29 July 23
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DeSantis’ struggling campaign recently fired Nate Hochman, a staffer who posted a video that prominently featured soldiers marching in front of a Florida flag superimposed on the sonnenrad (a symbol neo-Nazis often use along with the swastika). Hochman worked as a communications staffer with the DeSantis campaign until his firing but was also a young rising star within the GOP: He worked as a staff writer for the National Review, had a guest essay published in the New York Times, and occasionally appeared on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News program. His LinkedIn profile shows various stints at prominent conservative think tanks and policy shops. Hochman once referred to white supremacist media personality Nick Fuentes – a Holocaust denier – as a “good influence.” He also once tweeted favorably about fascism as an ideology, comparing it to mainstream conservatism. Former GOP strategist Rick Wilson told The Guardian that Hochman was only fired “because he got caught.”
The company DeSantis keeps provides helpful context to his neo-Nazi support in his home state: In June, Florida state representative Anna Eskamani (D) tweeted videos and photos showing a gaggle of a dozen or so neo-Nazis flying swastika flags and pro-DeSantis signs that read “Make America Florida” outside of Disney World in Orlando. Gov. DeSantis has frequently attacked the company following its condemnation of his “Don’t Say Gay” bill and what he describes as its “woke” agenda.
Neo-Nazis may be more inclined to vote for DeSantis over Trump as DeSantis has consistently attempted to carve out a lane for himself by outflanking Trump on far-right culture war issues pertaining to race and gender. On Thursday, the Florida governor defended changes to Florida’s middle school history curriculum, which requires teachers tell students that slaves learned skills “that could be applied for their personal benefit.” Vice President Kamala Harris accused DeSantis of “wanting to replace history with lies.”
The slavery remarks are par for the course for the far-right governor: In May, DeSantis signed a bill defunding Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs at Florida’s public universities, arguing that educational programs encouraging racial equity “distract from the core mission” of universities. That particular bill specifically also required that general education programs “not distort significant historical events or include a curriculum that teaches identity politics.” DeSantis’ radical policies as governor led to a very rare travel advisory from the NAACP, which warned African Americans that Florida is “openly hostile toward African Americans, people of color, and LGBTQ+ individuals.”
Given his current polling position, the chances of Ron DeSantis winning the presidency, let alone the Republican nomination, are slim. But as Trump’s criminal indictments continue to pile up, his viability in a general election could come into question in the 2024 primaries, giving DeSantis an opening. This scenario is particularly worrisome: As a former Congressman and two-term governor, DeSantis would likely be far more effective at ruthlessly weaponizing the full force of the state against marginalized populations than Trump’s chaotic, incompetent, and mercurial regime.
What makes DeSantis so dangerous as a politician is precisely his advanced education and experience. In 2022, when a judge asked Ryan Newman – DeSantis’ general counsel – to define the word “woke” when he referred to Hillsborough County State Attorney Andrew Warren as a “woke ideologue” for refusing to prosecute abortion cases, the Florida governor’s top lawyer made a revealing statement. Newman said that while “woke” was a pejorative slang term for progressive activism, he gave a general definition of the word as “the belief there are systemic injustices in society and the need to address them.” He then added that DeSantis does not personally believe any systemic injustices exist.
The reason this should raise huge red flags for voters is that Ron DeSantis is an Ivy League-educated attorney with degrees from both Yale and Harvard, where he graduated Magna Cum Laude in 2005. Since the 1970s, Harvard University has taught critical race theory, which is a graduate-level course examining how racial injustices have been baked into the American legal system from chattel slavery to Jim Crow and beyond. DeSantis obviously knows systemic racial injustices exist: He’s simply using his power and position as an elected official not to combat them, but to exacerbate them. This is likely why neo-Nazis are so warm toward his campaign.
DeSantis’ 2024 campaign is thankfully teetering on the edge of collapse. His “burn rate” (the rate of a campaign’s spending vs. its fundraising) is hovering around 40% and the Florida governor recently had to lay off approximately one third of his campaign staff to make his shrinking funds stretch. The problem of DeSantis’ dwindling financial support is compounded by the fact that the first primaries are still roughly six months away, and it’s possible his presidential bid may not survive past New Hampshire.
However his current endeavor fares, it’s important to note that the Florida governor is only 44 years old and will remain a fixture in Republican political circles for numerous election cycles to come. His overtures toward neo-Nazis are an ominous sign that the Republican Party’s neo-Nazi constituency is no longer fringe, but mainstream. The beltway media needs to unequivocally condemn any politician with ties to neo-Nazis and white supremacists, and they need to do it loudly and often.
Carl Gibson is an independent journalist whose work has been published in CNN, the Guardian, the Washington Post, the Houston Chronicle, the Louisville Courier-Journal, Barron’s, Business Insider, the Independent, and NPR, among others. He lives in Louisville, Kentucky.
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A woman caught with narcotics in Singapore in 2018 was executed on Friday, making her the first woman the city-state has punished with the death penalty since 2004. (photo: NextShark)
Saridewi Binte Djamani, 45, was hanged Friday after being convicted in 2018 of possessing "not less than 30.72" grams of heroin, according to Singapore's Central Narcotics Bureau.
"The Misuse of Drugs Act provides for the death penalty if the amount of diamorphine trafficked is more than 15 grammes," the bureau said in a statement. "Thirty-point-seventy-two grammes of diamorphine is more than twice that amount, and is sufficient to feed the addiction of about 370 abusers for a week."
Despite an appeal and an attempt to get a presidential pardon, Djamani's punishment was imposed – making her the first woman to be executed in Singapore since Yen May Woen in 2004, also convicted on drug charges.
Singapore argues that its harsh laws help deter drug offenses in the city-state, but anti-death penalty advocates disagree.
Phil Robertson, deputy Asia director of Human Rights Watch, called Singapore's policies inhumane and its drug law draconian.
"The execution of Saridewi Djamani, the first woman in decades to go to the gallows, shows that this galloping effort to show the government is tough on drugs will spare no one," he said in a statement emailed to reporters. "The death penalty is an inherently cruel and unusual punishment that should be applied to no one, yet Singapore seems to positively relish these cases to demonstrate how hard they are on drugs."
Amnesty International's Chiara Sangiorgio said in a statement ahead of Djamani's execution that "there is no evidence that the death penalty has a unique deterrent effect or that it has any impact on the use and availability of drugs."
"The only message that these executions send is that the government of Singapore is willing to once again defy international safeguards on the use of the death penalty," he said.
A 2019 study by the U.S. National Institutes of Health that examined whether the effectiveness of the death penalty in deterring drug crime in the Philippines — a country that has recently debated whether to reinstate it for drug convictions — found that punishment does not deter crime. Use of the death penalty was frequently excessive for the crime committed, the study's authors said, and disproportionately affected lower-income defendants.
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Donald Trump. (photo: Erin Schaff/NYT/Redux)
The office has asked witnesses about incidents in which Trump mocked his team for pushing election fraud theories, sources tell Rolling Stone
It’s a contradiction that Special Counsel Jack Smith’s office would like to know all about.
According to two sources with knowledge of the situation, federal investigators have questioned multiple witnesses, including some in recent months, about Trump privately suggesting, starting in November 2020, that certain conspiracy theories and “evidence” were nonsensical.
Among these witness accounts are moments of the then-president repeatedly calling Sidney Powell, one of the MAGA lawyers and die-hard Trumpists aiding his effort to stop the transfer of power, “crazy,” and dismissing many of her election-fraud arguments as patently absurd.
This included Powell’s assertions that several foreign nations had secretly helped rig the 2020 election in favor of Biden, manipulating Dominion voting technology in what would amount to one of the greatest international scandals in modern history. None of this was true, and even Trump — according to these witness accounts, and other sources who relayed similar experiences to Rolling Stone — initially sneered at the ridiculousness of it all.
However, that did not stop President Trump from publicly continuing to entertain and encourage Powell’s propaganda for weeks. This led to a now-infamous Dec. 18, 2020, gathering at the White House, where Powell, Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn, and others used these conspiracy theories to try to persuade Trump to essentially declare martial law and federally impound voting equipment so that he could remain in power. (That White House meeting is itself part of a series of gatherings that the special counsel has been probing.)
The special counsel’s continuing interest in incidents where Trump either seemed to know — or was told by his own aides — that his election-conspiracy theories were baseless suggests that prosecutors are likely preparing to demonstrate that Trump’s attempts to overturn the election were not the result of a reasonable or good-faith belief in conspiracy theories but instead a willful disregard of the facts. Demonstrating that Trump knew he was misleading the public could be a crucial evidentiary hurdle in any attempt to prove Trump engaged in a criminal conspiracy over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
The special counsel’s office declined to comment. In response to a request for comment, Trump’s spokesman Steven Cheung replies: “President Trump has been consistent and never wavered in his fight to right the wrong of the rigged and stolen 2020 election. His actions, under advice of many attorneys, were in furtherance of his duties as Commander in Chief and upholding of our Constitution.”
The Powell- and Flynn-led crew supplied the Trump administration with documents they claimed corroborated their ludicrous conclusions, which implicated the Democratic Party, the Iranian government, China, and other actors. It is unclear whether Smith’s team has reviewed these papers. However, one source — who retained these documents and describes themself as a “likely witness” for the special counsel — tells Rolling Stone that they are prepared to provide them to Smiths’ office, if investigators don’t already have them.
Press reports of Trump dubbing Powell “crazy” behind her back first began trickling out, including at Axios, at the tail end of his term in office. Sources close to Trump and those who worked for him during the tumultuous presidential transition tell Rolling Stone that it is often difficult for them to determine for certain, as one former senior White House official puts it, “what [Trump] believes and what he, you know, wink-wink, ‘believes.’” Several of these sources are convinced that though Trump apparently had moments following the 2020 election when he privately admitted he lost, it ultimately did not matter to whether or not he “believed” it. Whatever mild reservations he had, he was likely able to convince himself — largely due to his immense ego — into believing that only a massive fraud conspiracy could have kept him from returning to the Oval Office.
However, that’s a distinction that, to federal prosecutors at least, may not make that much of a difference.
Trump’s awareness of the truth about the 2020 election has been a repeated area of interest for the special counsel’s office.
For instance, the office has also grilled certain witnesses — including Trump’s son-in-law and former top aide Jared Kushner — on whether the then-president privately acknowledged in the days after the 2020 election that he had indeed legitimately lost to Biden.
The special counsel’s office has also asked witnesses about the White House’s reaction to a July 2020 risk assessment of mail-in voting issued by CISA, the top U.S. cybersecurity agency, a source familiar with the matter tells Rolling Stone.
The assessment found that while all forms of voting carry security risks, the “risks to mail-in voting can be managed.”
Under questioning from the January 6 Committee in 2021, former CISA director Chris Krebs testified that the White House had told his staff that they were unhappy that the office had issued that guidance. According to Krebs, Trump administration staffers pushed back on the assessment, asking “why are we providing guidance on whether a form of voting that the President has said is insecure” and “why are we saying that there are security controls for it?”
As CNN first reported, prosecutors have also asked witnesses about a February 2020 White House meeting where staff briefed Trump on efforts to improve the security of paper ballots and election systems. After the Covid-19 pandemic took hold, Democratic voters favored mail-in voting more than Republicans, and Trump attempted to crack down on the practice, citing baseless conspiracy theories about the security of the practice. But prosecutors were reportedly interested in Trump’s comments during the pre-pandemic February 2020 meeting in which he encouraged aides to publicly tout the security of mail-in ballots and election systems.
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Republican U.S. Senator John James. (photo: Paul Sancya/AP)
ALSO SEE: DeSantis Doubles Down on Claim That Some Blacks Benefited From Slavery
John James of Michigan says presidential contender has ‘gone too far’ as outrage grows over Florida teaching of history
James – who is Black – made his remarks in a post on X, the social media platform previously known as Twitter.
“Nothing about that … evil was a ‘net benefit’ to my ancestors,” James, from Michigan, said in reference to DeSantis’s support of the recently approved Florida state education board curriculum teaching schoolchildren that enslaved Black Americans “developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal” gain.
James continued by saying that DeSantis’s education board “is re-writing history”, leaving him “so far from the party” of Abraham Lincoln, the Republican president who emancipated enslaved Black Americans before his 1865 assassination.
“You’ve gone too far,” James wrote. “Stop.”
The comments from James constituted an impassioned defense of his fellow Black Republican federal lawmakers Byron Donalds and Tim Scott. Donalds, a Florida congressman, and Scott – a South Carolina senator and declared 2024 presidential candidate – each criticized the curriculum in question and DeSantis’s support of it.
Donalds had asserted that “the attempt to feature the personal benefits of slavery is wrong [and] needs to be adjusted”. Scott had said “slavery was really about separating families, about mutilating humans and even raping their wives”.
DeSantis rebuked both men, suggesting they sounded too similar to Democratic vice-president Kamala Harris, who dismissed the curriculum as “propaganda”.
During a 21 July speech in Jacksonville, Florida, Harris – the first woman and Black person to hold her office – had also said: “They want to replace history with lies.”
James cautioned DeSantis against assailing Donalds and Scott, who make up 40% of the population of Black Republicans in Congress.
“There are only five [B]lack Republicans in Congress, and you’re attacking two of them,” James’s X post said of DeSantis. “My brother in Christ … if you find yourself in a deep hole put the shovel down.”
DeSantis joins Scott and several others in a field of Republicans who for the moment are trailing former president Donald Trump in the polls for their party’s White House nomination next year. All are trying to unseat the Democratic incumbent, Joe Biden, who is running for re-election.
James, meanwhile, has announced that he intends to seek a second term representing Michigan’s 10th congressional district. The businessman and former US army captain won his seat after a relatively close victory over Democratic candidate Carl Malinga during the November midterms.
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U.S. soldiers. (photo: Scott Olson/Getty Images)
The House and Senate are fighting over the Pentagon budget — not because anyone objects to an obscene level of military spending but because it’s become yet another a proxy for the culture war. The Left should oppose the budget for the right reasons.
Instead of doing anything about any of that, Congress is in the process of finalizing the biggest defense budget in American history. As Sen. Bernie Sanders pointed out in an op-ed on Monday, the United States already spends more money on its military than “the next 10 nations combined, most of whom are [US] allies.”
It’s been almost two years since the disastrous and seemingly endless American war in Afghanistan finally ended. But instead of cutting some of the monstrously bloated Pentagon budget to reallocate the money to domestic social programs, this year’s National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) further bloats it to an utterly unprecedented $886 billion. Add that together with the money the Department of Energy spends on America’s potentially civilization-destroying nuclear arsenal, and we’re talking about more than $900 billion.
Defense budgets often sail through without much debate. The good news is that this year is an exception. All but four House Democrats — Jared Golden of Maine, Don Davis of North Carolina, Marie Gluesenkamp Pérez of Washington, and Gabe Vasquez of New Mexico — voted against the House version of the NDAA. The Democratic-controlled Senate finalized its version yesterday, but the differences between House and Senate versions are stark, with the fight far from over.
The bad news is that almost none of the battle over the NDAA has anything to do with the fundamental absurdity of the United States pouring $900 billion into the coffers of its military while so many of its citizens struggle to meet their basic needs.
Senator Sanders wants to have that fight, which is why he voted no. But he’s a voice in the wilderness. The majority of his colleagues take the obscenity of an endlessly expanding military budget as a given. They’re only interested in fighting about the NDAA as one more front of the culture war.
The House Version
Last year’s election delivered the GOP a narrow majority in the House. Speaker Kevin McCarthy had to face down steep opposition from the most unhinged members of his caucus to make it to the top spot, and he remains reluctant to stand up to them when they make demands. The end result of all this is a House majority that misses few opportunities to throw culture-war red meat to the hardest core of the Republican base.
The House version of the NDAA includes amendments doing away with Pentagon DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) offices, ending reimbursement for the travel expenses of service members who travel to other states to have abortions, stopping the military health system from covering the transition expenses of transgender soldiers, reinstating troops who were discharged for refusing to get vaccinated for COVID-19, prohibiting the teaching of anything that smacks of critical race theory in military academies, banning drag shows from military bases, and strictly banning anyone on bases from flying the pride flag.
When I say all these things culture-war red meat, my point isn’t that none of the specific issues matter. Many fronts of the culture war don’t matter — it’s extremely unimportant, to pick an example some conservatives have gotten surprisingly worked up about, whether candy manufacturer Mars Wrigley changes its animated green M&M to make her less sexy.
But the Venn diagram of issues politicians use to shore up their culture-war bona fides and issues that matter contains real overlap. While I doubt that many service members were ever institutionally required to read Derrick Bell’s essays on critical race theory in the first place, for instance, many of the amendments to the NDAA passed in the House range from “somewhat obnoxious” to “disturbingly cruel.”
Policies implemented so the politicians who pass them can score culture-war points often have very real material consequences for their victims. What defines the culture war as a whole, though, is that for most of its combatants the battle lines are drawn not over material interests but cultural sensibilities. All the issues listed above will tend to divide people in ways that run through economic classes rather than tending to pit one class against another.
None of that means that the Left can or should avoid taking positions on important social policy issues. But it does mean that on a strategic level, if we’re going to defeat the right wing and be in a position to implement better policies on every issue, our job is to find ways to change the channel every chance we get to issues with the potential to rally the support of working-class people in general based on shared material interests.
By contrast, both conservatives and neoliberals benefit when the political conversation steers away from issues where neither has much to offer most ordinary people of any demographic. Neither major party wants to talk about why the US government doesn’t guarantee health care as a fundamental right and why it instead spends its money on sowing chaos and destruction abroad. But the pride flags on military bases? That’s a fight they’re happy to have until the end of time.
The Culture War, the Class War, and the American War Machine
The United States mainland is surrounded by oceans to its east and west and close allies to its north and south. Even if we didn’t spend ten times as much on “defense” as the next ten nations combined, there are few countries in the world in less ongoing need of being defended. Terrorism exists, of course, but its incidence within the United States has always been tiny, and there’s precious little a giant army or navy can do about it in any case.
The reality for a very long time has been that the military budget exists not for defense but for offense. The list of nations around the world the United States has bombed or invaded since the end of World War II is absurdly long. It’s even longer if you start counting the proxy wars in which US arms play a significant role, the military coups carried out by foreign officers trained by the US military — and, as Slavoj Žižek might say, “so on and so on and so on.”
All of this is very bad for the people who live in countries that come into conflict with the United States. But America’s empire is also bad for the majority of Americans. As Sanders reminds us in his op-ed, every dollar spent on “defense” is a dollar not spent on meeting the material needs of ordinary Americans.
That’s why, even though the Senate version of the NDAA isn’t loaded down with conservative culture-war amendments, Sanders voted no. Plenty of Senate Democrats talk about standing up for the interests of working-class people. Voting for a $900 billion military budget as long as nothing culturally conservative is in it is a perfect way of demonstrating that it’s just talk.
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The Ukrainian port of Odesa, which has been regularly targeted since Russia pulled out of a deal to allow grain exports from Ukraine through the Black Sea. (photo: Emile Ducke/NYT)
President Volodymyr Zelensky has promised to build up defenses around his country’s southern coast, but Kyiv must make tough decisions about where to put its resources.
President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine has vowed to enhance air defenses around the port and the southern coast, but Kyiv’s resources are stretched thin and it faces difficult choices about where to deploy the limited number of air defense systems that can shoot down Russia’s most sophisticated missiles.
Ukraine continues to ask its Western allies to speed up the delivery of more air defense systems and warn that continued Russian bombardment could leave it without the necessary infrastructure to ship grain even if Black Sea shipping lanes open up. Moscow has struck Ukrainian ports near daily since pulling out of a deal last week that allowed Ukraine to ship its grain despite the war.
“In two or three months, we may not have a single port left,” Natalia Humeniuk, the spokeswoman for the Ukrainian military southern command, told French journalists this past week. “They want to dominate the Black Sea. They want to have a monopoly on grain,” she said.
On Saturday, Ms. Humeniuk said that Ukraine had taken measures to better protect the ports but warned that Russia may once again be adjusting its tactics before striking again.
The attack reported on Saturday hit a grain terminal in the Beryslav district and was just one of 29 attacks by Russian forces directed at Kherson in the past 24 hours, the Ukrainian military said. At least four civilians have been injured in those attacks, which were carried out with mortars, artillery, tanks and aircraft, the Ukrainian military said.
The bombardment of the port city came as tensions in the waters off the southern coast of Ukraine continued to rise, with Kyiv accusing Russian warships of threatening a civilian vessel and Russia’s Black Sea Fleet running drills off Ukraine’s southern coast this month. Moscow has warned that any ships sailing to Ukraine’s ports would be considered potentially hostile.
The Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based think tank, said on Friday that the Russian naval posture in the Black Sea, which includes a warning that ships bound for Ukrainian ports would be potentially seen as carrying military cargo, was most “likely intentionally ambiguous to generate widespread concern about possible detention by the Russian navy or outright strikes on civilian vessels.”
“The Kremlin likely aims for this posturing to have a chilling effect on maritime activity so that Russian naval assets do not need to enforce an actual blockade of Ukrainian ports,” the analysts wrote.
Ukrainian border guards said they had intercepted a threatening message from a Russian warship communicating on an open channel to a civilian ship. The claim was amplified by Russian military bloggers who replayed a recording of the message. The message and the claim could not be independently verified.
Ukraine has vowed to step up its efforts to target Russian warships and vessels using Russian ports and has been working to expand its fleet of naval drones, which it has used to attack and harass the Russian Black Sea Fleet.
In an apparent recognition of the danger they pose, the Russian authorities announced a nighttime navigation ban for all small vessels near the Kerch Strait. This month, Ukraine used naval drones in an attack on the Kerch Strait Bridge, which links the Russian-occupied Crimean Peninsula to Russia, and is a primary supply route for Russian troops fighting in the south of Ukraine. The attack left the roadway badly damaged. The rail line over the bridge, however, is still functioning and Ukraine has vowed to continue mounting attacks.
Against this backdrop, it seemed unlikely that Moscow would bend to international pressure and rejoin a deal that for nearly a year had allowed Ukraine to export tens of millions of tons of grain from its ports. Moscow has complained that the deal is one-sided in Ukraine’s favor, and that Western sanctions imposed after its invasion of Ukraine have continued to restrict the sale of its own agricultural products.
Still, African leaders meeting with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia in St. Petersburg on Friday called for the revival of the Black Sea grain deal, saying that the continent was disproportionately affected by disruptions to the global food supply, while stopping short of directly criticizing Moscow for pulling out of the agreement.
“The grain deal must be extended for the benefit of all the peoples of the world, Africans in particular,” Moussa Faki Mahamat, the chairman of the African Union Commission, said at a Russia-Africa summit on Friday. “This conflict is now directly affecting us as well,” President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa said.
President Azali Assoumani of Comoros, the chairman of the African Union, said Russia’s promise of free grain for six African nations announced this week was “important but maybe not enough.”
Here is what else is happening in the war:
- Zelensky Visit: The Ukrainian president said on Saturday that he had traveled to the Donetsk region in the country’s east “to congratulate our warriors” and to “honor their strength.” In one of a series of posts on social media accompanied by photographs with soldiers, he said that he had heard a commander’s report but could not share details of current operations.
Along with pushing toward the south, Ukraine is trying to advance eastward in the direction of Bakhmut, which fell to Russian forces in May after months of bloody fighting. - Dnipro Strike: On Friday evening, at least one missile strike in the city of Dnipro, in central Ukraine, damaged a high-rise apartment building, hours after Russia accused Kyiv of firing missiles at two Russian cities.
Rescue efforts were completed overnight, the regional military administration said on Saturday morning. Nine people, including two children, were injured, local officials said. There were no casualties reported at the apartment building. The 12-story building was new, and many apartments were still unoccupied, local residents said. - North Korea and Russia: A visit by Russia’s defense minister, Sergei K. Shoigu, this past week to North Korea, during which he met with the country’s leader, Kim Jong-un, was probably a bid to secure additional weapons and political support for the war in Ukraine, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken said on Saturday.
“We’re seeing Russia desperately looking for support for weapons wherever it can find them,” Mr. Blinken said, responding to a reporter’s question in Brisbane, Australia. “We see that in North Korea. We see that as well with Iran.”
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The collapse would result in natural disasters and turn Western Europe into Alaska, scientists warn in new research. (photo: Paul Souders/Getty Images)
The collapse would result in natural disasters and turn Western Europe into Alaska, scientists warn in new research.
The new research reveals a far grimmer view of the North Atlantic’s future than the most recent predictions from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and underscores the urgency of transitioning away from the consumption of fossil fuels to curb the greenhouse gas emissions that are driving warming global temperatures.
The Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC) acts like a huge conveyor belt that delivers warm water from the equator to the poles and brings cold water back southward to the equator. In the process, the AMOC heats up Europe and cools the tropics, providing milder and more stable climate conditions in both regions.
The AMOC has been circulating since the end of the last ice age some 12,000 years ago, though scientists have found evidence that earlier collapses of the system set off sudden temperature extremes. In recent years, the AMOC has shown signs that it is weakening, leading the most recent IPCC report to conclude that it is on track to collapse sometime after the dawn of the 22nd century.
Now, physicist Peter Ditlevsen and mathematician Susanne Ditlevsen, who are siblings and researchers at the University of Copenhagen, have presented new evidence that the AMOC may collapse decades sooner.
The pair “predict with high confidence the tipping to happen as soon as mid-century,” with a 95 percent chance of occurring anytime between 2025 to 2095, assuming a “business-as-usual” future in which greenhouse gas emissions are not reduced, according to a study published on Tuesday in Nature Communications.
“The AMOC is an extremely important part of the global climate,” Susanne Ditlevsen told Motherboard in an email. “Previous studies have found early warning signals that the AMOC is weakening. However, no study has given strict statistical confidence to these findings, and the timing has not been determined.”
“We asked ourselves if it would be possible to provide reliable predictions for the timing of a possible collapse based on observations by using advanced statistical methods. And indeed, to our own surprise, this was possible,” she added.
In a follow-up call with Motherboard, Ditlevsen noted that the IPCC report is based on complex models with a dizzying array of global climate parameters. In their study, the Ditlevsens aimed to hone in on the specific fate of the AMOC by extracting so-called “fingerprints” of the system’s strength from a 150-year dataset of sea surface temperatures. This specialized technique suggested that the AMOC is much closer to collapse than implied by the IPCC’s models, raising alarm bells about the future of the North Atlantic.
“We had expected to confirm what was found in the IPCC report, so we were actually quite surprised,” Ditlevsen said in the call. “We did not expect to find such an early indication of collapse. It's not a completely different result because [the IPCC] also predicts a collapse in the models, but it's an earlier result.”
If the AMOC does collapse in the coming century, it will unleash severe disasters for the North Atlantic region. Without this circulation of hot and cold water, the higher latitudes will get colder while the tropics will get warmer, a shift that will have unpredictable and destabilizing effects on the region.
“We would probably get a climate in Western Europe more like the climate in Alaska,” Ditlevsen said over email. “Other consequences could be that the heat transported northward by the AMOC stays in the tropics, heating these even more—on top of global warming. The larger temperature difference between subtropics and mid-latitudes will increase the strength of the jet-stream and could lead to intensified storminess.”
“How fast the change will be, when the collapse is reached, is not really known,” she continued. “Climate models give different estimates from decades to centuries. The problem is that we have not seen a collapse of the AMOC in the past 12.000 years. The collapses and restarts seen in the paleo-climatic record (ice-cores) from the last glacial period were extremely abrupt” including “estimated 10-15 degrees in a decade, whereas today we might expect a decline of 5-8 degrees (compared to 1.5 degrees in the past century).”
While it’s frightening to consider that we might cross this dangerous threshold within our lifetimes, Ditlevsen emphasized that the collapse of the AMOC could potentially be averted if humanity is able to rapidly transition away from fossil fuels. In the meantime, she and her colleagues will continue monitoring AMOC observations to refine their predictions of its possible collapse.
“The closer you are to the tipping point, the more accurate our predictions will be,” Ditlevsen said. “In five years, we will be much better at saying if we were wrong, of course, and we could have waited five years with putting [the study] out, but on the other hand, we think that we have an obligation to say something.”
“Of course, I hope we are wrong,” she concluded. “I sincerely hope we are wrong.”
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