It would be fair to say ex-president Donald Trump has never heard of AMOC, the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation. But then, this is a guy who arrived in Florida after the destruction from hurricane Irma and told the crowd how sorry he was that Melania couldn’t be there with him to witness the destruction. Melania was standing right beside Donald.
Recent polling suggests Donald Trump could be returned to the Presidential Office and the failure of AMOC his one notable legacy.
As Michael Mann, distinguished professor of meteorology at Pennsylvania State University, said, “a second Trump term is game over for the climate”.
Donald Trump called climate change, “One of the greatest scams in history.” On accepting the party’s nomination at the Republican National Convention, he said (on drilling) “We will do it at levels nobody’s ever seen before.”
Tump has said of the first day in office as president he would execute an executive order prohibiting offshore wind projects, saying they kill whales (In the UK, home to the world’s four largest wind farms, no humpback whale stranding have been linked to wind farms.) Source: Marco Silva & Jake Horton, BBC
Climate change is sometimes likened to a frog in water. If a frog was dropped into boiling water, it would jump out immediately. On the other hand, if the frog was placed in cold water, and the stove turned up, it would not notice that it was slowly being boiled alive.
The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation carries warm, salty surface water from the tropics northward, where it cools and sinks near Greenland. The water at deeper levels flows back to the equator. It is one of the largest ocean current systems on the planet influencing weather patterns.
AMOC is now weaker than at any time since the last Ice Age, some 11,500 years ago. In a 2021 analysis, the authors declared AMOC is at a point of “almost complete loss of stability.”
The US is one of the world’s largest oil and gas producers. There is both onshore and offshore drilling along with hydraulic fracturing (Fracking).
Just a month out from the election Donald Trump told delegates, “We will drill, baby, drill.” Meanwhile, water flowing northward from the equator is slowing and if the flow ended, Europe could be plunged into winters akin to Hollywood disaster movies. One such scenario cold see Donald starring as the Emperor who played golf while the world burned.
ajhenryblog 