What the president-elect calls a ‘giant hoax’ is changing the strategic calculus in the Arctic and for the Panama canal

Trump’s rhetoric has been denounced by other world leaders but the rationale for this expansionism is being influenced, experts say, by something affecting both Greenland and Panama – rising global temperatures caused by the burning of fossil fuels.

Even though the incoming US president has called climate change a “giant hoax”, his son Donald Jr acknowledged the value of mining rare minerals in Greenland that are being uncovered as the ice rapidly retreats from the vast Arctic island. Greenland’s enormous ice sheet is losing an average of 30m tonnes of ice an hour due to the climate crisis, raising sea levels and potentially collapsing vital ocean currents.

As sea ice dwindles in the Arctic Ocean, meanwhile, new shipping routes through the far northern latitudes are becoming more viable. Robert O’Brien, Trump’s former national security adviser, said that Greenland, which has had a US military base since 1941, is key to counter the threat of China and Russia but it is also “very important to the Arctic, which is going to be the critical battleground of the future because as the climate gets warmer, the Arctic is going to be a pathway that maybe cuts down on the usage of the Panama canal”.

  • grue@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    14 hours ago

    Welp, I played myself. I was really intending to talk about the AMOC shutting down, but wrote “Gulf Stream” as shorthand instead because I didn’t want to spell out the whole acronym and it’s more famous/less necessary to explain (I was tapping the comment on a phone at the time).

    Then, just my luck, you come in citing a source talking (among other things) about how the Gulf Stream specifically won’t shut down totally, because of the component of it that isn’t AMOC. 🤦

    FAQ 9.3 | Will the Gulf Stream Shut Down?

    …Based on models and theory, scientific studies indicate that, while the AMOC is expected to slow in a warming climate, the Gulf Stream will not change much and would not shut down totally, even if the AMOC did…

    …

    …The Gulf Stream is part of two major circulation patterns, the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) and the North Atlantic Subtropical Gyre…

    Anyway, that gaffe aside:

    I didn’t read through that report to see what it says about the timeline for the AMOC collapse in particular, but I’ve been paying a little bit of attention to the topic for a while now and it seems to me that, as new studies come out, they tend to revise the bounds of the estimate sooner and sooner. I feel like it’s gone from “maybe by the end of the century” in the older studies to “maybe a decade or so from now” in some of the most recent ones. Personally, I think it’s alarmingly possibly imminent. That’s just my impression, though; it’s not as if I did a legitimate literature review.