“The inhabitants of planet Earth are quietly conducting a gigantic environmental experiment,”

wrote Wallace S. Broecker, then at Columbia University, in an article, “Unpleasant Surprises in the Greenhouse”, in the science magazine Nature in 1987. He continued:

“We play Russian roulette with climate [and] no one knows what lies in the active chamber of the gun.”

The article predicted that human-caused climate change would disrupt an Atlantic Ocean current that brings warmth to Europe. This current is known as the “Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation,” or short AMOC, of which the Gulf Stream on the Eastern U.S. seaboard is a part.

The “unpleasant surprise” is a euphemism for a continent-wide climate catastrophe that will soon hit Europe and North Africa.

I was 18 years old when I came across the article. Up to that moment, I had been active in wildlife conservation. Upon reading the article, I realized that none of the conservation work mattered if we didn’t stop greenhouse gas emissions.

The graphic shows the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (“AMOC”). The blue “cold blob” is an alarming signal that the circulation will soon fail to reach northern Europe (source: What is happening in the Atlantic Ocean to the AMOC?)

A study published last month quantified when this will happen: around 2050, with 95% confidence for the years 2025 to 2095.

The danger of an AMOC collapse due to climate change was already identified in 1961. The 1987 paper by Broecker was more detailed, spoke clearly of the danger, and devoted half the paper to rallying government institutions and politics to take climate change seriously.

Predicting what CO2 emission will do to the climate is relatively easy. Believing the data and predictions and acting now on a future threat is difficult, even if the trajectory of this threat is indisputable, as the movie “Don’t Look Up” tragically shows.

We need to function if we want to fight climate change! Therefore, at YouSolar, we are building solutions that deliver power no matter what climate change throws at us, that reduce or eliminate carbon emissions, and support and harden the electrical infrastructure for everyone else.

Slowing, stopping, and reversing climate change is an entirely different challenge. Believe it or not, what we are doing now is the easy part.