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Is the Atlantic Overturning Circulation Approaching a Tipping Point?
duction In 1751, the captain of an English slave-trading ship made a historic discovery. While sailing at 25°N in the subtropical North Atlantic Ocean, Captain Henry Ellis lowered a “bucket sea-gauge,” devised and provided to him by the British clergyman Reverend Stephen Hales, through the warm surface waters into the deep.
Furthermore, a recent study using the three-dimensional observational ocean data collected by Argo profiling floats ( https://argo.ucsd.edu/) shows that the Gulf Stream has shifted about 10 km closer to shore since the beginning of this century (Todd and Ren, 2023). At least two studies analyzing state-of-the-art climate models and observations have shown “that the recent North Atlantic warming hole is of anthropogenic origin” and is caused by reduced northward oceanic heat transport related to greenhouse gas emissions (Chemke et al., 2020; Qasmi, 2023). It would also minimize many other losses, damages, and human suffering from “regular” global warming impacts (e.g., heatwaves, floods, droughts, harvest failures, wildfires, sea level rise), which are already happening all around us even without the passing of major climate tipping points.
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