The Frosted Cathedrals

 

When Hurricane Helene passed near Atlanta last month, it dumped nearly 12 inches of rain. Since then, it's been exceptionally sunny and dry, good weather for walking and hiking.

In fact, there's been zero rainfall in Atlanta in all of October and none is in sight. There's never been a month in Atlanta before with no rain since record-keeping began in 1878. We've had some very dry months in the past, but it's conceivable that we end this month with 0.00" for the very first time.

Climate change? We were warned about "global weirding," wild swings in extreme weather from floods to drought, from heat wave to deep freeze. Here in Georgia, we're experiencing one of those weird precipitation flip-flops. 

The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation system, the ocean's primary current taking warm water from the tropics up toward the poles, along with the atmospheric Gulf Stream, is the main protective force redirecting oceanic hurricanes away from the North American shore. Elizabeth Kolbert recently pointed out in The New Yorker that a 2021 study published in Nature Climate Change found several “early warning signals” that the AMOC was close to a "critical transition.” A 2023 study in Nature Communications went a step further and predicted that the AMOC could tip into a new state within decades, and another study estimated that the AMOC could shut down completely sometime between 2037 and 2064.

"Were the AMOC to collapse, heat would build in the Southern Hemisphere. Global rainfall patterns would shift, storms in the Atlantic would become more destructive, and warm water would pile up on the shores of the eastern U.S., leading to rapid sea-level rise. Places like Britain and Scandinavia would, perversely, grow much colder; according to one recent study, temperatures in London would drop by almost twenty degrees, which would give it a climate like present-day Siberia’s. Farming in much of northern Europe would become impossible."

Collapse of the AMOC would be a global catastrophe of epic proportions, but one single descriptor, be it "global warming," "next ice age," or "rising sea level," doesn't cover all of the impacts. The best catch-all term would probably be "we're fucked."