So here is where we are. The El Niño will arrive, the thermometers will spike, and the AMOC-on-the-brink stories will spike along with them, because a record-hot year is when the genre sells best. The collapse forecasts will lead with the statistical estimator that cannot distinguish a real signal from noise, and with the model runs that require more meltwater than Greenland can supply, and they will leave out the twenty years of moorings showing a system that swings hard and trends gently and refuses to be called a shutdown by the man who measures it. Then, a while later, the readings will report another swing, somebody will quietly extract a smoothed line, and the reassessment will follow the alarm the way it always does.