Could Europe actually cool if the AMOC weakens in a warming climate?

Cooling across Europe is the most widely mentioned impact of a weakened AMOC. However, we find that the end-of-century net temperature change over Europe, including both the AMOC-induced cooling and global warming, remains surprisingly undetermined in the existing literature. In our study, using both new Earth system model simulations and existing multi-model evidence, we show that certain parts of Europe could cool below preindustrial temperatures in scenarios with both a substantial AMOC weakening and low emissions. Under continued emissions, however, most regions would either not face the risk of net cooling or only at very high amounts of AMOC weakening. Simulations under combined scenarios of AMOC weakening and global warming reveal that the effect of a given amount of AMOC weakening on European temperatures is remarkably linear and independent of the underlying emissions scenario. This relationship circumvents the large uncertainties around the AMOC’s future evolution by instead inferring the amount of AMOC weakening that would cool a specific European region or country for any global warming scenario.