Meteorologist Slams CNN For Stoking Debunked Fears Of A Collapsing AMOC
CNN continues its disturbing trend of using discredited climate scares to generate panic and political action.
A recent CNN article by Laura Paddison, titled “
A crucial system of ocean currents is slowing. It’s already supercharging sea level rise in the US,” references new research on the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) to claim the current is slowing down leading to rising seas and costly, deadly coastal flooding. [emphasis, links added]
This false claim is based solely on a single, as yet unpublished and unverified study that used projections from a single climate model.
Evidence, including other studies and historical reports on AMOC trends, shows that there is
no consensus on the status of the AMOC.
Rather, scientists’ predictions and the media’s reporting on the AMOC have been flip-flopping for nearly two decades—unable to decide whether AMOC is speeding up, slowing down, or staying steady.
The AMOC has been among the climate alarmists’
top go-to bogeymen for years. There was even a sci-fi movie made about its collapse,
The Day After Tomorrow, in which the AMOC’s collapse leads to a new ice age within days.
Whether the movie made for good drama is debatable, but what is not debatable is the
vigorous criticism that climate scientists leveled against its portrayal of climate change.
Looking at the history of AMOC predictions, according to some studies, it’s collapsing. In others, it’s strengthening. Sometimes studies suggest that the AMOC has not changed measurably at all in recent years.
The problem is that scientists have not had a reliable way to observe the AMOC long enough to make definitive statements. That
hasn’t stopped the press from pushing speculative, often contradictory, claims based on every new study.
Heartland President James Taylor documented this ever-changing narrative in his
2021 article at Climate Realism, highlighting how climate activists have repeatedly contradicted themselves on AMOC trends.
One year it’s accelerating—fueling European warming—another year it’s stalling, threatening a new Ice Age. The takeaway?
We simply don’t know enough to draw sweeping conclusions, let alone restructure financial lending or credit scoring based on these speculations.
In this case, CNN isn’t even citing published research, but relies heavily on yet unpublished research
started in 2024 by
Liping Zhang—an oceanographer with National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory—suggesting that the AMOC may be weakening due to climate-related factors and could be ingincreased coastal flooding.
While Zhang’s modeling work may indeed raise valid scientific questions, CNN fails to mention the massive caveats attached to this line of research: sparse observational data, high model uncertainty, and a lack of consensus within the scientific community.
Had CNN done even a modest amount of fact-checking, it would have found that two peer-reviewed studies published in
Nature, a top science journal, in
January and
February 2025, came to precisely the opposite conclusion as the unpublished study that the “news” organization is touting.
Those studies looked at data and models and concluded that the AMOC is showing no signs of decline and is unlikely to do so even under climate extremes.
Meteorologist Slams CNN For Stoking Debunked Fears Of A Collapsing AMOC - Climate Change Dispatch
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