Chances are you’ve heard that Taylor Swift is getting married. When she and Travis Kelce announced their engagement last month, it was all over the news, all over the world.
Chances are equally good that you did not hear some other, literally Earth-shaping news that broke two days later. On August 28, some of the world’s foremost climate scientists dramatically revised their estimate of how soon one of the foundations of Earth’s climate system could collapse.
Media’s obsession with one story — and its ignoring of the other — highlights the gaps that remain in treating the climate crisis like the cataclysm it has become. While progress has been made in many newsrooms, old journalism habits linger, including sidelining important climate news out of misguided fears that it’s depressing or too complicated. As CCNow’s 89 Percent Project has shown, that’s not how most readers or viewers see it.
The collapse of what is commonly called the Gulf Stream — the vast Atlantic ocean current that scientists refer to as the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, AMOC — would deal a crushing blow to civilization as we know it. Sometimes known as Europe’s “central heating unit,” the AMOC is why Britain, France, The Netherlands, and their northern neighbors enjoy relatively mild winters, even though they sit as far north as Canada and Russia.
AMOC originates in the Caribbean, where sun-warmed sea water flows northeast across the Atlantic toward Greenland. The amount of heat AMOC transports is staggering: 50 times more heat than the entire world uses in a year. Without AMOC, the history and present day of Europe would look very different. Winters would be much colder and longer. Food production would be much less, as would the human population and infrastructure the region could support.
The scientific study released on August 28 concluded that AMOC’s collapse “can no longer be considered a low-likelihood event,” to quote The Guardian, one of the very few outlets to report the news. Indeed, such a collapse is more likely than not if humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions remain on their current trajectory. If emissions continue to rise, there is a seven out of 10 chance that AMOC will collapse, the scientists calculated. If emissions fall to a moderate level, the odds are 37% — roughly one in three. Even if emissions decline in line with the Paris Agreement goal of limiting temperature rise to 1.5 to 2 degrees Celsius, there is a one in four chance of collapse.
Although the collapse might not occur in this century, the scientists warned that the system could pass a “tipping point” in the next decade or two that makes its eventual collapse inevitable. As 44 scientists explained in an open letter to the Nordic Council of Ministers, AMOC might well collapse this century, but there is an “even greater likelihood a collapse is triggered this century but only fully plays out in the next.”
The only hope, the scientists added, is a “global effort to reduce emissions as quickly as possible, in order to stay close to the 1.5 [degrees C] target set by the Paris Agreement.”
By no means is northern Europe the only region in peril. A collapse, or even significant slowdown, of AMOC would devastate agriculture in Africa and other parts of the global south by massively disrupting rainfall patterns.
All of which helps explain why Stefan Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, who co-authored the new study, was frustrated by how little attention he and his colleagues’ warnings got. “What more can we do to get heard?” he asked. “It’s like the saying that every disaster movie starts with scientists warning and being ignored.”
From Us
At ONA25? If you’re in New Orleans this week for the Online News Association conference, we’ll be co-hosting an interactive workshop with the Solutions Journalism Network on Saturday, September 13, at 10am US Central Time. We’ll be going over the basics of solutions journalism and best practices for covering a climate crisis, helping participants draw the climate connection in their reporting and build the foundations of good climate journalism. Hope to see you there!
Workshop: How to Humanize the 89%. To kick off The 89 Percent Project’s second phase, Covering Climate Now is hosting a one-hour editorial meeting on Thursday, September 17, at 12pm US Eastern Time for journalists to brainstorm ways to put a face to the silent global climate majority, the 80 to 89% of the world’s population that wants their governments to do more on climate change. RSVP.
Learn more about The 89 Percent Project, and get involved.
The Future of Climate Reporting. The International Press Institute (IPI) and CCNow, in partnership with the Pulitzer Center, are teaming up to host a special series of events on the future of climate reporting for the attendees of the 2025 IPI World Congress and Media Innovation Festival, October 23-25, in Vienna. Learn more.
Quote of the Week
“If the farmers of Punjab — the food bowl of India — cannot even feed themselves, how will they feed others?”
– Surinder Singh, a farmer whose lands were devastated by the worst monsoon flooding in decades, told The Guardian
Noteworthy Stories
Climate summit. Leaders at the Africa Climate Summit earlier this week discussed strategies to reframe Africa as an “engine of solutions.” They announced plans to raise $100 billion from African development finance institutions and private banks to encourage industrialization free of the emissions that accompanied development in Europe, the US, and Asia. By David Akana for Mongabay…
CDR deductions. New research published in Nature finds that “the amount of carbon emissions that the world can safely store is just a 10th of industry estimates, something that would cut warming by much less than expected.” By Elena Mazneva for Bloomberg…
1 in 4. A new report from Realtor.com “found that slightly more than 1 in 4 US homes, representing nearly $13 trillion in value, are vulnerable to ‘severe or extreme climate risk.’” By Zoya Teirstein for Grist…
Pupil power. An “optional extracurricular activity” in a University of the South Pacific environmental law class went all the way to the International Court of Justice (IJC) and transformed global climate law. By Brooke Jarvis for The New York Times Magazine…
🎧 Bonus: Environmental lawyer Angelique Pouponneau, a Seychelles native and lead negotiator for the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS), explains the IJC advisory opinion and why it’s given small island nations “reason to be hopeful.” Mongabay podcast…
Empty nets. Southwest Louisiana was once the “shrimp capital of the US,” but fishermen say that the growing number of LNG terminals, chemical plants, and refineries have decimated their harvests. By Phil McKenna for Inside Climate News…
Resources
China’s impact. The global energy thinktank Ember released its first comprehensive review of China’s clean energy transition and finds that its “surge in renewables and whole-economy electrification is rapidly reshaping energy choices for the rest of the world, creating the conditions for a decline in global fossil fuel use.” Read the report.
Damning evidence. A new study published Wednesday in Nature finds that most of the deadly heat waves of the past 25 years would not have happened without emissions from the world’s largest oil, gas, and coal companies. “The conclusions may have far-reaching ramifications, including aiding those who seek in court to make oil and gas companies pay for climate change-related harm, a task that has proven extremely difficult in the US.” By Andrew Freedman for CNN.
Jobs & Fellowships
Chicago Public Media is looking for a senior editor, public health and safety (Chicago, Ill.). The Houston Chronicle is looking for a business editor (Houston, Texas). Quanta Magazine is looking for a physics editor (N.Y., N.Y.). The University of Florida is seeking a multimedia meteorologist to report for outlets across the state (Gainesville, Fla.). Floodlight is hiring an editor-in-chief (remote).
Pulitzer Foundation Fellowships. Applications are now open to join the third cohort of the Ocean Reporting Network (ORN), a fellowship program that gives professional journalists the opportunity to spend up to a year working on an in-depth or investigative ocean story. Apply by September 12, 2025.