Banking into the abyss

Apr 17

Two big news items this week about the great pumps that drive our world. RBC emerged as the planet’s pre-eminent pump for the lifeblood of fossil fuels. And that torrent of money is overwhelming the great oceanic circulatory system vital to our living Earth.

You may have heard about RBC’s rise to the pinnacle of fossil-fuelled finance, knocking JPMorgan off its perch as the biggest banker of climate breakdown. Unless you follow climate news closely, you may not have heard that the breakdown includes the deep flows and “overturnings” that drive the currents circulating from the abyssal depths back up and around the Earth’s oceans.

That may sound familiar — choking off the ocean’s currents was the premise behind the ridiculous movie The Day After Tomorrow (fun fact: the highest grossing movie ever filmed in Canada). Jake Gyllenhaal and Dennis Quaid rush into action after Antarctica’s Larsen Ice Shelf breaks away, disrupting the Atlantic’s overturning circulation, shutting down the Gulf Stream and freezing the Northern Hemisphere in a global superstorm.

We may not get flash-frozen but the underlying mechanism of melting ice disrupting the ocean’s currents is eerily similar to the results scientists published this week in the journal Nature.

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Peter Allan

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