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PH Penny Holliday On The Climate Question

“The thing that's not realistic about the film is that it happens sort of overnight or over a few days. And that wouldn't happen. It's plausible that it could weaken quite fast in ocean time scales. And that means over probably a few decades rather than just a day or two.”

The Climate Question · Climate & Energy · November 2026

“The thing that's not realistic about the film is that it happens sort of overnight or over a few days. And that wouldn't happen. It's plausible that it could weaken quite fast in ocean time scales. And that means over probably a few decades rather than just a day or two.” — Penny Holliday, The Climate Question

Context

Asked whether the Atlantic current collapse in The Day After Tomorrow is accurate, the oceanographer says less heat reaching Europe could cool it, but the film gets the speed wrong. She prefers "weakening" to "collapse."

Transcript

The Climate Question Around 09:26 into the episode
Speaker 1

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Graihagh Jackson

…that film the day after tomorrow, and in that film, the AMOC collapses, and New York basically freezes over. And indeed, there's a lot of concern that people have about the AMOC collapsing, at least online. And I just wonder, is that an accurate depiction of what could happen if it does collapse?

Speaker 4

There are some aspects of it, which are similar to how things might evolve in the future, in that if the AMOC weakens, less heat is carried northwards by that ocean current. And that means there's less heat available to warm places like Europe and the UK. So with under a weaker AMOC, there is the potential for there to be a net cooling effect in Europe and the UK. But the thing that's not realistic about the film is that it happens sort of overnight or over a few days. And that wouldn't happen. The AMOC could potentially weaken. It's plausible that it could weaken quite fast in ocean time scales. And that means over probably a few decades rather than just a day or two. And it's really important to consider the terminology we're using here. So there is talk of AMOC collapse, but we prefer to talk about AMOC weakening because most likely what will happen under climate change is that the AMOC will slowly start to weaken. There may be a point, some models do show a point where it collapses, it gets to a weaken point where it can't recover. But many models…

Speaker 2

Has the AMOC ever collapsed before

Speaker 4

or weakened? Before? Yeah, we think the AMOC, there's plenty of evidence to show that the AMOC can exist in a weaker state than it is at the moment. There's some evidence too that the AMOC during the period in which human civilization has expanded across the world, the AMOC's been in a really…

Speaker 2

Can I ask how extreme some of the changes

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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