If it were to come true, Wally Broecker would earn yet another, deserved scientific accolade: The Great Ocean Conveyor. More from WHOI here.
“The climate system is an angry beast and we are poking it with sticks,” said Dr. Wallace S. Broecker of Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, who was one of the first to raise the alarm about abrupt climate change. ”We don’t know whether it’s going to pay attention to the pokes. But if it does, it might rise up and do something we don’t like.”
(Courtesy of the New York Times.)
Update. 2015-03-24, 20:44 EDT
More on this from Stefan Rahmstorf at RealClimate. See also and see this too, and this.