, but we can lower how much hotter it gets with every increment of emission-reduction we can manage. Maybe we can change the odds of AMOC collapse and other tipping point disasters. That's our job now. I don't know if we're up to it.

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Steve Genco

Steve is author of Intuitive Marketing (2019) & Neuromarketing for Dummies (2013). He holds a PhD in Political Science from Stanford University.