Free Republic

The state of “current” affairs is not good. An Atlantic current that’s key for maintaining the climate could collapse sooner than we thought, potentially bringing about a global weather apocalypse, per an alarming study in the journal Science Advances. “This is a key result with implications for the future climate of the Atlantic and beyond,” the international team of researchers wrote in the paper. The at-risk current in question is the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC, a “conveyor belt of the ocean” that circulates warm water toward the ocean surface from the tropics to the Northern Hemisphere. This oceanic...

ANCHORAGE, Alaska - Climate change could thaw the top 11 feet of permafrost in most areas of the Northern Hemisphere by 2100, altering ecosystems across Alaska, Canada and Russia, according to a federal study. Using supercomputers in the United States and Japan, the study calculated how frozen soil would interact with air temperatures, snow, sea ice changes and other processes. The most extreme scenario involved the melting of the top 11 feet of permafrost, or earth that remains frozen year-round. "If that much near-surface permafrost thaws, it could release considerable amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and that could...