New Scientist Premium- Climate change: The great Atlantic shutdown - Features: "Shock findings suggest vital Atlantic currents are slowing dramatically. Will this soon plunge Europe into winter, turn the Amazon into grassland and cause famine in Asia?

IS EUROPE'S central-heating system about to break down, causing climate chaos around the world? Late last year, oceanographers reported a sudden and shocking slowdown in the currents of the North Atlantic, a critical part of the vast system of ocean circulation that influences temperatures and weather around the world. A shutdown could cause famine in south Asia, kill off the Amazon rainforest and plunge western Europe into a mini ice age.

However, if you live in Europe, don't order that snowcat just yet. The conclusions reported last year have been dismissed by many climate scientists, who say their models show the current will keep going for at least another hundred years or so. So what is really going on? Are changes in ocean circulation about to turn our lives upside down, or is this something only our grandchildren will have to cope with? "