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climate scientists
Why Is Taylor Swift's Engagement Bigger News Than the Risk of AMOC Collapse?
Media’s obsession with one story—and its ignoring of the other—highlights the gaps that remain in treating the climate crisis like the cataclysm it has become.
Sep 12, 2025
Chances are you’ve heard that Taylor Swift is getting married. When she and Travis Kelce announced their engagement last month, it was all over the news, all over the world.
Chances are equally good that you did not hear some other, literally Earth-shaping news that broke two days later. On August 28, some of the world’s foremost climate scientists dramatically revised their estimate of how soon one of the foundations of Earth’s climate system could collapse.
Media’s obsession with one story—and its ignoring of the other—highlights the gaps that remain in treating the climate crisis like the cataclysm it has become. While progress has been made in many newsrooms, old journalism habits linger, including sidelining important climate news out of misguided fears that it’s depressing or too complicated. As Covering Climate Now’s 89% Project has shown, that’s not how most readers or viewers see it.
The collapse of what is commonly called the Gulf Stream—the vast Atlantic ocean current that scientists refer to as the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, AMOC—would deal a crushing blow to civilization as we know it. Sometimes known as Europe’s “central heating unit,” the AMOC is why Britain, France, The Netherlands, and their northern neighbors enjoy relatively mild winters, even though they sit as far north as Canada and Russia.
AMOC originates in the Caribbean, where sun-warmed sea water flows northeast across the Atlantic toward Greenland. The amount of heat AMOC transports is staggering: 50 times more heat than the entire world uses in a year. Without AMOC, the history and present day of Europe would look very different. Winters would be much colder and longer. Food production would be much less, as would the human population and infrastructure the region could support.
The scientific study released on August 28 concluded that AMOC’s collapse “can no longer be considered a low-likelihood event,” to quote The Guardian, one of the very few outlets to report the news. Indeed, such a collapse is more likely than not if humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions remain on their current trajectory. If emissions continue to rise, there is a 7 out of 10 chance that AMOC will collapse, the scientists calculated. If emissions fall to a moderate level, the odds are 37%—roughly 1 in 3. Even if emissions decline in line with the Paris Agreement goal of limiting temperature rise to 1.5 to 2°C, there is a 1 in 4 chance of collapse.
“It’s like the saying that every disaster movie starts with scientists warning and being ignored.”
Although the collapse might not occur in this century, the scientists warned that the system could pass a “tipping point” in the next decade or two that makes its eventual collapse inevitable. As 44 scientists explained in an open letter to the Nordic Council of Ministers, AMOC might well collapse in this century, but there is an “even greater likelihood a collapse is triggered this century but only fully plays out in the next.”
The only hope, the scientists added, is a “global effort to reduce emissions as quickly as possible, in order to stay close to the 1.5 [°C] target set by the Paris Agreement.”
By no means is northern Europe the only region in peril. A collapse, or even significant slowdown, of AMOC would devastate agriculture in Africa and other parts of the Global South by massively disrupting rainfall patterns.
All of which helps explain why Stefan Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, who coauthored the new study, was frustrated by how little attention he and his colleagues’ warnings got. “What more can we do to get heard?” he asked. “It’s like the saying that every disaster movie starts with scientists warning and being ignored.”
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'A Mockery of Science': Experts Slam Trump DOE's Climate Report in New Paper
"The goal is clear," said one of the experts. "To justify inaction and avoid meaningful emissions reductions."
Sep 02, 2025
The US Department of Energy's July climate report is "biased, full of errors, and not fit to inform policymaking," according to a comprehensive review released Tuesday by a group of 85 scientists who reviewed the document independently.
The department's "Climate Working Group" drew up the report as part of the effort by US President Donald Trump to fatally undermine the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) determination, commonly known as the "endangerment finding," that greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane endanger human lives by warming the planet.
"If successful," Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M, says, "this move could unravel virtually every US climate regulation on the books, from car emissions standards to power plant rules."
The Energy Department's nearly 150-page paper, titled "A Critical Review of the Impacts of Greenhouse Gas Emissions on the US Climate." Dessler describes its five authors as "climate contrarians who dispute mainstream science." The team behind the report, he argues, was "hand-picked" by Energy Secretary Chris Wright to lend legitimacy to the Trump administration's predetermined conclusions about climate science.
The DOE report's five authors seek to contradict the much more rigorous analyses conducted by groups like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), whose reports have been written by over a thousand researchers and which cite tens of thousands of academic studies.
The multinational panel has concluded that human fossil fuel usage has considerably warmed the planet, causing increased amounts of extreme weather, threatening food and water security, destroying ecosystems, and risking dangerous amounts of sea-level rise.
The Energy Department's report advances the main idea that climate scientists like those at the IPCC broadly "overstate" the extent of the human-caused climate crisis as well as its risks. Unlike other research of its kind, the department crafted its report in secret, which prompted the expert response.
"Normally, a report like this would undergo a rigorous, unbiased, and transparent peer review," said Dr. Robert Kopp, a climate and sea-level researcher at Rutgers. "When it became clear that DOE wasn't going to organize such a review, the scientific community came together on its own, in less than a month, to provide it."
Their review found that the Energy Department's report "exhibits pervasive problems with misrepresentation and selective citation of the scientific literature, cherry-picking of data, and faulty or absent statistics."
For instance, the report claims that there is "no obvious acceleration in sea-level rise" even though the number of days of high-tide coastal flooding per year has increased more than 10-fold since the 1970s.
It also attempts to portray CO2 emissions as a net benefit to the environment, particularly agriculture, by pointing to its benefits for crop growth, but ignores that the impact of increased droughts and wildfires far outweighs those benefits.
And it attempts to pick out isolated historical weather events like the Dust Bowl during the 1930s as evidence that dramatic climatic changes happen very frequently within short amounts of time and that the unprecedented increase in global temperatures over the past century and a half is not worthy of alarm.
"My reading of the report uncovered numerous errors of commission and omission, all of which slant toward a conclusion that human-caused climate change poses no serious risks," said Kerry Emmanuel, a meteorologist and climate scientist who specializes in hurricane physics. "It seems to work backward from a desired outcome."
Dessler notes that over 99% of the literature included in the IPCC's report was simply ignored by the Department of Energy. He described the report as a "mockery of science" akin to a "Soviet show trial."
"The outcome of this exercise by the Department of Energy is already known: climate science will be judged too uncertain to justify the endangerment finding," he said. "Once you understand that, everything about the DOE report makes total sense."
In 2025, the US National Weather Service issued a record number of flash flood warnings, while 255 million Americans were subject to life-threatening triple-digit temperatures in June. The previous year, 48 of 50 US states faced drought conditions, the most ever recorded in US history, while nearly 9 million acres burned due to wildfires.
"We live in a world where the impacts of climate change are increasingly being felt by citizens all around the globe—including communities throughout the US," said Andra Gardner, a professor of environmental science at Rowan University.
"This is perhaps what makes the DOE Climate Working Group report most astounding," she continued. "In a country where we have the tools to not only understand the impacts of climate change but also to begin meaningfully combating the crisis, the current DOE has instead decided to promote fossil fuel interests that will further worsen the symptoms of climate change with a report that turns a blind eye to the established science."
According to an analysis from Climate Power published in January, oil and gas industry donors gave $96 million in direct donations to the campaign of Donald Trump and affiliated super PACs during the 2024 election, while spending $243 million to lobby Republicans in Congress.
The result has been an administration that has purged climate science information from federal websites, laid off thousands of EPA employees, and gutted government funding for wind and solar energy.
Becca Neumann, an associate professor in the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department at the University of Washington, says that "the goal" of the report "is clear: to justify inaction and avoid meaningful emissions reductions."
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Capitalism Eating Itself by Fueling Climate Mayhem, Warns Capitalist
If humanity stays on current course, warns top insurer, the "financial sector as we know it ceases to function. And with it, capitalism as we know it ceases to be viable."
Apr 03, 2025
A veteran financial consultant and insurance executive is warning his fellow capitalists that their commitment to profits and market supremacy is endangering the economic system to which they adhere and that if corrective actions are not taken capitalism itself will soon be consumed by the financial and social costs of a planet being cooked by the burning of fossil fuels.
According to Günther Thallinger, a former top executive at Germany's branch of the consulting giant McKinsey & Company and currently a board member of Allianz SE, one of the largest insurance companies in the world, the climate crisis is on a path to destroy capitalism as we know it.
"We are fast approaching temperature levels—1.5C, 2C, 3C—where insurers will no longer be able to offer coverage for many" of the risks associated with the climate crisis, Thallinger writes in a recent post highlighted Thursday by The Guardian.
"Meanwhile in the real world—a capitalist declares that capitalism is no longer sustainable..."
With "entire regions becoming uninsurable," he continues, the soaring costs of rebuilding and the insecurity of investments "threaten the very foundation of the financial sector," which he describes as " a climate-induced credit crunch" that will reverberate across national economies and globally.
"This applies not only to housing, but to infrastructure, transportation, agriculture, and industry," he warns. "The economic value of entire regions—coastal, arid, wildfire-prone—will begin to vanish from financial ledgers. Markets will reprice rapidly and brutally. This is what a climate-driven market failure looks like."
Commenting on the Guardian's coverage of Thallinger's declaration, Dan Taylor, a senior lecturer in social and political thought at the Open University, said, "Meanwhile in the real world—a capitalist declares that capitalism is no longer sustainable..."
While climate scientists, experts, and activists for decades have issued warning after warning of the threats posed by the burning of coal, oil, and gas and humanity's consumption of products derived from fossil fuels, the insurance industry has been the arm of capitalism most attuned to the lurking dangers.
"Here go the radical leftist insurance companies again," said David Abernathy, professor of global studies at Warren Wilson College, in a caustic response to Thallinger's latest warnings.
Despite their understanding of the threat, however, the world's insurers have primarily aimed to have it both ways, participating in the carnage by continuing to insure fossil fuel projects and underwriting expansion of the industry while increasingly attempting to offset their exposure to financial losses by changing policy agreements and lobbying governments for ever-increasing protections and preferable regulatory conditions.
In the post, self-published to LinkedIn last week, Thallinger—who has over many years lobbied for a more sustainable form of capitalism and led calls for a net-zero framework for corporations and industries—warned of the growing stress put on the insurance market worldwide by extreme weather events—including storms, floods, and fires—that ultimately will undermine the ability of markets to function or governments to keep pace with the costs:
There is no way to "adapt" to temperatures beyond human tolerance. There is limited adaptation to megafires, other than not building near forests. Whole cities built on flood plains cannot simply pick up and move uphill. And as temperatures continue to rise, adaptation itself becomes economically unviable.
Once we reach 3°C of warming, the situation locks in. Atmospheric energy at this level will persist for 100+ years due to carbon cycle inertia and the absence of scalable industrial carbon removal technologies. There is no known pathway to return to pre-2°C conditions. (See: IPCC AR6, 2023; NASA Earth Observatory: "The Long-Term Warming Commitment")
At that point, risk cannot be transferred (no insurance), risk cannot be absorbed (no public capacity), and risk cannot be adapted to (physical limits exceeded). That means no more mortgages, no new real estate development, no long-term investment, no financial stability. The financial sector as we know it ceases to function. And with it, capitalism as we know it ceases to be viable.
In an interview earlier this year, Thallinger explained that failure to act on the crisis of a rapidly warming planet is not just perilous for humanity and natural systems but doesn't make sense from an economic standpoint.
"The cost of inaction is higher than the cost of transformation and adaptation," Thallinger said in February. "Extreme heat, storms, wildfires, floods, and billions in economic damage occur each year. In 2024, insured natural catastrophe losses surpassed $140 billion, marking the fifth straight year above $100 billion."
"Transitioning to a net-zero economy is not just about sustainability," he continued, "it is a financial and operational necessity to avoid a future where climate shocks outpace our ability to recover, straining governments, businesses, and households. Without decisive action, we risk crossing a threshold where adaptation is no longer possible, and the costs—human and financial—become unimaginable."
Thallinger's solution to the crisis is not to subvert the capitalist system by transitioning the world to an economic system based on shared resources, communal ownership, or a more enlightened egalitarian response. Instead, he proposes that a "reformed" capitalism is the solution, writing, "Capitalism must now solve this existential threat."
Calling for a reduction of emissions and a rapid scale-up of green energy technologies is the path forward, he argues, asking readers to understand "this is not about saving the planet," but rather "saving the conditions under which markets, finance, and civilization itself can continue to operate."
This disconnect was not lost on astute observers, including Antía Casted, a senior researcher at the Sir Michael Marmot Institute of Health Equity, who suggested concern over Thallinger's prescription.
"It would be fine if [the climate crisis] destroyed civilization and maintained capitalism," Casted noted. "They just need to find a way for capitalism to work without people."
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