THE CONVERSATION — Those following the latest developments in climate science would have been stunned by the jaw-dropping headlines last week proclaiming the — which responded to a .
“Be very worried: Gulf Stream collapse could spark global chaos by 2025” . “A crucial system of ocean currents is heading for a collapse that ‘would affect every person on the planet” noted and repeated .
One can only imagine how internalized this seemingly apocalyptic news as across the globe.
This latest alarmist rhetoric provides a textbook example of how not to communicate climate science. These headlines do nothing to raise public awareness, let alone influence public policy to support climate solutions.
We see the world we describe
It is well known that . This is causing many to simply shut down and give up — .
Alarmist media framing of impending doom has become , and when amplified by sensational media messaging, it is quickly emerging as a dominant factor in the .
This is also not the first time such headlines have emerged. Back in 1998, the published an article raising the alarm that global “warming could lead, paradoxically, to drastic cooling — a catastrophe that could threaten the survival of civilization.”
In 2002, editorials in the and magazine offered the prediction of a forthcoming collapse of deep water formation in the North Atlantic, which would lead to the next ice age.
Building on the unfounded assertions in these earlier stories, BBC Horizon televised a 2003 documentary entitled , and in 2004 magazine published “The Pentagon’s Weather Nightmare,” piling on where previous articles left off.
Seeing the opportunity for an exciting disaster movie, Hollywood stepped up to created in which every known law of thermodynamics was ever so creatively violated.
The currents are not collapsing (anytime soon)
While it was to show that it is , this still hasn’t stopped some from this false narrative.
The latest series of alarmist headlines may not have fixated on an impending ice age, but they still suggest the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation could collapse by 2025. This is an outrageous claim at best and a completely irresponsible pronouncement at worst.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has been assessing the likelihood of a cessation of deep-water formation in the North Atlantic for decades. In fact, I was on the writing team of the where we concluded that:
“It is very likely that the Atlantic Ocean Meridional Overturning Circulation (MOC) will slow down during the course of the 21st century. It is very unlikely that the MOC will undergo a large abrupt transition during the course of the 21st century.”
Almost identical statements were included in the and the . Other assessments, including the National Academy of Sciences , published in 2013, also reached similar conclusions.
The 6th assessment report went further to conclude that:
“There is no observational evidence of a trend in the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), based on the decade-long record of the complete AMOC and longer records of individual AMOC components.”
Understanding climate optimism
Hannah Ritchie, the deputy editor and lead researcher at and a senior researcher at the Oxford Martin School, where she proposed an elegant framework for how people see the world and their ability to facilitate change.
Ritchie’s framework lumped people into four general categories based on combinations of those who are optimistic and those who are pessimistic about the future, as well as those who believe and those who don’t believe that we have agency to shape the future based on today’s decisions and actions.
Ritchie persuasively argued that more people located in the green “optimistic and changeable” box are what is needed to advance climate solutions. Those positioned elsewhere are not effective in advancing such solutions.
More importantly, rather than instilling a sense of optimism that global warming is a solvable problem, the extreme behaviour (fear mongering or civil disobedience) of the “pessimistic changeable” group (such as many within the movement), often does nothing more than drive the public towards the “pessimistic not changeable” group.
A responsibility to communicate, responsibly
Unfortunately, extremely low probability, and often poorly understood , often end up being misinterpreted as likely and imminent climate events.
In many cases, the , particularly around the differences between hypothesis posing and hypothesis testing, are lost on the lay reader when a study goes viral across social media. This is only amplified in situations where scientists make statements where creative licence is taken with speculative possibilities. Possibilities that reader-starved journalists are only too happy to play up in clickbait headlines.
Through independent research and the writing of IPCC reports, the climate science community operates from a position of privilege in the public discourse of climate change science, its impacts and solutions.
Climate scientists have agency in the advancement of climate solutions, and with that agency comes a responsibility to avoid sensationalism. By not tempering their speech, they risk further ratcheting up the rhetoric with nothing to offer in terms of overall solutions or risk reduction.
— Andrew Weaver is professor at the School of Earth and Ocean Sciences, University of Victoria
