It’s worth looking at this polar map to get a visual sense of the ramifications of this happening:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_Circle#/media/File:Arct...
Notice the red line, marking where the average temperature of the warmest month is below 10°C. Notice how low it is on the west side of the Atlantic, in Nunavut and Labrador. It’s between 50° and 60° north.
Now imagine that line at those latitudes in Europe. You’d have Labrador-like conditions in the UK, a drastic situation indeed. Reykjavik would suddenly resemble Iqaluit.
That’s an overly optimistic way to look at it. The geological record shows there were glaciers in parts of France and Germany the last time th current shut down. (When it shut down due to CO2 induced global warming.)
Also, the temperature change was rapid: Somewhere between 50-100 years. If we’re in the same cycle, we’re more than a decade in already.
That was during an ice age, the global temperature was way lower in general. It wasn't caused by just the absence of the gulf stream
This isn't saying much. There are glaciers in parts of France and Germany now.
There are glaciers as far south as Slovenia. Spitting distance to the mediterranean.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skuta_Glacier
Granted it’s not a very big glacier, but it’s there :D
Though not for long https://slovenia.si/this-is-slovenia/remnants-of-slovenias-g... :( (the other Slovenian glacier is almost gone as well)
Shutdown of northern Atlantic overturning after 2100 following deep mixing collapse in CMIP6 projections - 28 August 2025 - https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/adfa3b
High-resolution ‘fingerprint’ images reveal a weakening Atlantic Ocean circulation (AMOC) - 12 Oct 2025 - https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2025/10/high-...
Physics-Based Indicators for the Onset of an AMOC Collapse Under Climate Change - 24 August 2025 -https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2025JC02...
Link disambiguation: <https://edition.cnn.com/2025/11/15/climate/iceland-warming-c...>
(Cited source by dagens.com, which is / may be AI-generated to boot.)
All the news seems to be copy pasted and machine translated around. I think this is the original English language source: https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/cop/iceland-sees-secu...
The IPCC rates a collapse before 2100 as “unlikely but not impossible.”
The IPCC has historically also underestimated the effect of climate change on the sea.
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/7/4/044...
You could say it that way, or you could say that they're currently overestimating the effects.
To further clarify, this is the research (from August 2025) which is cited in the CNN story which is the basis of the Dagens AI copypasta. "Shutdown of northern Atlantic overturning after 2100 following deep mixing collapse in CMIP6 projections".
Is that true for all the metrics? Didn’t they overestimate sea level rise? I recall reading that actually levels are lower than the forecasts.
When was it updated? The newer research seems up the probability.
Eg https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/aug/28/collapse...
It's presumably worth it for Iceland to take seriously even if the probability is low.
I was curious about whether or not the IPCC associates numerical values to words like "unlikely" so I looked it up:
https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2017/08/AR5_Uncertai...
They seem to be giving the word unlikely a range from 0-33%. I'm not sure how to reason about that 0% given that they also used the phrase "not impossible."
AFAIK the IPCC are generally quite conservative on these matters. Newer research shows possible collapse occurring much sooner (Sometime between 2025-2095).
This is clearly getting more reporting on than on any domestic news outlets. This is the first I am hearing about this.
Is it the first time you hear about the risks of AMOC collapsing?
To clarify, no the AMOC collapse I have grown up with as a discussion point over the last 40 years.
I am talking about the decision by our national security council. I had not seen any reporting on that domestically.
I wish other countries would take it this seriously.
Somewhat ironically, Iceland might be the country best suited by nature to handle the cold that would descend upon the Nordics if the gulf stream collapsed. At least they have plenty of volcanic heat they can use. My home country Sweden is not so lucky. Sure it's located a fair bit further south, but it's not clear that'll be enough to escape the cold. Yet the Swedish government seems wholly oblivious. Even the opposition is silent on this issue.
Kudos to the Icelandic! I wish you well in this endeavour!
Feel like I should mention the other end of this problem too: if the gulf stream stops heating the Nordics, it also stops bringing cold water from the Arctic to the gulf of Mexico. The heat waves will be absolutely epic. The Caribbeans, Florida and Mexico ought to be more worried too. In my armchair opinion, this will go way beyond nice beach days.
See [amocscenarios.org](https://amocscenarios.org/) for various modeled scenarios on what the future could look like with a collapsed AMOC.
Sweden, Finland, Norway would not be hit too badly. Summers will still be warmer, but shorter. Winters longer but about as cold.
The worst effects will be for the UK and specifically Scotland. Their climate wil change to look more like Finlands or Swedens. I.e. proper winters with pretty deep cold spells. This will be a complete disaster as buildings and general infrastrucure will not be able to handle it. There'll be massive issues from frost heave, buildings that are not insulated enough, heating systems specced too small to properly heat houses and so forth.
An AMOC collapse will be very bad, but not quite the Day Afer Tomorrow as some think it would be.
Has that site been /slashdotted by HN? It's really buggy for me.
> The worst effects will be for the UK and specifically Scotland
On the cooling side. The worst general effects will hit the Caribbean, Africa, India and Southeast Asia.
(Also the northern Rockies will get slightly better ski seasons?)
Beyond Florida, the entire east coast of the US will become not just drastically warmer if the AMOC collapses, but will experience dramatic local sea level rise (warm water is more voluminous than cold water). Think Boston with the climate of modern-day Alabama.
Both the recent Acapulco and Jamaica hurricanes had non-normal intensification as they hit the warn coastal waters. I wonder how devastating this is going to be to Florida and the Atlantic states. Every time there is a hurricane it hits the Cat 5 physical limit.
Fort Lauderdale and Miami are underwater several times a year as is. The seawall at Daytona is gone.
It is going to be destabilizing. As long as it doesn't affect the corn growing in Iowa.
The main factor reducing gulf stream is increase of fresh water runoff into Arctic ocean. So maybe we should invest into building Sibaral Canal diverting some of the water of northern rivers towards Aral sea, and by that saving both Nordic and Central Asian countries.
Europe will be thrown into chaos if the AMOC actually fully collapses. Minimum temperatures in the north and west dropping twenty degrees celcius will wreak havoc on harvests, put pressure on trade relations, and will probably drain several large cities. No doubt one asshole biding their time will take the chance to start a war in Europe amidst the chaos.
From what I've read, a full collapse is unlikely, though. Plus, preventing this from happening requires a concentrated worldwide effort, which seems unlikely with the leader of the leading greenhouse gas emission source per capita having gone on record saying climate change is a Chinese conspiracy.
At this point, I think a lot of governments are just hoping the best case scenario is right, because there's hardly anything we can do if the AMOC does indeed start collapsing fully, other than southbound mass emigration.
We're also well set up where a majority of the population is in just one city, meaning it would be pretty easy to do some centralized building. Swedish population is far more spread out than Iceland is
Coincidentally at the moment the Canadian government has begun yet again pushing the idea of a new oil pipeline to serve asian markets with the justification being boosting the economy.
Remains depressing that somehow no one thinks for a second of the economic instability that will be induced by the climate change that that oil pipeline would contribute to...
Few politicians seem to want to think about what happens after their time in office. Quick, short term wins only.
It is nice to see a country take it seriously of course. But, at some level I don’t love this type phrasing that has become generally accepted—it is a big deal, so we declare it a national security risk.
Everything is a national security risk when we look generally enough. Climate, education, economics, cultural diversity: failing in any of these fields makes the country weaker in some abstract way and that will impact national security down the road. “This impacts the general welfare and quality of life of the people” should be the highest category of urgent problem that needs to be fixed. A healthy, happy, productive populace can solve national security as a side effect.
> A healthy, happy, productive populace can solve national security as a side effect.
I think many “healthy, happy, productive” societies that have been invaded by less happy and productive neighbors throughout all of recorded history would beg to disagree.
IMO it would take some real study to come to a conclusion there. My opinion is mostly borrowed from the ACOUP guy: societies that are relatively developed in comparison to their neighbors rack up a lot of W’s. This is just unsurprising and not narratively dramatic so the opposite gets over-emphasized.
https://acoup.blog/2020/01/17/collections-the-fremen-mirage-...
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45906226
I'm glad they took this seriously and considered it important. Maybe the world will finally notice how we're destroying the planet and ourselves, and whether anyone thinks about their children and grandchildren who may live in a world destroyed by generations.
> a world destroyed by generations
This hyperbole isn’t helpful. The world won’t be destroyed. (If you promise annihilation and are visited simply by devastation, it reduces credibility in an unnecessary way.)
right everyone will be hah we were not all killed, only lots of people, but some survived! You lose! Glad we didn't listen to you, most of my family were killed except for me and my niece, but you said me and my niece would be killed too! You know absolutely nothing!!
Is the credibility in question among anyone who would notice the difference in phrasing?
We should always try to speak with precision, but not for the sake of people who will dismiss it no matter what you say.
I'm curious why this conversation tat is more or less a George Carlin bit from decades ago plays out over and over on social media. I bet that you knew exactly what they meant when they talked about the world being destroyed.
It wasn't a scenario where the Earth is literally annihilated by a black hole, or a super nova, or a meteor or a GMB, it was a scenario where the world is functionally ruined for human life as we know it in a time-scale far shorter than we can muster up the resources to stop or even mitigate it.
So like, what's going on here? Is your response a subconscious coping strategy to change the topic to something more comfortable than one of impending doom for the human species and civilization as we know it?
> it was a scenario where the world is functionally ruined for human life as we know it
Sure. The AMOC collapsing doesn’t do that. It makes life shit for a lot of people. But it doesn’t make the Earth uninhabitable for humans or technological civilization.
“Destroy the earth” is hyperbole. Cause mass starvation, associated wars and refugee crises, and mass extinctions with renewed vigor are not.
It’s like being invited to a party in someone’s house. One person starts smoking in the house. Sure, one person is no big deal. Then another person lights up because someone else did, and hey, they don’t have to live there tomorrow. Before you know it, 5–10% of people are smoking and making it stink for everyone, but it’s fine. They’ll stop eventually, and it’s not like you have to live there.
Unless someone stands up and says "no smoking in the house" ... people are going to keep smoking.
We live in the atomic age. The idea that calamity could befall one part of the world and the others will be fine just isn't possible.
Here's a plausible scenario -- European countries decide that they will just power through the cold Frostpunk style by burning massive amounts of hydrocarbons and some other societies in regions suffering from the heat due to climate change decide that this course of action is unacceptable and war breaks out.
The theme of climate change is feedback loops and one way checkpoints. The increasing rates of change from these feedback loops and how societies respond may doom the plant and life as we know it.
This isn't hyperbole.
This seems more like informal and basically reasonable talk, rather than hyperbole.
The purpose of Earth, from the point of view of most humans, is to act as a comfortable host of humans. We are destroying the Earth by making it no longer fit for that purpose. I don’t think anybody reads “destroy Earth” and interprets it as something more like, “get rid of the iron ball as well.”
Unless you are one of those deep-sea vent dwelling creatures, we’re risking changes to the planet that will affect your life eventually.
> we’re risking changes to the planet that will affect your life
Most people should already be seeing changes to their life in a statistically significant way.
But the AMOC collapsing doesn’t mean plenty of the Earth isn’t comfortable for humans. Global temperatures peaking in their pessimistic state still leaves, for better or for worse, most of the industrialized world viable. Poorer. Less comfortable. But viable nonetheless.
This is important because committing to long-term projects requires avoiding nihilism and complacency. Pitching everything as disaster tips into the former.
Convincing the world seem the hard part. 43% of the forcing greenhouse grasses are currently coming from non amicable regimes. 53% if you include USA, but there's a chance administration is going to change. Beyond declaring what are the small countries options?
The same as everyone else’s options.
Adapt.
There’s no stopping this train.
climate change isn't an one/off effect but gradual
every bit of improvement is a higher chance to avoid some of the most catastrophic outcomes (where the unlikely but possible worst outcome being a mass extinction chain reaction which humanity will find very very hard to survive in a functioning manner/without losing their future)
so still worth fighting for any improvement even if we can't avoid a catastrophe anymore, as there is a huge margin between what we still can archive, and what we might end up with if we stop fighting and are quite unlucky
it's both true and misleading in what conclusions people might take from it
e.g. if you want the true climate damage done by a country you would have to look at all the damage done by producing all the goods consumed there. This isn't very practical doable. But if you e.g. mass import Chinese goods you can't only blame China for the climate damage done in context of producing those goods (but neither can you take away all the fault from them, they still decide how to produce the goods in the end and we (west) motivate them to do so badly).
This also applies to Oil producing countries etc.
And some non amicable countries are so because they see no way to handle their economical situation if they tried to change it. But if countries where to work better together they might find a way forward. And sometimes innovation can fix that by itself. E.g. solar cells have gotten absurdly good to a point where sometimes they just out compete non-renewables on purely economical benefits. That is, if your government doesn't do regulations to actively prevent this (weather it's by hindering solar or by hugely subventionieren oil/coal/gas).
So the situation is both better and worse then the statistics above make it look. Better as you could move production away from non amicable countries and boycott their products and "convince" some of them by giving them a economical feasible means to improve. Worse because we know this won't happen and it means its not just "their fault" but quite often indirectly partially our fault, too.
Also lets be realistic thanks to corruption, short term thinking(e.g. next election) and sometimes plain stupidity many countries which try to get away from oil/coal/gas have done such horrible bad decisions that they not only completely fucked avoiding climate change but also have put their economy in a thought spot. When then is taken out of context and used by people like Trump as an example why fighting climate change is supposedly a scam.
> took this seriously
That assumes Iceland consider "National Security Risk" as politically charged as it is in other major countries.
> finally notice how we're destroying the planet and ourselves,
this might sound very pessimistic
but the world has noticed _very long ago_
the first calculations about the greenhouse effect where in 1896!
in the 50th/60th it increasingly more clear that there might be a huge problem
in the 70th it became clear that there might not just be a huge problem but most likely is one, even if there wasn't yet scientific consensus on it
in the 80th scientific consensus was formed that there is human accelerated climate change and that it's a huge problem
since then outside of a very small fraction (depending on year, but in general <10% of scientist) the question wasn't if it is happening or if it is quite bad, but how "exactly" it will play out and how bad exactly it will get with options ranging from quite bad, over parts of earth becomes inhabitable for human where currently up to ~1000000000 people lives, to risk of human extinction in the long run (indirectly by causing a mass extinction event from a combination of climate change being to fast in combination with other environmental damages done by humans). Sure there have been other effect overlying climate change and people have tried to use them to explain climate change away, but consistently fail, sadly only from a scientific POV and not from a convincing people they don't have to worry POV.
And now in 2025 we have on of the most powerful nations of the world deciding that climate change is a scam, not based on data or analysis but based on it benefiting companies owned by some of their most influential citizens. And started systematically removing access to all public data they had previously gathered about climate change basically trying to rewrite history. And that at a time where large part of the US are currently being severely affected by long term environmental abuse. And yes abusing the environment isn't the same as climate change, but we could take a hint that if something has pretty bad effect on a local scale that then something similar done globally will probably have pretty bad effect globally.
It's also not like we don't know that currently _already_ whole nations (e.g. Philippines) are in the process of sinking. Or the amount and level of extrema weather conditions has constantly increased. Or that heat related death are constantly increasing. Or that there are gigantic dead areas in the oceans (through likely not caused by climate change, but this other kind of environmental catastrophes overlap with it putting even more strain on nature).
And still overall the trend of the last few years is to do less about it, not more. Because it is seen as luxury counties can't afford in a very strained world economy.
And people very commonly speak about it's anyway to late why bother, when we are speaking about a gradual effect not a binary yes/no switch.
I honestly don't have optimism about it anymore, there is no indication for me to believe thinks will get better until it's way way to late to prevent a catastrophe.
And don't get me wrong, humanity will (probably) survive, we are quite good at that. And there most likely will be a future where children can have a nice happy live. But before that for reasons not limited to climate change things probably will go to shit for a few decades, maybe even a century. But don't worry as long as people still try to make things better, things will get better again, it just might take some time.
But if I where living close by the coast or close to the equator, or in a area which already has common extrema weather, I would make sure my children grow up somewhere else.
bah that was such a downer to write, but it is my take on the topic anyway
Trump's instability is also a security risk.
See Bill Gates recent article on climate change alarmism.
I think in that article Gates does quite a disservice to the climate change dialogue because he does not even entertain the possibility that the most severe of the effects of climate change is going to be massive population migration due to extreme weather and agricultural failures. His comment that climate change is not going to lead to civilization collapse fails to elaborate for whom.
Maybe he’s hoping for sea level rise these days. Enough to submerge a particular island.
Bill Gates changed quickly when he realized the damage to the environment that AI will cause I guess.
I think there's an "and" in that that article, not an exclusive "or".
Not how I understood it. It was about climate “vs” health not whether the climate is breaking down.
My (paranoid) unpopular take: the AI boom we’re currently experiencing is a concerted effort by the billionaires to maintain operational agency (the ability to think and do at a massive scale) once society begins to collapse due to climate change.
~~ edit ~~
Thank you for the sane responses. I’m reconsidering how much I believe this.
How would that work? AI cannot run if society collapses.
Maintaining all that infrastructure and supplying spare parts is not going to work.
Also AI cannot do anything on its own. Barely anything with support from humans.
This is also my reasoning for why I think AI alignment is not going to be a problem for humanity any time soon.
By the time AI will be capable of maintaining the whole supply chain required to keep itself running sufficient time will have passed so we can come up with something viable.
I think Billionaire alignment is a much larger problem than AI alignment. To use Bostrom's language, it's not full-on owl domestication, but sparrows with owl-like powers that we need to worry about.
https://lukemuehlhauser.com/bostroms-unfinished-fable-of-the...
Long before 2100, critical AI system will no longer be operating from this soil. They are in Earths orit, and on its moon.
And the industrial base that maintains it? Chips have a limited lifespan.
> AI cannot run if society collapses.
That doesn’t mean some idiot billionaires huffing each others’ farts can’t think it can.
Respectfully disagree. An AI with full access to robots could do everything on its own that it would need to "survive" and grow. I argue that humans are actually in the way of that.
"robots" is a very hand wavy answer. There's so much that goes into the supply chain of improving and running AI that I, a human, feel quite safe.
Is there any particular element of the supply chain that you feel make “robots” hand-wavy?
I think this is a very common opinion here. I'd say at least 15% people believe that.
Yeah? How many robots? What kind of robots? What would the AI need to survive? Are the robots able to produce more robots? How are the robots powered? Where will they get energy from?
Sure it's easy to just throw that out there in one sentence, but once you actually dig into it, it turns out to be a lot more complicated than you thought at first. It's not just a matter of "AI" + "Robots" = "self-sustaining". The details matter.
This makes no sense. It takes a complex industrial society to keep that tech going. The supply chain to make GPUs would not survive even a modest disruption in the world economy. It's probably the most fragile thing we currently manufacture.
If you're an AI company and you believe your own hype (like Musk seems to), you'll probably believe that you can automate everything from digging minerals out of the ground all of the way up to making the semiconductors in the robots that dig the minerals.
As you may infer from my use of the word "hype", I do not think we are close to such generality at a high enough quality level to actually do this.
Presumes that the surviving humans will not actively disrupt/destroy these automated industries. Which seems highly likely as they will want to scavenge them for anything of value or repurpose them for their own means.
There's lots of implicit assumptions or this would be a book, but remember that Musk has a rocket and wants to colonise Mars, and that Mars is so bad that it is currently 100% populated by robots.
For the billionaires without rockets, there's also a whole bunch of deserts conveniently filled with lots of silicon.
(Or as Mac(Format|World|User) put it sometime in the 90s when they were considering who might bail out Apple and suggested one of the middle east oil barrons, a "silly con").
Musk smokes a lot of weed. We won't have a colony on Mars in his grandshildren's lifetime.
His lifetime, I agree unlikely, but also I think that will be short: he's pissed off too many other powerful people and will get the western equivalent of Russian oligarchs "falling out of a window".
The economics he talks about are all nonsense. No bank will lend someone $200k to go to Mars on the offchance they might be a successful pizza restaraunteur.
But like I said, if you're (e.g.) him and you buy your own hype…
While I believe we’re in a slow takeoff, I believe we are in a takeoff. The important question to my mind is whether AGI comes before systemic societal collapse due to climate change. I think it does, and my tin foil hat grows a wider brim with each passing day. I hope I’m wrong!
This is also why I'm skeptical of claims that it would be impossible (or nearly so) for governments to meaningfully regulate AI R&D/deployment (regardless of whether or not they should). The "you can't regulate math" arguments. Yeah, you can't regulate math, but using the math depends on some of the most complex technologies humanity has produced, with key components handled by only one or a few companies in only a handful of countries (US, China, Taiwan, South Korea, Netherlands, maybe Japan?). US-China cooperation could probably achieve any level of regulation they want up to and including "shut it all down now." Likely? Of course not. But also not impossible if the US and China both felt sufficiently threatened by AI.
The only thing that IMO would be really hard to regulate would be the distribution of open-weight models existing at the time regulations come into effect, although I imagine even that would be substantially curtailed by severe enough penalties for doing so.
This is the best argument I’ve heard against it, so thanks.
My anxiety entirely orbits around the scale of AI compute we’ve reached and the sentiment that there is drastic room for improvement, the rapidly advancing state of the art in robotics, and the massive potential for disruption of middle/lower class stake in society. Not to mention the general sentiment that the economy is more important than people’s well being in 99.9% of scenarios.
Who's to say it has to keep moving forward? The companies are buying up massive amounts of GPUs in this AI race, a move that's widely questioned because next year's GPUs might render the current ones outdated[0], so there will probably be plenty of GPUs to go around if the CEO demands it (prior to collapse). Operating datacenters would probably be out of the question with a collapsed society as the power grid might be unreliable, global networks might be down and securing many datacenters would probably be difficult, but there's at least one public record of a billionaire building his own underground bunker with off-grid power generation and enough room to have his own little datacenter inside[1]. "Ordinary" people will acquire 32GB GPUs or Mac Studios for local open-source LLM inference, so it seems likely billionaires would just do the next step up for their bunker and use their company's proprietary weights on decommissioned compute clusters.
[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/14/ai-gpu-depreciation-coreweav... [1] https://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-hawaii-under...
Concerted effort among the greediest people in the world all competing with each other? I find that very hard to imagine.
If there's an evil plot, it's goal must surely be to accelerate environmental degradation.
First we had the blockchain, now AI to consume enormous amounts of resources and distract us from what we should be investing in to make the environment healthier.
do you think it’s one person or a group of them that meets? design by committee? how are they getting it all done? let’s hear it!
I guess it's whoever was in that Doug Rushkoff meeting with the whole idea we'll have security forces with those exploding dog collars to keep them in line and to keep revolutionary forces from killing us and taking our food supply!
https://english.elpais.com/technology/2023-09-20/writer-doug...
it's very easy to achieve great things without coordination if you can just do what's best for yourself and help your peers achieve their collective goals.
but they do meet at davos every now and again, without the democratic shackles.
I don’t know if I believe it’s an active conspiracy. Instead I think it’s more of a very concerning, very plausible eventuality.
FWIW I do agree with the operational agency at scale bit
and I’m always fascinated by these conspiracy theories, was genuinely hoping to get one (but also happy to see you’re challenging your own position). the idea of people coordinating on these things is very funny to me
I think like all tech people will use it for good and bad. those in power have more power etc etc I think it tends to boil down to whether you believe people are, overall, good or bad. over time, that’s what you’ll get with use of tech
You should go see "Bugonia" by Yorgos Lanthimos, if you haven't yet, then! That movie might be straight up your alley.
So, if this happens, Iceland actually becomes Iceland...
