Do you know the difference between a prophesy and an empirical observation? If you can’t distinguish between those basic things, why do you feel comfortable snarking so confidently?
It’s worth looking at this polar map to get a visual sense of the ramifications of this happening:
Notice the red line, marking where the average temperature of the warmest month is below 10°C. Notice how low it is on the west side of the Atlantic, in Nunavut and Labrador. It’s between 50° and 60° north.
Now imagine that line at those latitudes in Europe. You’d have Labrador-like conditions in the UK, a drastic situation indeed. Reykjavik would suddenly resemble Iqaluit.
AFAIK the IPCC are generally quite conservative on these matters. Newer research shows possible collapse occurring much sooner (Sometime between 2025-2095).
I was curious about whether or not the IPCC associates numerical values to words like "unlikely" so I looked it up:
They seem to be giving the word unlikely a range from 0-33%. I'm not sure how to reason about that 0% given that they also used the phrase "not impossible."
I'm glad they took this seriously and considered it important. Maybe the world will finally notice how we're destroying the planet and ourselves, and whether anyone thinks about their children and grandchildren who may live in a world destroyed by generations.
> took this seriously
That assumes Iceland consider "National Security Risk" as politically charged as it is in other major countries.
Convincing the world seem the hard part. 43% of the forcing greenhouse grasses are currently coming from non amicable regimes. 53% if you include USA, but there's a chance administration is going to change. Beyond declaring what are the small countries options?
The same as everyone else’s options.
Adapt.
There’s no stopping this train.
> a world destroyed by generations
This hyperbole isn’t helpful. The world won’t be destroyed. (If you promise annihilation and are visited simply by devastation, it reduces credibility in an unnecessary way.)
This seems more like informal and basically reasonable talk, rather than hyperbole.
The purpose of Earth, from the point of view of most humans, is to act as a comfortable host of humans. We are destroying the Earth by making it no longer fit for that purpose. I don’t think anybody reads “destroy Earth” and interprets it as something more like, “get rid of the iron ball as well.”
Unless you are one of those deep-sea vent dwelling creatures, we’re risking changes to the planet that will affect your life eventually.
I'm curious why this conversation tat is more or less a George Carlin bit from decades ago plays out over and over on social media. I bet that you knew exactly what they meant when they talked about the world being destroyed.
It wasn't a scenario where the Earth is literally annihilated by a black hole, or a super nova, or a meteor or a GMB, it was a scenario where the world is functionally ruined for human life as we know it in a time-scale far shorter than we can muster up the resources to stop or even mitigate it.
So like, what's going on here? Is your response a subconscious coping strategy to change the topic to something more comfortable than one of impending doom for the human species and civilization as we know it?
I wish other countries would take it this seriously.
Somewhat ironically, Iceland might be the country best suited by nature to handle the cold that would descend upon the Nordics if the gulf stream collapsed. At least they have plenty of volcanic heat they can use. My home country Sweden is not so lucky. Sure it's located a fair bit further south, but it's not clear that'll be enough to escape the cold. Yet the Swedish government seems wholly oblivious. Even the opposition is silent on this issue.
Kudos to the Icelandic! I wish you well in this endeavour!
Feel like I should mention the other end of this problem too: if the gulf stream stops heating the Nordics, it also stops bringing cold water from the Arctic to the gulf of Mexico. The heat waves will be absolutely epic. The Caribbeans, Florida and Mexico ought to be more worried too. In my armchair opinion, this will go way beyond nice beach days.
See [amocscenarios.org](https://amocscenarios.org/) for various modeled scenarios on what the future could look like with a collapsed AMOC.
Sweden, Finland, Norway would not be hit too badly. Summers will still be warmer, but shorter. Winters longer but about as cold.
The worst effects will be for the UK and specifically Scotland. Their climate wil change to look more like Finlands or Swedens. I.e. proper winters with pretty deep cold spells. This will be a complete disaster as buildings and general infrastrucure will not be able to handle it. There'll be massive issues from frost heave, buildings that are not insulated enough, heating systems specced too small to properly heat houses and so forth.
An AMOC collapse will be very bad, but not quite the Day Afer Tomorrow as some think it would be.
> The worst effects will be for the UK and specifically Scotland
On the cooling side. The worst general effects will hit the Caribbean, Africa, India and Southeast Asia.
(Also the northern Rockies will get slightly better ski seasons?)
Beyond Florida, the entire east coast of the US will become not just drastically warmer if the AMOC collapses, but will experience dramatic local sea level rise (warm water is more voluminous than cold water). Think Boston with the climate of modern-day Alabama.
The main factor reducing gulf stream is increase of fresh water runoff into Arctic ocean. So maybe we should invest into building Sibaral Canal diverting some of the water of northern rivers towards Aral sea, and by that saving both Nordic and Central Asian countries.
Europe will be thrown into chaos if the AMOC actually fully collapses. Minimum temperatures in the north and west dropping twenty degrees celcius will wreak havoc on harvests, put pressure on trade relations, and will probably drain several large cities. No doubt one asshole biding their time will take the chance to start a war in Europe amidst the chaos.
From what I've read, a full collapse is unlikely, though. Plus, preventing this from happening requires a concentrated worldwide effort, which seems unlikely with the leader of the leading greenhouse gas emission source per capita having gone on record saying climate change is a Chinese conspiracy.
At this point, I think a lot of governments are just hoping the best case scenario is right, because there's hardly anything we can do if the AMOC does indeed start collapsing fully, other than southbound mass emigration.
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[dead]
Trump's instability is also a security risk.
See Bill Gates recent article on climate change alarmism.
I think in that article Gates does quite a disservice to the climate change dialogue because he does not even entertain the possibility that the most severe of the effects of climate change is going to be massive population migration due to extreme weather and agricultural failures. His comment that climate change is not going to lead to civilization collapse fails to elaborate for whom.
I think there's an "and" in that that article, not an exclusive "or".
Maybe he’s hoping for sea level rise these days. Enough to submerge a particular island.
Not how I understood it. It was about climate “vs” health not whether the climate is breaking down.
So, if this happens, Iceland actually becomes Iceland...
My (paranoid) unpopular take: the AI boom we’re currently experiencing is a concerted effort by the billionaires to maintain operational agency (the ability to think and do at a massive scale) once society begins to collapse due to climate change.
~~ edit ~~
Thank you for the sane responses. I’m reconsidering how much I believe this.
How would that work?
AI cannot run if society collapses.
Maintaining all that infrastructure and supplying spare parts is not going to work.
Also AI cannot do anything on its own. Barely anything with support from humans.
This is also my reasoning for why I think AI alignment is not going to be a problem for humanity any time soon.
By the time AI will be capable of maintaining the whole supply chain required to keep itself running sufficient time will have passed so we can come up with something viable.
Long before 2100, critical AI system will no longer be operating from this soil. They are in Earths orit, and on its moon.
> AI cannot run if society collapses.
That doesn’t mean some idiot billionaires huffing each others’ farts can’t think it can.
Respectfully disagree. An AI with full access to robots could do everything on its own that it would need to "survive" and grow. I argue that humans are actually in the way of that.
"robots" is a very hand wavy answer. There's so much that goes into the supply chain of improving and running AI that I, a human, feel quite safe.
I think this is a very common opinion here. I'd say at least 15% people believe that.
Yeah? How many robots? What kind of robots? What would the AI need to survive? Are the robots able to produce more robots? How are the robots powered? Where will they get energy from?
Sure it's easy to just throw that out there in one sentence, but once you actually dig into it, it turns out to be a lot more complicated than you thought at first. It's not just a matter of "AI" + "Robots" = "self-sustaining". The details matter.
This makes no sense. It takes a complex industrial society to keep that tech going. The supply chain to make GPUs would not survive even a modest disruption in the world economy. It's probably the most fragile thing we currently manufacture.
This is also why I'm skeptical of claims that it would be impossible (or nearly so) for governments to meaningfully regulate AI R&D/deployment (regardless of whether or not they should). The "you can't regulate math" arguments. Yeah, you can't regulate math, but using the math depends on some of the most complex technologies humanity has produced, with key components handled by only one or a few companies in only a handful of countries (US, China, Taiwan, South Korea, Netherlands, maybe Japan?). US-China cooperation could probably achieve any level of regulation they want up to and including "shut it all down now." Likely? Of course not. But also not impossible if the US and China both felt sufficiently threatened by AI.
The only thing that IMO would be really hard to regulate would be the distribution of open-weight models existing at the time regulations come into effect, although I imagine even that would be substantially curtailed by severe enough penalties for doing so.
If you're an AI company and you believe your own hype (like Musk seems to), you'll probably believe that you can automate everything from digging minerals out of the ground all of the way up to making the semiconductors in the robots that dig the minerals.
As you may infer from my use of the word "hype", I do not think we are close to such generality at a high enough quality level to actually do this.
Presumes that the surviving humans will not actively disrupt/destroy these automated industries. Which seems highly likely as they will want to scavenge them for anything of value or repurpose them for their own means.
There's lots of implicit assumptions or this would be a book, but remember that Musk has a rocket and wants to colonise Mars, and that Mars is so bad that it is currently 100% populated by robots.
For the billionaires without rockets, there's also a whole bunch of deserts conveniently filled with lots of silicon.
(Or as Mac(Format|World|User) put it sometime in the 90s when they were considering who might bail out Apple and suggested one of the middle east oil barrons, a "silly con").
While I believe we’re in a slow takeoff, I believe we are in a takeoff. The important question to my mind is whether AGI comes before systemic societal collapse due to climate change. I think it does, and my tin foil hat grows a wider brim with each passing day. I hope I’m wrong!
Who's to say it has to keep moving forward? The companies are buying up massive amounts of GPUs in this AI race, a move that's widely questioned because next year's GPUs might render the current ones outdated[0], so there will probably be plenty of GPUs to go around if the CEO demands it (prior to collapse). Operating datacenters would probably be out of the question with a collapsed society as the power grid might be unreliable, global networks might be down and securing many datacenters would probably be difficult, but there's at least one public record of a billionaire building his own underground bunker with off-grid power generation and enough room to have his own little datacenter inside[1]. "Ordinary" people will acquire 32GB GPUs or Mac Studios for local open-source LLM inference, so it seems likely billionaires would just do the next step up for their bunker and use their company's proprietary weights on decommissioned compute clusters.
This is the best argument I’ve heard against it, so thanks.
My anxiety entirely orbits around the scale of AI compute we’ve reached and the sentiment that there is drastic room for improvement, the rapidly advancing state of the art in robotics, and the massive potential for disruption of middle/lower class stake in society. Not to mention the general sentiment that the economy is more important than people’s well being in 99.9% of scenarios.
Concerted effort among the greediest people in the world all competing with each other? I find that very hard to imagine.
If there's an evil plot, it's goal must surely be to accelerate environmental degradation.
First we had the blockchain, now AI to consume enormous amounts of resources and distract us from what we should be investing in to make the environment healthier.
do you think it’s one person or a group of them that meets? design by committee? how are they getting it all done? let’s hear it!
I don’t know if I believe it’s an active conspiracy. Instead I think it’s more of a very concerning, very plausible eventuality.
FWIW I do agree with the operational agency at scale bit
and I’m always fascinated by these conspiracy theories, was genuinely hoping to get one (but also happy to see you’re challenging your own position). the idea of people coordinating on these things is very funny to me
I think like all tech people will use it for good and bad. those in power have more power etc etc I think it tends to boil down to whether you believe people are, overall, good or bad. over time, that’s what you’ll get with use of tech
You should go see "Bugonia" by Yorgos Lanthimos, if you haven't yet, then! That movie might be straight up your alley.
it's very easy to achieve great things without coordination if you can just do what's best for yourself and help your peers achieve their collective goals.
but they do meet at davos every now and again, without the democratic shackles.
Shutdown of northern Atlantic overturning after 2100 following deep mixing collapse in CMIP6 projections - 28 August 2025 - https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/adfa3b
High-resolution ‘fingerprint’ images reveal a weakening Atlantic Ocean circulation (AMOC) - 12 Oct 2025 - https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2025/10/high-...
Physics-Based Indicators for the Onset of an AMOC Collapse Under Climate Change - 24 August 2025 -https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2025JC02...
[flagged]
Do you know the difference between a prophesy and an empirical observation? If you can’t distinguish between those basic things, why do you feel comfortable snarking so confidently?
It’s worth looking at this polar map to get a visual sense of the ramifications of this happening:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_Circle#/media/File:Arct...
Notice the red line, marking where the average temperature of the warmest month is below 10°C. Notice how low it is on the west side of the Atlantic, in Nunavut and Labrador. It’s between 50° and 60° north.
Now imagine that line at those latitudes in Europe. You’d have Labrador-like conditions in the UK, a drastic situation indeed. Reykjavik would suddenly resemble Iqaluit.
Link disambiguation: <https://edition.cnn.com/2025/11/15/climate/iceland-warming-c...>
(Cited source by dagens.com, which is / may be AI-generated to boot.)
All the news seems to be copy pasted and machine translated around. I think this is the original English language source: https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/cop/iceland-sees-secu...
The IPCC rates a collapse before 2100 as “unlikely but not impossible.”
The IPCC has historically also underestimated the effect of climate change on the sea.
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/7/4/044...
When was it updated? The newer research seems up the probability.
Eg https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/aug/28/collapse...
AFAIK the IPCC are generally quite conservative on these matters. Newer research shows possible collapse occurring much sooner (Sometime between 2025-2095).
I was curious about whether or not the IPCC associates numerical values to words like "unlikely" so I looked it up:
https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2017/08/AR5_Uncertai...
They seem to be giving the word unlikely a range from 0-33%. I'm not sure how to reason about that 0% given that they also used the phrase "not impossible."
I'm glad they took this seriously and considered it important. Maybe the world will finally notice how we're destroying the planet and ourselves, and whether anyone thinks about their children and grandchildren who may live in a world destroyed by generations.
> took this seriously
That assumes Iceland consider "National Security Risk" as politically charged as it is in other major countries.
Convincing the world seem the hard part. 43% of the forcing greenhouse grasses are currently coming from non amicable regimes. 53% if you include USA, but there's a chance administration is going to change. Beyond declaring what are the small countries options?
The same as everyone else’s options.
Adapt.
There’s no stopping this train.
> a world destroyed by generations
This hyperbole isn’t helpful. The world won’t be destroyed. (If you promise annihilation and are visited simply by devastation, it reduces credibility in an unnecessary way.)
This seems more like informal and basically reasonable talk, rather than hyperbole.
The purpose of Earth, from the point of view of most humans, is to act as a comfortable host of humans. We are destroying the Earth by making it no longer fit for that purpose. I don’t think anybody reads “destroy Earth” and interprets it as something more like, “get rid of the iron ball as well.”
Unless you are one of those deep-sea vent dwelling creatures, we’re risking changes to the planet that will affect your life eventually.
I'm curious why this conversation tat is more or less a George Carlin bit from decades ago plays out over and over on social media. I bet that you knew exactly what they meant when they talked about the world being destroyed.
It wasn't a scenario where the Earth is literally annihilated by a black hole, or a super nova, or a meteor or a GMB, it was a scenario where the world is functionally ruined for human life as we know it in a time-scale far shorter than we can muster up the resources to stop or even mitigate it.
So like, what's going on here? Is your response a subconscious coping strategy to change the topic to something more comfortable than one of impending doom for the human species and civilization as we know it?
I wish other countries would take it this seriously.
Somewhat ironically, Iceland might be the country best suited by nature to handle the cold that would descend upon the Nordics if the gulf stream collapsed. At least they have plenty of volcanic heat they can use. My home country Sweden is not so lucky. Sure it's located a fair bit further south, but it's not clear that'll be enough to escape the cold. Yet the Swedish government seems wholly oblivious. Even the opposition is silent on this issue.
Kudos to the Icelandic! I wish you well in this endeavour!
Feel like I should mention the other end of this problem too: if the gulf stream stops heating the Nordics, it also stops bringing cold water from the Arctic to the gulf of Mexico. The heat waves will be absolutely epic. The Caribbeans, Florida and Mexico ought to be more worried too. In my armchair opinion, this will go way beyond nice beach days.
See [amocscenarios.org](https://amocscenarios.org/) for various modeled scenarios on what the future could look like with a collapsed AMOC.
Sweden, Finland, Norway would not be hit too badly. Summers will still be warmer, but shorter. Winters longer but about as cold.
The worst effects will be for the UK and specifically Scotland. Their climate wil change to look more like Finlands or Swedens. I.e. proper winters with pretty deep cold spells. This will be a complete disaster as buildings and general infrastrucure will not be able to handle it. There'll be massive issues from frost heave, buildings that are not insulated enough, heating systems specced too small to properly heat houses and so forth.
An AMOC collapse will be very bad, but not quite the Day Afer Tomorrow as some think it would be.
> The worst effects will be for the UK and specifically Scotland
On the cooling side. The worst general effects will hit the Caribbean, Africa, India and Southeast Asia.
(Also the northern Rockies will get slightly better ski seasons?)
Beyond Florida, the entire east coast of the US will become not just drastically warmer if the AMOC collapses, but will experience dramatic local sea level rise (warm water is more voluminous than cold water). Think Boston with the climate of modern-day Alabama.
The main factor reducing gulf stream is increase of fresh water runoff into Arctic ocean. So maybe we should invest into building Sibaral Canal diverting some of the water of northern rivers towards Aral sea, and by that saving both Nordic and Central Asian countries.
Europe will be thrown into chaos if the AMOC actually fully collapses. Minimum temperatures in the north and west dropping twenty degrees celcius will wreak havoc on harvests, put pressure on trade relations, and will probably drain several large cities. No doubt one asshole biding their time will take the chance to start a war in Europe amidst the chaos.
From what I've read, a full collapse is unlikely, though. Plus, preventing this from happening requires a concentrated worldwide effort, which seems unlikely with the leader of the leading greenhouse gas emission source per capita having gone on record saying climate change is a Chinese conspiracy.
At this point, I think a lot of governments are just hoping the best case scenario is right, because there's hardly anything we can do if the AMOC does indeed start collapsing fully, other than southbound mass emigration.
[dead]
Trump's instability is also a security risk.
See Bill Gates recent article on climate change alarmism.
I think in that article Gates does quite a disservice to the climate change dialogue because he does not even entertain the possibility that the most severe of the effects of climate change is going to be massive population migration due to extreme weather and agricultural failures. His comment that climate change is not going to lead to civilization collapse fails to elaborate for whom.
I think there's an "and" in that that article, not an exclusive "or".
Maybe he’s hoping for sea level rise these days. Enough to submerge a particular island.
Not how I understood it. It was about climate “vs” health not whether the climate is breaking down.
So, if this happens, Iceland actually becomes Iceland...
My (paranoid) unpopular take: the AI boom we’re currently experiencing is a concerted effort by the billionaires to maintain operational agency (the ability to think and do at a massive scale) once society begins to collapse due to climate change.
~~ edit ~~
Thank you for the sane responses. I’m reconsidering how much I believe this.
How would that work? AI cannot run if society collapses.
Maintaining all that infrastructure and supplying spare parts is not going to work.
Also AI cannot do anything on its own. Barely anything with support from humans.
This is also my reasoning for why I think AI alignment is not going to be a problem for humanity any time soon.
By the time AI will be capable of maintaining the whole supply chain required to keep itself running sufficient time will have passed so we can come up with something viable.
Long before 2100, critical AI system will no longer be operating from this soil. They are in Earths orit, and on its moon.
> AI cannot run if society collapses.
That doesn’t mean some idiot billionaires huffing each others’ farts can’t think it can.
Respectfully disagree. An AI with full access to robots could do everything on its own that it would need to "survive" and grow. I argue that humans are actually in the way of that.
"robots" is a very hand wavy answer. There's so much that goes into the supply chain of improving and running AI that I, a human, feel quite safe.
I think this is a very common opinion here. I'd say at least 15% people believe that.
Yeah? How many robots? What kind of robots? What would the AI need to survive? Are the robots able to produce more robots? How are the robots powered? Where will they get energy from?
Sure it's easy to just throw that out there in one sentence, but once you actually dig into it, it turns out to be a lot more complicated than you thought at first. It's not just a matter of "AI" + "Robots" = "self-sustaining". The details matter.
This makes no sense. It takes a complex industrial society to keep that tech going. The supply chain to make GPUs would not survive even a modest disruption in the world economy. It's probably the most fragile thing we currently manufacture.
This is also why I'm skeptical of claims that it would be impossible (or nearly so) for governments to meaningfully regulate AI R&D/deployment (regardless of whether or not they should). The "you can't regulate math" arguments. Yeah, you can't regulate math, but using the math depends on some of the most complex technologies humanity has produced, with key components handled by only one or a few companies in only a handful of countries (US, China, Taiwan, South Korea, Netherlands, maybe Japan?). US-China cooperation could probably achieve any level of regulation they want up to and including "shut it all down now." Likely? Of course not. But also not impossible if the US and China both felt sufficiently threatened by AI.
The only thing that IMO would be really hard to regulate would be the distribution of open-weight models existing at the time regulations come into effect, although I imagine even that would be substantially curtailed by severe enough penalties for doing so.
If you're an AI company and you believe your own hype (like Musk seems to), you'll probably believe that you can automate everything from digging minerals out of the ground all of the way up to making the semiconductors in the robots that dig the minerals.
As you may infer from my use of the word "hype", I do not think we are close to such generality at a high enough quality level to actually do this.
Presumes that the surviving humans will not actively disrupt/destroy these automated industries. Which seems highly likely as they will want to scavenge them for anything of value or repurpose them for their own means.
There's lots of implicit assumptions or this would be a book, but remember that Musk has a rocket and wants to colonise Mars, and that Mars is so bad that it is currently 100% populated by robots.
For the billionaires without rockets, there's also a whole bunch of deserts conveniently filled with lots of silicon.
(Or as Mac(Format|World|User) put it sometime in the 90s when they were considering who might bail out Apple and suggested one of the middle east oil barrons, a "silly con").
While I believe we’re in a slow takeoff, I believe we are in a takeoff. The important question to my mind is whether AGI comes before systemic societal collapse due to climate change. I think it does, and my tin foil hat grows a wider brim with each passing day. I hope I’m wrong!
Who's to say it has to keep moving forward? The companies are buying up massive amounts of GPUs in this AI race, a move that's widely questioned because next year's GPUs might render the current ones outdated[0], so there will probably be plenty of GPUs to go around if the CEO demands it (prior to collapse). Operating datacenters would probably be out of the question with a collapsed society as the power grid might be unreliable, global networks might be down and securing many datacenters would probably be difficult, but there's at least one public record of a billionaire building his own underground bunker with off-grid power generation and enough room to have his own little datacenter inside[1]. "Ordinary" people will acquire 32GB GPUs or Mac Studios for local open-source LLM inference, so it seems likely billionaires would just do the next step up for their bunker and use their company's proprietary weights on decommissioned compute clusters.
[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/14/ai-gpu-depreciation-coreweav... [1] https://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-hawaii-under...
This is the best argument I’ve heard against it, so thanks.
My anxiety entirely orbits around the scale of AI compute we’ve reached and the sentiment that there is drastic room for improvement, the rapidly advancing state of the art in robotics, and the massive potential for disruption of middle/lower class stake in society. Not to mention the general sentiment that the economy is more important than people’s well being in 99.9% of scenarios.
Concerted effort among the greediest people in the world all competing with each other? I find that very hard to imagine.
If there's an evil plot, it's goal must surely be to accelerate environmental degradation.
First we had the blockchain, now AI to consume enormous amounts of resources and distract us from what we should be investing in to make the environment healthier.
do you think it’s one person or a group of them that meets? design by committee? how are they getting it all done? let’s hear it!
I don’t know if I believe it’s an active conspiracy. Instead I think it’s more of a very concerning, very plausible eventuality.
FWIW I do agree with the operational agency at scale bit
and I’m always fascinated by these conspiracy theories, was genuinely hoping to get one (but also happy to see you’re challenging your own position). the idea of people coordinating on these things is very funny to me
I think like all tech people will use it for good and bad. those in power have more power etc etc I think it tends to boil down to whether you believe people are, overall, good or bad. over time, that’s what you’ll get with use of tech
You should go see "Bugonia" by Yorgos Lanthimos, if you haven't yet, then! That movie might be straight up your alley.
it's very easy to achieve great things without coordination if you can just do what's best for yourself and help your peers achieve their collective goals.
but they do meet at davos every now and again, without the democratic shackles.