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Once the North Atlantic Thermohaline Circulation collapses, the world won't be plunged into an instant ice age. It will take anywhere from a year to a decade for the necessary temperature anomalies to form. Basically, the equatorial Atlantic will become very warm as the north Atlantic becomes arctic.
During that period, Europe will cool down -- as will North America, but not so dramatically at first. But once a certain level of temperature difference is reached, the weather will turn abruptly worse, much worse. The warm, tropical air will push into the cold arctic air and the clash will produce "superstorms" like the snowstorm that hit the eastern part of the USA on March 10-15, 1993.
Meteorologists call this a Wave 2 teleconnection since it is formed from two massive low-pressure cells, one over east-central USA, and the other over north-eastern Europe -- connected over the North Pole.
So, how do we save lives? Simple -- and difficult. Northern Europeans, who will be affected first, will need to keep a week's supply of food, fuel, water, and other provisions on hand (or more, if possible). They'll need to keep emergency supplies in, too.
Second, the immediately affected countries (Scandinavia, Scotland, the Baltics, the European heartland, and Iceland) should make evacuation plans NOW. This should be coordinated by the European Economic Community. Resettlement plans should be drawn up before the crisis hits.
Third, North America should be prepared to do the same thing. We'll be about a year behind Europe in the cool-down, although once the stormy weather starts, it is likely to be world-wide. In a full ice-age scenario, almost all of Canada will have to be resettled. Fortunately, there are only about 35 million Canadians. But 8 million are French Canadians, and that's a big cultural jump, especially for the xenophobic USA to absorb millions of people their government has conditioned them to disdain.
Now, there's a significant possibility these climate changes won't happen soon. There could be some occurrence that reverses the loss of salinity, or a cool and cloudy summer that prevents arctic ice-melt runoff, or something like that. These cycles in nature take 5-20 years to come around. We might luck out and get two decades, or five, or a century without a "climate flip-flop".
Or, it might start next week.
The over-all strategy should be: Prepare but don't panic. It costs very little to think about how to deal with it before it happens, to make some plans, to negotiate resettlement options. In your own life, if you live in Boston, don't put the house up for sale tomorrow -- just get better acquainted with the South.
And most of the lives lost to a new ice age won't be from the cold, but from famine. Yet that problem exists already in most of the world. I fear that most of these people will be lost, not because of the cold, but because of economic exploitation from multinational corporations and political tyranny from homegrown Hitlers. They don't care about their fellow citizens; CEOs and Maximum Commanders don't go without food during a famine.
The ice age in the heart of Humanity has never thawed, and it's that ice age that will harvest most of the victims.
--bkl
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