[user104658]

Originally Posted by Zizu

Hasn’t the Gulf Stream froze / paused a few times for a short time .. already


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It does and has always fluctuated but it's been more unstable and less predictable post-industrial-revolution and continues to degrade. If the current was to be disrupted entirely it would alter the weather patterns of a large chunk of the world (UK/Western Europe and West Africa would be hardest hit, but also all of the Americas, notably the east coast of South America).

The Gulf Steam is directly influenced by atmospheric CO2 levels which do also fluctuate naturally, but currently roughly 33% (1/3) of atmospheric CO2 is due to human industrial and commercial activity.

In other words, upcoming climate change is very real and if not "man made", definitely accelerated by our activities (by potentially thousands of years). Would the same thing have happened eventually? Probably yes, but not for many hundreds of years. As for when it actually will happen, that's not really predictable either. It could be in a few decades, it could be 100+ years when none of us are around to know about it, so we might never get to tell the climate-skeptics "I told you so". They don't really understand small statistical changes. If they can't look out their window and see that something is different, then it isn't happening.