Divergent impacts of ocean tipping and global warming on habitability

The potential collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) poses substantial climate risks ¹ , yet some current economic models estimate it would have a net economic benefit through counteracting the impacts of global warming that led to its collapse in the first place ^2–4 . This is based on eventual net effects on country-level mean annual temperature ^5,6 , with no consideration of effects on precipitation, spatial detail, or shifting directions of climate change. Here, we explore the impacts of consecutive climate shifts on the human climate niche ^7,8 – first 2.5°C global warming, disproportionately affecting the Global South, and then a collapse of the AMOC, impacting North Atlantic adjacent landmasses the most. We show that these sequential changes have very different spatial patterns of precipitation and temperature effects, some of which offset each other, while others are compounding. This represents a first step towards a more nuanced, spatially and temporally explicit approach to the quantification of the impacts of tipping a critical component of the climate system.