A new paper from Jungclaus et al. at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology says model runs show the melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet is not likely to shut down the thermohaline circulation any time soon:
Our results suggest that abrupt climate change initiated by GIS melting is not a realistic scenario for the 21st century.
Annan and Hargreaves (or perhaps it was Hargreaves and Annan — it’s so hard to keep those people straight:)) did a paper reaching the same conclusion something like a year ago, and I seem to recall at least one other to the same effect. I would point out that the captioned sentence is a little misleading out of its context since as stated it seems to go beyond the THC issue. Depending on how you want to define “abrupt” (not an uncontroversial point), there are concerns about GIS melting that are unrelated to the THC.
Interesting to contrast this with the one Nature wants to publish, which puts a more exciting interpretation on things 🙂
In fact the authors of this GRL paper poke gently at the Swingedouw et al model in their conclusions.