A recent CNN article by Laura Paddison, titled “A crucial system of ocean currents is slowing. It’s already supercharging sea level rise in the US,” references new research on the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) to claim the current is slowing down leading to rising seas and costly, deadly coastal flooding. [emphasis, links added]
This false claim is based solely on a single, as yet unpublished and unverified study that used projections from a single climate model.
Evidence, including other studies and historical reports on AMOC trends, shows that there is no consensus on the status of the AMOC.
Rather, scientists’ predictions and the media’s reporting on the AMOC have been flip-flopping for nearly two decades—unable to decide whether AMOC is speeding up, slowing down, or staying steady.
The AMOC has been among the climate alarmists’ top go-to bogeymen for years. There was even a sci-fi movie made about its collapse, The Day After Tomorrow, in which the AMOC’s collapse leads to a new ice age within days.
Whether the movie made for good drama is debatable, but what is not debatable is the vigorous criticism that climate scientists leveled against its portrayal of climate change.
Looking at the history of AMOC predictions, according to some studies, it’s collapsing. In others, it’s strengthening. Sometimes studies suggest that the AMOC has not changed measurably at all in recent years.
The problem is that scientists have not had a reliable way to observe the AMOC long enough to make definitive statements. That hasn’t stopped the press from pushing speculative, often contradictory, claims based on every new study.
Heartland President James Taylor documented this ever-changing narrative in his 2021 article at Climate Realism, highlighting how climate activists have repeatedly contradicted themselves on AMOC trends.
One year it’s accelerating—fueling European warming—another year it’s stalling, threatening a new Ice Age. The takeaway? We simply don’t know enough to draw sweeping conclusions, let alone restructure financial lending or credit scoring based on these speculations.
In this case, CNN isn’t even citing published research, but relies heavily on yet unpublished research started in 2024 by Liping Zhang—an oceanographer with National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory—suggesting that the AMOC may be weakening due to climate-related factors and could be ingincreased coastal flooding.
While Zhang’s modeling work may indeed raise valid scientific questions, CNN fails to mention the massive caveats attached to this line of research: sparse observational data, high model uncertainty, and a lack of consensus within the scientific community.
Had CNN done even a modest amount of fact-checking, it would have found that two peer-reviewed studies published in Nature, a top science journal, in January and February 2025, came to precisely the opposite conclusion as the unpublished study that the “news” organization is touting.
Those studies looked at data and models and concluded that the AMOC is showing no signs of decline and is unlikely to do so even under climate extremes.
In addition, CNN ignored the fact that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in Chapter 12 of its Sixth Assessment Report: Emergence of Climate Impact Drivers, has found no correlation between climate change and coastal flooding in the present and predicts none in the future as shown in the table below, note the yellow highlighted row “Coastal flood.”
It is hard to believe there would be no coastal flooding if glacial melt were rapidly occurring, which would be necessary for the AMOC to slow abruptly.
Even when CNN acknowledges the uncertainty about the research’s claims by quoting Gerard McCarthy, an oceanographer at Maynooth University in Ireland, who candidly admits: “The science is still not clear,” its article then immediately pivots into speculative catastrophe—claiming future foreclosures, economic loss, and insurance shocks—all supposedly based on AMOC’s decline.
That’s not reporting. That’s narrative crafting.
Making matters even worse, CNN has been corrected on this issue before. In 2024, Climate Realism published a comprehensive takedown of similar claims in a piece titled “No, CNN and Other Media Outlets: Climate Change is Not Causing the Ocean Circulation to Collapse”. The article points out that the limited time frame of AMOC observations—barely two decades—renders any long-term predictions highly speculative.
Simply put: if you haven’t watched something for very long, you can’t know with any confidence what it is going to do in the future. Also, climate model projections can’t help this problem, since they are known to be flawed and are dependent upon the quality of the assumptions built into them.
If modelers assume climate change will cause an AMOC collapse, one shouldn’t be surprised when the models they create forecast a collapsing AMOC.
CNN compounds the errors resulting from its dubious use of science by projecting even more unjustified economic extrapolations. They tie AMOC-driven flooding to increased foreclosures, credit instability, and higher insurance premiums. This is a sleight of hand: attributing economic pressures caused by real estate inflation, poor zoning, and coastal overdevelopment to hypothetical ocean current changes.
The truth is that insurance losses and flood exposure are driven by where people build and what they build, not by a slow-motion current thousands of miles offshore.
This was recently exposed by Climate Realism in CNN’s Climate Con: How Real Estate, Not Storms, Drives Insurance Costs.
That article cites NOAA’s data, such as its Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters database, which consistently shows that the rising cost of disasters is due to increased development in high-risk areas, not increased frequency or intensity of disasters.
CNN’s AMOC article is yet another example of how mainstream media misleads the public by dressing up uncertain science as inevitability.
By leaning on AMOC modeling that lacks a solid observational foundation and is directly contradicted by other scientific research, then spinning speculative findings into warnings of financial collapse, CNN continues a disturbing trend: using unsubstantiated climate narratives to generate fear and political action, facts be damned.
Even though the expert that CNN quotes says, “The science is still not clear,” CNN fails to practice any journalistic caution. Instead, CNN peddles science on the AMOC that has already been debunked, using it to support alarming narratives about insurance markets, lending, and housing.
The result is a disservice to both science and the public, dismissing real science and sound economic and public policies in the pursuit of progressive political ends, like bigger government intervention in energy markets.
Read more at Climate Realism
CNN(China News Network)is leftists Propaganda not Real News that why Red Ted Turner created it for in the first place
CNN continues to tell extreme lies. In their article about the new federal budget lacking subsidies for wind and solar power, they contend this will raise consumers’ energy bills. The article says that wind and solar is cheaper than fossil fuels, so by eliminating the subsidies there would be a shift to more fossil fuels which would be result higher costs for consumers. The truth is the exact opposite. As seen by the very high cost of power by nations that have a lot of wind and solar power, such as the UK and Germany, the cost of using fossil fuels is much less. Media outlets such as CNN always ignore the fact that if wind and solar power was cheaper, they would require no subsidies or mandates. The CNN article also claimed that there would be a loss of jobs in the renewable energy sector. They ignored the fact in that shifting more to fossil fuels, there will be an increase in jobs there.