• ryven@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    9 hours ago

    I’m not a climate scientist, but this is my understanding: the Earth doesn’t heat evenly, because most of the sunlight falls in the tropics. The ocean currents are an important way that heat gets redistributed. If the current collapses, the temperature difference between the equator and the high latitudes will increase, because heat will travel more slowly. Trying to fix this by adding more greenhouse gases would result in the equatorial regions becoming uninhabitable before it thawed out Europe—kind of like how if you microwave a Hot Pocket and it’s heating unevenly, you can’t fix it by microwaving it more, that just makes the already-hot parts scorching.