It seems reasonable to call the Coalition’s policy what it primarily is: a proposal to expand fossil fuels

Some news you may not have clocked last week while the focus was on important things like a royal tour: 44 of the world’s top climate scientists, including four decorated Australian professors, released an open letter warning that ocean circulation in the Atlantic is at serious risk of collapse sooner than was previously understood.

They said a string of studies suggested the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a body backed by nearly 200 countries, had greatly underestimated the possibility that the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation – or Amoc, a system of ocean currents that brings heat into the northern Atlantic west of Britain and Ireland – could in the next few decades reach a point at which its breakdown was inevitable. The cause? Rising greenhouse gas emissions.

This is consistent with what climate computer models have forecast but there are signs the circulation is weakening more rapidly than expected. Stefan Rahmstorf, from Germany’s Potsdam Institute, told my colleague Jonathan Watts that by his estimation the risk of crossing a tipping point this century so that collapse was unavoidable had increased from less than 10% to about a 50-50 chance.

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