04.09.2025

Drill, Kemi, drill

Global warming could possibly switch off the Gulf Stream in our lifetime, making the UK a pretty miserable place to live. Yet the Tory leader wants us to ignore this and max out oil and gas production, writes Eddie Ford

As the planet steadily heats up, with every added fraction of a degree bringing more serious harm to the ecosystem, we are reaching various tipping points that indicate a catastrophic and irreversible climate breakdown.

One particular concern is the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), of which the Gulf Stream is part. It is the main ocean current system in the Atlantic and a component of the overall ocean circulation system, thus playing a vital role in the planet’s climate system: it brings sun-warmed tropical water to Europe and the Arctic, where it cools and sinks to form a deep return current.¹ This keeps northern and western Europe warmer than it would be otherwise, with the difference of between 4°C and 10°C, depending on the area.

Previously, the collapse of the Gulf Stream - using that as shorthand for AMOC as a whole - was considered unlikely, though it was already known to be at its weakest in 1,600 years as a result of the climate crisis, with studies of the Florida Current suggesting that the Gulf Stream was around 10% weaker from around 1200 to 1850 due to increased surface salinity and hence probably contributed to the conditions known as the Little Ice Age.²

But two major studies have indicated that collapse is no longer considered a low-likelihood event, as the Gulf Stream appears to be more unstable than previously thought - in many models the tipping point is predicted to be reached in the next decade or two, after which the shutdown of the Gulf Stream becomes inevitable, owing to self-amplifying feedback. This can be seen by the fact that air temperatures are rising rapidly in the Arctic because of the climate crisis, meaning the ocean cools more slowly there. But warmer water is less dense and therefore sinks into the depths more slowly. This slowing allows more rainfall to accumulate in the salty surface waters, also making it less dense, and further slowing the sinking, thereby forming the feedback loop.

If the Gulf Stream severely weakens or even collapses, one of the paradoxical effects of global warming in a country like Britain is that it could get a lot colder - becoming more like Labrador in Canada, which is at a similar latitude, but has different inclement conditions: wet, windy and dank.

So we have the study recently published in the journal, Environmental Research Letters, which analysed the standard models used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.³ The new analysis examined models that were run for longer, to 2300 and 2500, and made the “shocking” discovery that the tipping point at which shutdown becomes inevitable is likely to be passed within a few decades, but that the collapse itself may not happen until 50 or 100 years later. According to the research, if carbon emissions continue to rise - which seems near certain - then 70% of the model runs will lead to collapse, while an intermediate level of emissions will result in collapse in 37% of the models. Even in the case of low future emissions, shutdown will happen in 25% of the models, rather than the 10% chance that the older models suggested. The true figures could be even worse, because the models did not include the torrent of meltwater from the Greenland ice cap that is also freshening the ocean waters.

Start collapsing

Similarly, the European Union’s commissioner for climate, Wopke Hoekstra, has warned that the Gulf Stream could collapse in a few decades after a significant study was released by Utrecht University researchers.⁴ This analysed 25 different climate models and found that under what they called a “moderate emissions scenario” - meaning a rise in global temperatures of around 2.7°C above preindustrial levels this century - the Gulf Stream could start collapsing from 2063; and, of course, the planet is well on track to reach that level of heat. But under a “high-emissions scenario” of warming above 4°C, which unfortunately is far from impossible, the shutdown could occur as early as 2055.

Of course, to get a fuller perspective, we should remember that all the previous models and studies have said that the Gulf Stream would not collapse this century - we are only talking probabilities.⁵ But the consequences of a switch off when it comes to Europe, especially Britain, are incredibly serious - it would shift the tropical rainfall belt, on which many millions of people rely to grow their food, plunge western Europe into extreme cold winters, even as global warming marches on, giving us summer droughts, and add 50cm to already rising sea levels. For these very reasons, climate scientists have been warning for many years that a Gulf Stream/AMOC collapse must be avoided “at all costs” - so, while every added fraction of a degree warmer threatens more serious danger, it is also the case that every fraction less can potentially diminish that danger.

Hoekstra has called the Utrecht study yet another “wake-up call”, as it shows the Gulf Stream could collapse in our “lifetime”. Earlier this month, the European Commission vice-president, Teresa Ribera - in charge of the EU’s overarching environmental policy - suggested that the AMOC should be “added to the list of national security acronyms in Europe”, given the devastating impact of a shutdown. Sybren Drijfhout, a researcher at the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute and responsible for the study in Environmental Research Letters, said that the Utrecht research was “solid” and he too expressed frustration that the climate crisis seemed to have become less of a priority in European politics in recent years despite the threat posed by global warming.⁶

Yet we are literally running out of time - as can be seen in the UK, which has just had its hottest summer on record, according to the Met Office.⁷ The mean temperature for meteorological summer, which encompasses the months of June, July and August, was 16.1°C, which is significantly above the current record of 15.76°C set in 2018. Thus all five of the warmest summers on record have now occurred since 2000 - a clear signal of global warming, with June and July suffering four heatwaves, including temperatures above 30°C. As many can testify, there was very little rainfall across much of the country during the summer. England has experienced what the government has described as “nationally significant” water shortfalls - so that much of the country is still under a hosepipe ban. Meteorologists have said this year’s consistent warmth was driven by dry ground from spring, high-pressure systems and unusually warm seas around the UK, and minimum temperatures had been exceptionally above average.

You could argue that maybe we should be grateful for small mercies, because, although the summer has been consistently warm, there has not actually been extreme heat. The highest temperature recorded to date for 2025 was on July 1 in Faversham, Kent at 35.8°C - well short of the UK’s all-time high of 40.3°C, set in July 2022. On the other hand, the Met’s head of climate attribution, Dr Mark McCarthy, points out that in a “natural climate”, you could expect to see a summer like 2025 with an approximate return period of around 340 years, but, given the human-induced climate crisis, we could expect instead to see these sorts of summers roughly one in every five years. That is, we could experience much hotter summers in the very near future.

Everything points in this direction, one more example being that the cooling La Niña weather phenomenon - having the opposite climate impact of El Niño - might be returning between September and November. But, even if it does, global temperatures are expected to be above average, said the UN’s World Meteorological Organisation.⁸ Conditions oscillate between La Niña and its opposite, El Niño, with neutral conditions in between - after a brief spell of weak La Niña conditions, neutral conditions have persisted since March. The unusually protracted 2020-23 La Niña was the first “triple dip” of the 21st century, and only the third since 1950. However, despite all this, La Niña’s cooling effect did nothing to break the run of exceptionally hot years. The past 10 years make up the hottest 10 individual years ever recorded and temperatures have remained at record or near-record levels even after El Niño conditions faded last year - 2024 being the hottest year on record. Predictions about the weakening or collapse of the Gulf Stream sound all too plausible.

North Sea

Yet tell that to Kemi Badenoch, the current Tory leader, who is blindly chasing after Nigel Farage and Reform votes by effecting the scrapping of net zero targets - even though it was Theresa May who first put the targets into law in 2019 (presumably she is now regarded as too ‘woke’). In what is obviously her version of Donald Trump’s “drill, baby, drill” mantra, Badenoch promised this week in Aberdeen to aim to “maximise extraction” of oil and gas in the North Sea, announcing plans to overhaul the North Sea Transition Authority, which oversees the issuing of licences, dropping the word ‘transition’ and replacing its 12‑page mandate with a simple order to get as many hydrocarbons out of the ground as possible.⁹

In Trumpian mode, she told her audience that Britain is in the “absurd situation” of “leaving vital resources untapped”, while neighbours such as Norway extract them from the same seabed: “Britain has already decarbonised more than every other major economy since 1990,” Badenoch claimed, “yet we face some of the highest energy prices in the developed world”. This is not sustainable, she continued, which is why the Tory leader is “calling time” on this “unilateral act of economic disarmament and Labour’s impossible ideology of net zero by 2050”. A future Conservative government will scrap all green and other mandates for the North Sea in favour of getting “all our oil and gas out of the North Sea”, as “economic growth and our national interest came first”.

But this is illiterate nonsense on every conceivable level, as correctly observed by Peter Franklin in the online Unherd magazine.¹⁰ That is essentially because in the UK oil prices are determined by global markets, as are natural gas prices. Perhaps even more importantly, the UK produces less than 1% of the world’s oil and gas supply, so logic dictates - sorry to spoil your fantasy, Kemi - that upping the output a fraction will hardly make any difference. North Sea production peaked decades ago and all that can be achieved with new oil and gas fields, even if you leave aside the ecological implications, is to slightly slow the rate of decline.

As Franklin writes, the whole controversy is about “whether or not we leave the last dregs in the ground” and, either way, “it won’t affect our progress towards net zero nor, for that matter, the prices at the petrol pump”. Even if a Nigel Farage government nationalised the oil industry under a policy of ‘British oil for British consumers’ - you can just about imagine such a thing - it would not work to lower prices or create ‘energy security’, because Britain can never achieve “self-sufficiency” or “self-reliance”, when it comes to oil and gas. Badenoch and Farage are peddling autarkical delusions ... predictably, along with various ‘official communist’ nationalists such as the Morning Star’s CPB and the CPB Marxist-Leninist.¹¹