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bar10 t1_jb49877 wrote

Reply to comment by Thermodynamicist in Salty fingerprint in the Ocean is evidence of accelerated weakening of Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation by DisasterousGiraffe

>AMOC will bring less warm water northwards, and this will partly offset the warming effect of the greenhouse gases over western Europe. For the gradual weakening that is likely over the 21st Century, the overall effect is still a warming.

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Thermodynamicist t1_jb5vyoq wrote

The question is how this overall warming effect is distributed.

E.g. assume it's 15 ºC average to begin with. We might approximate this as a sine wave over the year with an amplitude of 10 ºC.

In the case of 3 ºC warming, we might then have 18 ºC with the same 10 ºC amplitude sine wave, or we might have 18 ºC ± 20 ºC. These scenarios would be very different despite having the same average temperature.

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