From ClimateRealism

By Anthony Watts

A recent Yahoo News article, “Experts warn ongoing concern with Atlantic Ocean will be direct threat to dozens of nations: ‘Consequences for at least 1,000 years to come,’” by Timothy McGill, claims a new modeling study shows that a collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC,) would intensify Southern Europe’s drought risk, producing consequences lasting “at least 1,000 years.” It presents this as an increasingly likely, looming climate catastrophe. This is false. There is no direct observational evidence that the AMOC has changed according to real-world data finding that the AMOC has not declined over the past 60 years.

The article declares, “The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) is expected to weaken or even collapse under anthropogenic climate change,” quoting Stefan Rahmstorf warning, “[i]f the AMOC shuts down, this would have consequences for at least 1,000 years to come.” It also leans on the familiar “tipping point” language, wrongly implying a near-term collapse of the Atlantic conveyer belt would plunge the world into a period of irreversible climate disruption.

The problem is that the AMOC story has been a moving target for more than a decade, with headline claims repeatedly whipsawing between “it’s slowing,” “it’s speeding up,” and “there’s no clear trend.” This ongoing flip-flop is clearly debunked by Heartland President James Taylor. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s own explainer, “What is the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC)?,” concedes that while research suggests weakening “over the past century,” whether it will continue to slow or stop “remains uncertain,” which is a polite way of saying the observational record does not support the kind of certainty implied by “increasingly likely” collapse rhetoric. The Climate at a Glance reference, “Ocean Currents,” relies on real-world AMOC data and does what the Yahoo News article does not: it documents the long pattern of contradictory AMOC alarmist claims, including repeated assertions that models show a dramatic slowdown “not experienced in 1,600 years,” followed by subsequent papers and analyses disputing the magnitude, timing, or even existence of a measurable trend.

And that is the key point: this Yahoo piece is ultimately about a modeling exercise, not an observed “collapse in progress.” The article even frames the study as testing scenarios in a large climate model and then projecting how European summer precipitation might respond if the AMOC “fails.” That’s not a measurement; it’s an if-then thought experiment inside a model. When a model’s assumptions are stacked into a “collapsed AMOC” scenario and then run forward for 1,000 years, you will indeed get 1,000 years of modeled consequences. But that tells you more about the model’s design than it does about what will actually happen.

This is also where the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC)  Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) is routinely misused in media coverage. The IPCC’s AR6 discusses AMOC as a system likely to weaken under warming in many models, but it also treats the topic cautiously because direct long-term observations are limited, and reanalysis/proxy reconstructions can disagree. The article does not convey that caution; it sells certainty and urgency, then bolts on a thousand-year scare tag to raise the emotional stakes.

If you want to see the contradiction problem laid out plainly, Climate Realism has multiple AMOC fact checks with specific examples of media flip-flops and exaggerated certainty, including “CNN Lies in its AMOC Collapse Story: Another Flip-Flop in a Long Line of Alarmist Claims,” “No, NewsBreak, the Supposed ‘Cold Blob’ in the Atlantic Isn’t a Harbinger of the Atlantic Ocean Current Collapsing,” “Why Isn’t the Mainstream Media Reporting that Ocean Circulation Is Doing Well?,” and “The BBC Tries a Feckless Rescue as Scientists Inconveniently Find the Gulf Stream Isn’t Getting Weaker.” Those articles document a very simple reality: the AMOC has been used as a media boogeyman for years precisely because it’s scientifically complex, difficult to observe accurately over long-term periods, and therefore easy to oversell with model projections and dramatic graphics to a gullible public.

What Yahoo also ignores is how much this AMOC panic has already been culturally packaged as catastrophe entertainment. The 2004 movie The Day After Tomorrow was built around a rapid AMOC/Gulf Stream shutdown that plunges the Northern Hemisphere into instant ice-age conditions. Scientists panned that scenario at the time as wildly unrealistic in its speed and mechanics, a point summarized in coverage such as ScienceDaily’s discussion of whether ‘The Day After Tomorrow’ could happen, which notes that climate scientists criticized the film. Yet the rhetoric in today’s reporting often walks right back toward the same cinematic framing: collapse, tipping, imminent disruption, and now—conveniently—“1,000 years” of punishment for extra moral emphasis.

Finally, the article buries the biggest giveaway in plain sight: the claimed consequences are said to be relevant for “decision makers of today,” not because the AMOC has demonstrated a measured march toward shutdown, but because a model was forced into a collapse state and then used to generate dramatic downstream impacts. That is advocacy by simulation, not evidence that the real AMOC is about to “fail,” much less that it will lock Europe into a millennium of drought as a quasi-certain outcome. In fact, the purported downstream impacts are unproven and highly debatable because AMOC collapse is not a proven cause of long-term regional or global ice ages. Rather, it is speculative based on model outputs, for which real world data suggest, Garbage In, Garbage Out.

Yahoo is misleading readers by presenting a highly speculative, model-driven collapse scenario as a growing near-term likelihood, while ignoring the fact that the measurements of the current don’t show a clear decline. The story also overlooks the fact that AMOC claims have ping-ponged for years across the scientific and media landscape, from declining currents, or currents speeding up, to no real change. When the best you can say about the observations is “uncertain,” the responsible move is humility, not thousand-year climate doom mongering.