In The Age Of Climate Change, Your Life Can Be Upended At The Drop Of A Hat

The family who lived in this destroyed
California house presumably had a 
joyous Christmas. The burning 
Christmas tree inside just seems like
another one of billions of blows
the fires have landed on so many people.

The California wildfires prove once again that climate change makes all of our lives that much more unsettled and insecure.   

Thousands of lives changed for the worse at the drop of a hat last week as the wildfires tore through houses, neighborhoods, whole communities. The disaster might not have happened without climate change, or at least wouldn't have been nearly as bad. 

It was all just another example of how our own little bubbles of bliss are invaded by a sense of doom sometimes in our warming world.

Things for any individual have always been capable of suddenly going south.   A loved one might suddenly die,  you get a devastating diagnosis, you become a victim of a major crime, or your house burns down due to some stupid electrical short in an appliance. 

Those things have always been at the back of our minds, but we shove it away. We want to enjoy life, not fret about all the bad things that could happen. 

In the age of climate change, we still try not to think about the bad stuff that might or might not ever occur. And that's a good thing. Constantly worrying or obsessing over how the world can harm us is completely unhealthy. 

But the California wildfires have shoved this possibility into our faces. Just like the steady parade of mega-disasters the world is increasingly experiencing, 

Like Hurricane Helene in September. That's when people living in their corner of mountain paradise in North Carolina, seemingly safe from the worst of hurricanes that sometimes roam and wreck the coastal areas found their lives awash in epic flood ruins. 

In Helene, walls of mud swept down those beautiful North Carolina hillsides, wiping out homes and lives in an instant.  Houses and businesses seemingly too high above those pretty mountain rivers to be in harms way just washed away in a few hours from seemingly impossible floods. r 

It was the same in California. All those gorgeous homes in gorgeous neighborhoods in Pacific Palisades, Pasadena, Altadena, Malibu and other communities gone in a night. Homes full of memories and comfort just went poof and disappeared. 

Leaving all those residents to mourn and face a much too uncertain future. 

The rest of us don't really have the right to complain about how unsettling climate change is, given the trauma California fire victims are experiencing. 

But it makes us think. It can happen to us. It has in Vermont. I think of the residents of that apartment building in Plainfield, who woke up on July 10 last year in a quintessential Vermont village with a pretty little brook gurgling by beneath the rich green of the sugar maples standing guard over the town.  

In less than 24 hours, it was all gone, literally washed away in a flash flood.  Thousands of other Vermonters faced misery and ruin amid the floods of 2023 and 2024.  It hurt to watch, never mind experience it.  

The rest of us try to help out, sympathize, to do something about it, whatever we can. But otherwise, we try to live our lives in peace, and hope we're not next.

By the way, western North Carolina and Vermont were considered as two places relatively "safe" from the ravages of climate change. 

These days, we get nervous every time our homes are rocked and battered by the next extreme storm and thank our lucky stars to wake up in the morning to find little or no damage. 

I am one of those extremely lucky ones in Vermont. By my calculation, my St. Albans property has sustained about $1,500 in damage from severe storms over the past decade. That's not bad at all, and we were even more fortunate to be able to absorb those little hiccups with a minimum of discomfort. 

The California firestorms hit in the dead of winter. Most of the nation is frigid, gray, colorless this time of year. Calfornia should be greening up in what should be the usual winter rains, but it's burning down instead.

Yesterday, I ventured outdoors for awhile near my northern Vermont home, under a dark, hazy overcast, occasional snowflakes racing past me in the wind.  Winter is not my favorite season to begin with. Now, the winter seemed more depressing than usual, given the heartache in California, and the worry over what might come next. 

The classic Mamas and Papas tune "California Dreaming," popped into my head. I thought how bitterly ironic the song's lyrics have become in the tough winter of 2025:

"All the leaves are brown

And the sky is gray

I've been for a walk

On a winter's day 

I'd be safe and warm

If I was in L.A."

 

Is An Crucial Atlantic Ocean Current Called AMOC Ready To Go Amok?

Warm water heads north toward Europe, cools, 
eventually sinks, goes back south, warms up
and the process repeats itself.  However,
fresh water melting off the Arctic could stop
this circulation, causing extreme, sudden
changes in climate, especially in Europe.

 Is the AMOC ready to go amok?  

I should probably explain that one. 

The AMOC is the Atlantic Meridonal Overturning Circulation. It brings warm water from south to the northern Atlantic Ocean. That rent brings carbon, nutrients and other stuff to sustain a healthy population of fish and other aquatic animals.

It also keeps western and northern Europe much warmer than it would be, considering how far north that area is. If this circulation collapses, that region of the world would turn much, much colder in the winter. And much more variable in the summer. 

The problem is, climate change could make this circulation stop. It's already slowing down. 

For years, there's been a lot of speculation among scientists as to how far climate change needs to go before AMOC collapses. Now, a group of scientists are saying the risks of this circulation collapsing are underestimated. 

 As Gizmodo reports:

"The climate scientists quoted a 2023 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, which said there is 'medium confidence' the AMOC won't abruptly collapse by 2100. If such a low likelihood event did happen, the report added, 'it would very likely cause abrupt shifts in regional weather patterns and water cycle."

Well, at least we have time to plan, right?

But what if it happens sooner? It seems a growing body of researchers think it might.  Some scientists say it could happen as soon as the middle of this century, say 20 or 30 years from now. That's not a lot of time for millions of people to brace themselves for sudden, radical shifts in the climate. 

Nordic nations would probably stop being able to grow their own food under the extreme weather conditions. 

That would be bad enough. But a collapse of AMOC would reverberate around the world, with big time climate changes worldwide.

An AMOC collapse would probably reverse climate change in the northern hemisphere, but that would not be a good thing.

Some European cities would get 10 to 20 degrees colder within just a few decades. Meanwhile, The Atlantic Ocean sea level would rise by more than two feet. Meanwhile, the southern hemisphere would turn much warmer than it already is, and the Antarctic ice cap would melt much faster than it is now, according to renewablematter.eu.

Overall, this circulation's shutdown would also reduce the worlds supply of food.

As I noted, we don't know when, or even if this nightmare scenario will happen. But scientists are definitely worried. 

The AMOC is slowing down, and could collapse, because of melting ice sheets in Greenland and other areas of the Arctic adjacent to the North Atlantic. 

The water flowing up from the south and keeping Europe mild in this AMOC circulation is pretty salty. Once the salty water makes it that far north, it cools and sinks because the high salinity increases its density. 

Fresh water from all that ice melting off of Greenland reduces the saltiness in the water, which in turn reduces the density of the water. So less surface water sinks, which slows the flow of the current. Scientists worry if too much fresh water from ice melt flows into the Atlantic, it'll shut off the current entirely.  

 Scientists have done research on how much fresh water it would take to shut the current off. But past studies uses simulations that provided unrealistic scenarios involving a bunch of fresh water gushing into the Atlantic all at once.

 In February this year, scientists from Utrecht University in the Netherlands used a complex climate model to simulate the collapse of the AMOC and discovered that it could be closer than previously thought.

The Dutch scientists' model kept gradually adding more and more fresh meltwater to the North Atlantic and concluded that could lead to a sudden collapse of the currents in less than 100 years. However, they weren't able to come up with a statistically reliable estimate of exactly when that would happen.  

We better hope it doesn't happen anytime soon. If it does, it'll make the kinds of climate disruptions we're already seeing now just a pleasant walk in the park.