Previous: Chapter 2. There’s a lot of opportunities

Chapter 3. The wheel is turning

We’re not sleeping at the wheel (Ladytron, “Soft Power”)

Glasgow, April 2024

Even after all these years, the commute by train from Helensburgh to Glasgow is still one of my favourite journeys. The views over the Clyde estuary are fabulous: the wide water, the rolling hills on the far side topped with wind turbines; the Dumbarton rock, the old dilapidated harbour at Bowling with the carcasses of old boats slowly degenerating. Even the Erskine bridge, that monument to car culture, is an impressive and arguably even elegant structure. The scenery and wildlife change every day with the tide, the weather and the seasons. On the return trip, the views towards Bute are amazing too. And in winter, the sunsets are often spectacular.

But that day, I had no eye for all that beauty. I was busy writing a short article for my long-neglected blog, explaining the need for action on AMOC: that we most likely still had time to stop it, and why in any case we needed more accurate modelling of the collapse. I had started an outline the night before, and the undisturbed half hour on the train was exactly what I needed to get a first draft ready. I walked from Partick station to the Institute on autopilot, mentally making edits, a rare thing for me. Without even bothering to check my mail, I dove straight in and finished the post in another hour. At least now I had something to share with the general public. I made sure it was prominently linked from my University web page and pinged Elías. Then I went to the Common Room for a belated cup of coffee. I decided to go for a latte, mostly because I enjoyed the ritual and found going through the steps of the process relaxing. While steaming the milk I thought back to my chat with Elías and Luzmila the day before.

I had felt quite energised after talking to my friends about getting the project started. Things were looking a lot better than I had ever dreamed. As expected, we would still need to find a considerable amount of funding, but less than I had expected. Still, although for an international research project a million was a modest budget, for crowdfunding it was a huge sum. That kind of fundraising was totally out of my line, but luckily I had more friends. Specifically, my old friend Elías Mendoza, a lifelong activist for good and a seemingly inexhaustible source of positivism and energy. I always got a buzz from chatting with him; he made me feel like we could handle anything. I had met him years ago at an online event, and in fact we had never met in person. But we had hit it off right from the start. He was in his forties then, one of those people on whom being bald looked good, with a neat short beard and a charming engaging smile. He was an endless source of great ideas and initiatives but totally humble at the same time. Elías listened carefully to my rough outline of the project, asked a few pertinent questions, and said “I think I could arrange an opinion piece for you in The Guardian.”
I was at the same time delighted and dismayed: that might very well be the end of my low profile. But probably only for a short while, the news cycle moves very fast. And it was definitely one of the best ways to get widespread attention. “That would be fantastic. Thank you so much!”
“Not at all. In the meanwhile, you write that blog post and I’ll share it with anyone I can think of: the Greens, XR, Greenpeace, all the usual suspects.”
This is why I wasn’t an activist. As Elías had assumed — he knew me too well — I had been thinking about a blog post, but I hadn’t written anything, let alone promoted it. Coming from him, promotion would work so much better. It was almost like having an agent.
He continued: “We should also talk to my friend Luzmila Moreno. She’s a community organiser and crowdfunder from Nova Scotia, that will give us some traction on the other side of the Atlantic. You’ll like here. She’s Quechua”.

Elías was right, I did like Luzmila right away. She was young enough to be my daughter and with a bit of imagination she could pass as Rob’s elder sister. Her enthusiasm was infectuous. She already knew of the AMOC story, and was really keen to help. “I have this idea for a fundraising activity that would be a great fit for AMOC: it’s to sail along the current from Bermuda to Europe in a ten-meter sailboat.”
I thought this was a great idea: Bermuda was an important point in many AMOC studies, and it would indeed get a lot colder when the collapse happened.
Elías said, “We should do it in sync, with another boat going in the other direction”.
“Great idea!”, I nodded enthusiastically. “I would go for St-Kilda as the other point, because the Outer Hebrides will be particularly hard hit by the collapse. One boat would follow the Gulf Stream and the North Atlantic Drift; the other the Canary Current and the North Equatorial Current. It would be perfect. And the aim should be for the teams to finish as close together as possible. But it will be quite a challenge. Who is going to do this?”
Luzmila replied, “I’ve already found a couple who want to do this on my side. But I don’t have any contacts in Scotland”.
“Me neither,” Elías admitted. We sat silent for a few moments, trying to think how to tackle this, but no luck. As always, Elías remained optimistic. “Anyway, we should set up the crowdfunding site first thing. I’m sure we’ll find a boat on the Scottish side.”
I wasn’t so sure, but once again, he was right.

I was trying to convince the machine to grind the coffee beans for my latte when Esther came in. She was one of my favourite colleagues and I hadn’t seen her in a while. She also happened to be the Head of the Institute. I generally felt awkward with chitchat, so my usual approach to contact in the Common Room was to keep it to a minimum. Nod, wave, hurry off. Which was a bit of a shame, as it was a nice airy room with white walls, tall windows and comfy seating.
But I always had a chat with Esther, so I sat down on the semi-circular sofa near the window and waited for her to join me. There is a row of magnificent beeches in front of the Institute, and the bright spring sunlight reflecting on the new leaves daubed the walls of the room with pale green.

While she was brewing her tea, I suddenly remembered that she had mentioned once that they had a boat at Rhu marina. I hadn’t paid much attention at the time as sailing was not my thing, and it had totally slipped my mind, but now I couldn’t believe my luck! After the most perfunctory of long-time-no-see-how-have-you-beens, I came straight to the point “Esther, I can’t believe it: only yesterday I was talking about not knowing anyone in the sailing community, and here you are! You are in the Helensburgh Sailing Club, aren’t you? You could do me a great favour!” and I explained the whole idea. Esther was of course more than happy to help. Everyone in the Instituted knew about AMOC, and was low-key worried about it. She agreed to post the idea on their facebook, and within days, things started to move. The post made its way to various sailing forums, and soon a young team got in touch, explaining they’d read my blog post and thought it was something they wanted to help with. They had wanted to do something like this for a while and had even been strengthening their boat to deal with the harsher conditions of the Northern Atlantic.

While we were planning the particulars of the action, Elías made good on his promise and got me my opinion piece in The Guardian. I positioned it as a follow-up on their original article on the AMOC collapse but did my best to make it a call to action. Elías and Luzmila were a great help, and I think the final submitted article was really pretty good. And luckily, the editors left it largely intact as well. We even managed to squeeze in a mention of the fundraising event.

The Northern Atlantic, June 2024

Purely by chance, our timing had been fortuitous: the best time to undertake this kind of cross-Atlantic sailing trip is June. The Canadian team, Roy and Stanley, set out North from Bermuda to join the Gulf Stream near the Grand Banks, off Nova Scotia; the Scottish team, Sandaidh and Evelyn, were headed South from St Kilda to join the Portugal Current near the Galician Banks, off the north-western tip of Spain, and from there on to the lower part of the Atlantic Gyre.

Sandaidh and Evelyn had decided to stay close to land and visit a number of British ports so I went to meet them in Oban, a great excuse for a trip on the beautiful West Highland Line. I was really surprised by the reception: there was a small crowd with colourful banners and the action even made it into the venerable Oban Times.

Luzmila and Elías had done a great job with the crowdfunding site, and the teams themselves already had a small but dedicated following, but we weren’t really prepared for what happened next (or at least, I wasn’t; I’m sure Elías had been counting on it from the start). The action went viral. From a niche fundraising event followed by a small but dedicated group of enthusiasts, it became a global sensation overnight. The teams became instant celebrities, and a host of volunteers appeared out of nowhere, keen to help with everything from creating a dedicated “STOP THE FREEZE” web site, to moderating the comments on the public log book of the teams. I had thought the Guardian article had given us a lot of exposure, but it was nothing compared to this. In the first week of the fundraiser we had already exceeded our three-month target, and when both journeys along the gyre where finally completed, we had a budget of ten million, an amount I’d never thought we could reach, and which would even allow us to fund part of the second iteration of the project.

Paradoxically, the fact that both teams had very limited bandwidth seemed to help with their popularity. As I’d learned, even a state-of-the-art Iridium satellite phone only has 22 kbit/s upload speed. That is plenty for voice and plain text, but posting pictures takes longer and video is out of the question. So in the morning, each team had a voice call session, and in the evening they’d post a few pictures. Somehow, the more frequent small text messages they’d post in between really appealed to the audience. The calls between both teams proved very popular as well.

It was abundantly clear to the audience that the ocean was no laughing matter: they were all alone and far from anywhere. I think it was this position of isolation and fragility that helped them get the message about the threat posed by the AMOC collapse across so effectively.

I, who before hadn’t had the slightest interest in sailing, was instantly hooked. I worried about them when they got into a storm, felt for them in the doldrums, shared their anger at the pollution and delighted with them in the beauty of it all: lush islands and schools of flying fish for Sandaidh and Evelyn; rather more austere with icebergs, seals and whales for Stanley and Roy, and magnificent clouds and gorgeous sunsets all around. It was a riveting adventure. Fortunately, there were no major mishaps and both teams arrived a their destinations after about a month and within a few days of one another.

Helensburgh, August 2024

Before sailing on to France where they had friends, Stanley and Roy stayed with me for a few weeks. They were a delightful couple and somehow fitted so seamlessly into my life that I was really sorry to see them go. It was a decent summer (for Scotland), and we went for long walks together, exploring the hills and moors. The orchids were out in myriads and the cottonsedge was like clouds of candy floss floating over the grasslands. It was idyllic, and I couldn’t help but thinking what would happen to this beautiful land when the AMOC collapsed. Luckily, it was impossible to be gloomy in their company. They took me sailing, something I’d never done before, and it was a magical experience. But after a month had flown by like the sparrow flying through King Edwin’s hall, it was time for them to move on, and on a fair morning in early August, the tide was right and they sailed off into the distance. I stood on the pier at Rhu long after their gennaker had disappeared around the Rosneath peninsula.

While walking home along the shore of the Gareloch, I mused that, even if the project would lead to nothing, at least on a personal level I was already much the better for it.

Helensburgh, October 2024

A few months later, with the practical organisation of the project in full swing, my friend Elilla sent me a very recent preprint of work by Dijkstra. He and his group at of Universiteit Utrecht specialised in the inter-relations between climate subsystems. The paper was “Probability Estimates of a 21st Century AMOC Collapse” and I admit my heart sank a bit when reading that title: if they had managed to narrow down the estimate considerably, the work of my teams might be obsolete before it even began. And it would be much harder to shift the public opinion with only this preliminary work by one group. So in a way I was relieved that their estimate only narrowed the Ditlevsen estimate to 2037-2064. It was a very important and useful piece of work, but a lot more research was still needed, and that’s where our teams came in — or so I devoutly hoped.

Next: Chapter 4. Accuracy

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