Interesting Excerpts
Direct link to this excerpt: https://savetheoxygen.org/excerpts.html#amoc
The Shutdown of Ocean Currents Could Freeze Europe in The Economist weekly edition 8-16-2025
Leaders: Climate Tipping Points: When climate change poses a strategic threat, it needs a strategic response
(used in full without permission) Those who think about national security love to bandy acronyms such as ATACMS (Army Tactical Missile System) and WOMBAT (Weapon of Magnesium, Battalion, Anti-Tank). They need to add AMOC to the list. The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation is not a weapons system. But it could lay waste a continent—specifically, Europe—to an extent that only a nuclear war could outmatch.
AMOC is part of a system of currents which move heat around the oceans of the world. It delivers a stupendous flow of that heat—more than 1,000 terawatts—to the North Atlantic. That sounds like the sort of planetary juggernaut it would be incredibly hard for humans (whose global civilisation runs at a mere 20 terawatts) to do anything about. Alas, no. AMOC is a curiously delicate thing. Changes in sea-surface temperature and salinity caused by global warming could conceivably make it stall; such abrupt shutdowns are clearly visible in the geological record. For Europe that could mean a sudden, severe cooling—even as the rest of the world keeps warming.
Europeans sweltering through yet another summer heatwave might think such cooling would be just the ticket. Again, alas, no. A complete AMOC shutdown could see Brussels hitting -20°C (-4°F) in a bad winter. In Oslo the figure would be almost -50°C (-58°F); not quite Yakutsk, but not far off. February sea ice in the North Sea could come as far south as the Humber estuary and the Frisian Islands north of Holland. Average rainfall in parts of northern Europe would drop precipitously; according to one estimate as much as 80% of England’s arable land would no longer be farmable without irrigation. Storms would get worse; so, in some models, might summer heatwaves. This would be the worst of all worlds.
And it’s not just Europe. By cooling the northern hemisphere as a whole, an AMOC collapse would push the band of rain which girdles the tropics towards the south. That would be very bad for the African countries on the south edge of the Sahara; it could also be devastating to the Amazon.
Cold, dry and sudden
These ghastly prospects are one of the reasons that AMOC takes a starring role in worries about climate “tipping points”—effects of warming that might be dramatic, damaging and irreversible. Another reason is the strong suggestion, in both theory and models, that after a (currently unknown) temperature threshold is passed, the collapse could take just a few decades. A third is that AMOC, or at least parts of it, may already be in slow decline.
This is well known to people who think about climate change—as is the level of uncertainty about how far away the threshold actually is and the spirited debate over how complete a collapse might ensue. But there is no evidence that such possibilities are feeding into government planning processes.
You might argue that they shouldn’t: that the response to the risk should be to redouble all efforts which might keep the temperature low enough to avoid a tipping point. But preparedness makes sense. The Advanced Research and Invention Agency in Britain is funding prototype monitoring schemes that might make possible early warnings of accelerating collapse. If it could be made robust enough, such a system could make possible years of preparation.
If this were a military threat, such risk-reduction would be second nature, as would table-top analysis of vulnerabilities and contingency plans for softening impacts. Larger outlays are not, as yet, necessary. But larger imaginations are.
More extensive article in the Science & Technology section: Earth’s climate is approaching irreversible tipping points
Direct link to this excerpt: https://savetheoxygen.org/excerpts.html#saving-time-2
From Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond Productivity Culture by Jenny Odell, pages 174-176
Since then, Shell has merged scenario planning into what is more straightforwardly PR. Having shifted from funding climate change denial ads in the 1970s to “painting [themselves] green” in the 2000s, those same companies who faced down “self-defeating determinism” are selling the public their own strain of determinism. Energy companies have every incentive to make their future be the future. In a sweeping 2021 study of ExxonMobil’s climate change communications since the mid 2000s, Naomi Oreskes and Geoffrey Supran find language that portrays extraction and consumer demand as inevitable:
[A] 2008 ExxonMobil Corp advertorial stat[es]: “By 2030, global energy demand will be about 30 percent higher than it is today . . . oil and natural gas will be called upon to meet . . . the world’s energy requirements.” Another, in 2007, says that “increasing prosperity in the developing world [will be] the main driver of greater energy demand (and consequently rising CO2 emissions).” A 1999 Mobil advertorial is even blunter: “[G]rowing demand will boost CO2 emissions.” In other words, they present growing energy demand as inevitable, and imply that it can only be met with fossil fuels.It was BP that popularized the notion of an individual carbon footprint, for example, by releasing a carbon footprint calculator in 2004. This was one of several ways that energy companies would imply that the responsibility for solving climate change lay with the consumer. It is certainly true that consumption habits need to change; Klein suggests that the well-off 20 percent in a population are the most responsible for making those changes. But she also points out that if we want reductions to span beyond “earnest urbanites who like going to farmers’ markets on Saturday and wearing up-cycled clothing,” we need “comprehensive policies and programs that make low-carbon choices easy and convenient for everyone.”* In the meantime, energy companies’ emphasis on consumption is disingenuous. This rhetoric echoes Big Tobacco’s effort to portray itself as a neutral purveyor of what consumers just can’t seem to help but demand. In other words, We just sell the cigarettes; you’re the ones smoking them.
A framing like this one portrays climate change as solely “our” fault, where the “our” is an aggregate of consumers who should attend to their carbon footprint calculators. All the while, as Aronoff writes, “every shred of evidence suggests the [energy] industry is moving full speed ahead in the opposite direction, pushing more exploration and more production as temperatures rise, seas swell, and fires burn.” One smoky day while I was writing this chapter, a Wells Fargo ATM asked me if I wanted to donate to help with the wildfires. I stared back at the screen. Wells fargo is one of the largest funders of fossil fuels, having invested $198 billion into the coal, oil, and gas industry in the four years following the Paris Agreement.
Just as the industry of individual time management resells the idea of time as money to the isolated bootstrapper, energy companies sell the idea of the carbon footprint to conceal larger and more significant avenues of change. These include both technological and political tools to which we already have access. For Klein, Aronoff, and others, some of those tools would be public regulation and oversight---things like the Green New Deal---and standing up to the global trade agreements that favor the suicidal time horizon of energy companies. Indeed, Klein has an entire chapter titled “Planning and Banning.”
*Likewise, in Overheated, Aronoff notes that “If there is to be such a thing as a low-carbon society, it will be the government’s job to build it.” Of course, personal choice within the structures we have is still important. Douglas Rushkoff, in Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires, has this suggestion: “Instead of debating whether to buy electric, gas, or hybrid, just keep the car you have. Better yet, start carpooling, walking to work, working from home, or working less. Like Jimmy Carter tried to tell us during his much ridiculed fireside chats, turn down the thermostat and wear a sweater. It’s better for your sinuses and better for everyone.” Toward the end of her book, considering the possibility of doing less, Aronoff ties her arguments to the proposed benefits of a shorter workweek. In some ways, these recommendations evoke the end of chapter 2 of this book: the idea of giving certain things up, as well as Butt-Head’s request: “Could you, like, get less stuff?”
(Excessive highlighting mine.)
[...] In these dreams, there was always a wall coming—a wall of fire or a wall of smoke—and it moved with terrifying impartial finality, like the playhead on a video timeline.
The fire dreams began to mix with dreams of my own death, which had increased during the pandemic. I wrote in my journal:
The future has disappeared—I want to say over a horizon, but there is no horizon, just this smoke-fog. I have never felt more distinctly that every year will be a worse year, that every minute is a minute closer to catastrophe and unrecoverable losses. Just like how you feel about your own aging body, but applied to everythingin the world, and you don't even have the comfort of knowingthat it will flourish after you are gone, like it's actually ending.
I keep thinking about my childhood and how I grew up not even knowing about wildfires, and how I thought of myself as living in a "normal time," and now everything in my past feels like it was traveling along the surface of a folded piece of paper. And just now, we're going over the fold, and everything after this is just about survival. Everything will be different in ways I can't imagine, and there is much reason to believe it will be far worse, and the deep terror involved in that is the terror, I think, that is driving my dreams. Not just of dying, but of suffering.
reading this in the midst of another nightmare fire season—one that started much earlier than usual—I recognize and sympathize with my own sentiment. Yet I've also begun to see such nightmares as my internalization of declinism, the belief that a once-stable society is headed for inevitable and irreversible doom. As distinct from a clearheaded (and heartbroken) assessment of our situation, declinism is probably one of the more dangerous forms of linear, deterministic time reckoning there is. After all, it is one thing to acknowledge the past and future losses that follow from what has occurred; it is another to truly see history and the future proceeding with the same grim amorality as the video playhead, where nothing is driving it except itself. In failing to recognize the agency of both human and nonhuman actors, such a view makes struggle and contingency invisible and produces nihilism, nostalgia, and ultimately paralysis.
Declinism is a close relative of nostalgia, and objects of nostalgia are often atemporal, lacking aliveness. An example: say you break up with someone and many years later find yourself nostalgic for the relationship. Who is it that appears in this melancholic yearning? Assuming they're still around, it is surely not your ex-partner as they currently are, the one who has continued to age and evolve. Instead, it is a frozen, idealized version of them, like a hologram that survives within and despite the present. What's more, some relationships arguably end in the first place because the partners have stopped seeing each other in time, one partner having replaced the living, changing other with a static image that can impart no surprises, only a comforting presence. As we learned with the moss, [site owner: see pg 140-143] to think you love and appreciate something or someone is, unfortunately, not a guarantee that you can assign them their own reality or that you know them at all.
That's how it's been with me and "the environment" for much of my life. When I was a kid, my family took a few road trips up north, past the seemingly impenetrable Santa Rosa and Klamath mountain ranges. From the backseat of our car as we drove up Highway 101, I saw hundreds of miles of redwoods and Douglas fir. Admiring their unbroken density, I thought I was looking at forests immemorial. (Children can be nostalgic, too.) Even entering my thirties, I hadn't made much progress past "trees = good; fires = bad." I had yet to learn that California and, indeed, much of the world was actually in the midst of a fire deficit. I was not aware of how closely the local ecology had co-evolved with periodic fire, nor the extent to which indigenous people worldwide had used fire, nor how or when such practices were banned. In other words, I thought I was looking at natural history, not political or cultural history—as if the two could ever be separated.
Book: "an attempt to see time as something other than money" Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock (2023) by Jenny Odell, pages 156-158I am citing these perspectives not in order to shame those, like me, whose worlds only now seem to be ending. Rather, to the nihilist who cannot imagine the future, I am highlighting a perspective that has survived, and continues to survive, the long-ago end of the world. There are many people and places that could accept neither Enlightenment Man's march of progress nor the billiard ball declinism of the Anthropocene—because that narrative was inherently premised upon their destruction, commodification, and relegation to a state of nonbeing. For those people and places, the historical past can never be an object of nostalgia, and the future has always been in jeopardy. If you don't want to kick the can down the road, look to those who never recognized the road in the first place.
Book: "an attempt to see time as something other than money" Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock (2023) by Jenny Odell, pages 179-180
The extra heat that we trap near the planet every day is equivalent to the heat from four hundred thousand bombs the size of the one that was dropped on Hiroshima.
Life on a Shrinking Planet by Bill McKibben, The New Yorker, November 26th, 2018
DeMocker: You have talked about "climate victory speakers." What are they?
Wood: Back in World War II citizens known as victory speakers helped mobilize the nation rapidly. They were average people who would give five-minute talks at bridge clubs, movie theaters, PTA meetings — anywhere. My mother and grandmother were both victory speakers and gave four to five speeches a day, telling people how to garden and can vegetables to conserve resources for the war effort.
People listen to trusted members of the community more than they listen to scientists or academics. Victory speakers can wake Americans up to our new reality and tell them what they can do about it. Neighborhood associations are tremendous for this. Churches are already organized through their committees and membership lists. I also see a role for the Internet and social media. A league of concerned citizens has to step up and say, "This will be my purpose. I can't solve all the problems. I can't plant all the gardens. But I'm going to take on the task of waking people up."
Let there be no mistake, our government's energy policies are a threat to our collective survival. But we've faced tyrannical threats before and overcome them — by uniting in solidarity. This is an "all hands on deck" moment for planetary defense. If we come together to present this unprecedented peril, with everyone stepping up to contribute, we just might transform our present political divisiveness into a unified effort to preserve our country.
The Sun Interview Before It's Too Late Mary Christina Wood on Avoiding Climate Disaster, interview by Mary DeMocker. February 2019.
If we think about what it means to "concentrate" or "pay attention" at an individual level, it implies alignment: different parts of the mind and even the body acting in concert and oriented toward the same thing. To pay attention to one thing is to resist paying attention to other things; it means constantly denying and thwarting provocations outside the sphere of one's attention. We contrast this with distraction, in which the mind is disassembled, pointing in may different directions at once and preventing meaningful action. It seems the same is true on a collective level. Just as it takes alignment for someone to concentrate and act with intention, it requires alignement for a "movement" to move. Importantly, this is not a top-down formation, but rather a mutual agreement among individuals who pay intense attention to the same things and to each other.
I draw the connection between individual and collective concentration because it makes the stakes of attention clear. It's not just that living in a constant state of distraction is unpleasant or that a life without willful thought or action is an impoverished one. If it's true that collective agency both mirros and relies on the individual capacity to "pay attention," then in a time that demands action, distraction appears to be (at the level of the collective) a life-and-death matter. A social body that can't concentrate or communicate with itself is like a person who can't think and act. In Chapter I, I mentioned Berardi's distinction between connectivity and sensitivity in After the Future. It's here that we see why this difference matters. For Berardi, the replacement of sensitivity with connectivity leads to a "social brain" that "appears unable to recompose, to find common strategies of behavior, incapable of common narration and of solidarity."
This "schizoid" collective brain cannot act, only react blindly and in misaligned ways to a barrage of stimuli, mostly out of fear and anger. That's bad news for sustained refusal. While it may seem at first like refusal is a reaction, the decision to actually refuse--not once, not twice, but perpetually until things have changed--means the development of and adherence to individual and collective commitments from which our actions proceed. In the history of activism, even things that seemed like reactions were often planned actions. For example, as William T. Martin Riches reminds us in his accounting of the Montgomery bus boycott, Rosa Parks was "acting, not reacting" when she refused to get up from her seat. She was already involved with activist organizations, having been trained at the Highlander Folk School, which produced many important figures in the movement.40 The actual play-by-play of the bus boycott is a reminder that meaningful acts of refusal have come not directly from fear, anger, and hysteria, but rather from the clarity and attention that makes organizing possible.
Book: How to do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy (2019) by Jenny Odell, page 81-82