[HN Gopher] Japan's cherry blossom 'earliest peak since records ...
___________________________________________________________________
Japan's cherry blossom 'earliest peak since records began'
Author : onetimemanytime
Score : 195 points
Date : 2021-03-30 16:54 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bbc.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bbc.com)
| mrb wrote:
| It's interesting that in the chart we even see an expected peak
| around 1600-1700 that correspond to the Little Ice Age period
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ice_Age (colder weather =
| late cherry blossom season)
| shakezula wrote:
| Which seems to shore up the hypothesis here a little bit more.
| The Little Ice Age is a really interesting phenomenon to me in
| terms of climate study. We really take the stability of our
| climate for granted. I'm sure future generations will not have
| that luxury.
| tasogare wrote:
| More time to the beach, less energy spent on heating, easier
| crops farming, embrace the decline.
| dwaltrip wrote:
| I'm sure you will be in favor of providing support to those
| of the hundreds of millions of climate migrants who come to
| your major cities?
| jagger27 wrote:
| Don't forget to also embrace the more frequent and
| devastating forest fires, droughts, floods, and extreme
| weather!
| nemo44x wrote:
| I do wonder for some of these disasters, like forest
| fires and floods, if they're caused in large part by
| humans settling in more places. Not caused by the people
| settling and developing those areas but by virtue of
| settling places where these things happen and thus
| becoming a disaster because people are there.
| i_haz_rabies wrote:
| not to mention worsening air quality, ocean
| acidification, rising ocean levels, and massive loss of
| biodiversity!!
| loopz wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change
| minikites wrote:
| It astounds me how people who are otherwise intelligent and who
| understand the scientific method don't believe in anthropogenic
| climate change. It doesn't fill me with a lot of hope for the
| future, since we can't begin to work on this problem at the scale
| we need if so many of us don't think there even is a problem to
| begin with.
| godmode2019 wrote:
| 'intelligent' people question everything. Lay people accept
| information without question.
| elif wrote:
| Intelligence can better be described as finding the right
| middle, rather than adhere to either of your hyperbolic
| extremes.
|
| "questioning everything" is to forego basic levels of
| knowledge upon which higher levels of understanding must be
| built.
| wodenokoto wrote:
| The updated headline "Japan's cherry blossom 'earliest peak since
| 1409'" does not match the article headline nor the article
| content. The previous headline on HN "Japan's cherry blossom
| 'earliest peak since 812'" matches both article headline and
| content.
|
| Until this year, the earliest peak was in 1409, but this year is
| not only the earliest peak since then, but the earliest peak ever
| recorded since 812.
| dukeofdoom wrote:
| For whatever reason, fruit trees are really ascetically pleasing.
| I suspect because humans have been selectively breeding them for
| so long. Interesting bark, flowers, leaves, and colourful tasty
| fruit. I think they are remarkable achievements of human
| innovation. Cherry blossom trees no longer produce edible size
| cherries just flowers. But I noticed how much longer cherry
| blossoms last on the West coast, which I believe is due to longer
| cooler summers.
| soperj wrote:
| Yes they do, they're sour cherries though so no one eats them.
| They litter the sidewalks where I live in the pacific north
| west, and the wasps are all over them come fall.
| yongjik wrote:
| I once read an excerpt of a Portuguese priest's report about
| his travel to Japan in Edo period - there was a remark about
| how exquisitely beautiful Japanese gardens are, and how much
| the Japanese care about them. Then he says no garden had any
| fruit trees, because the Japanese considered such trees utterly
| unworthy of their attention.
|
| Like European lawns, apparently these gardens _had_ to flaunt
| total lack of practical benefit, like peacocks ' feathers.
| jolmg wrote:
| > considered such trees utterly unworthy of their attention.
|
| That doesn't read like wanting to flaunt lack of practical
| benefit. Might it not be more about fruit trees and non-fruit
| trees requiring different forms of attention? Like having to
| clean up after possibly-sticky, rotting fruit, etc. You can't
| rake fruit like you would with leaves. If anything, non-fruit
| trees seem more practical.
| yongjik wrote:
| I'm paraphrasing from memory, but the priest made it clear
| that the Japanese considered fruit trees unworthy of their
| garden, not just "requiring different maintenance." (Well,
| of course, I don't know how fluent the priest's Japanese
| was, so there might be a game of telephone occurring here
| ...)
| ekianjo wrote:
| Fruit trees would also attract all sorts of animals and
| you probably don't want that if you manage a garden.
| pvaldes wrote:
| They talk about a wild prunus Prunus jamasakura. I didn't knew
| the species, seems okay
|
| But what most gardeners today are culturing is not so much Prunus
| jamasakura as Prunus serrulata, that are complex hybrids from
| several cherry species.
|
| This mean that any comparison with USA data would be useless for
| example.
|
| When an hybrid or lots of hybrids arose, contamination and
| eventually replacement of the pure species is expected. In a few
| centures the species change or even are replaced by the hybrids.
| (For example, finding a wild pure-blood japanese Chaenomeles
| currently is mission impossible). So my first question would be,
| how they managed that problem?
|
| Are they registering a mix of several hybrids, that moves the
| average up or down because some in particular are trendy or
| forgotten?
|
| Could be that and explanation to the final part of the curve?
|
| A similar plot could made us conclude (wrongly) that the corn is
| getting much bigger in the last 1000 years "by climate change",
| instead because people selected more modern varieties of corn.
|
| Just an neutral opinion.
| mrow84 wrote:
| > A similar plot could made us conclude (wrongly) that the corn
| is getting much bigger in the last 1000 years "by climate
| change", instead because people selected more modern varieties
| of corn.
|
| Surely this conclusion would only make sense if we believed
| that relevant climatic changes were occurring over the same
| time frame as the changes in size.
|
| In the case of the cherry trees, the shift in the full-
| flowering date corresponds very well with the shift in the
| local temperature record (also provided at [0]), lending
| credence to that being the explanatory factor. Other factors
| are, of course, possibly relevant, but I don't think that the
| link is as weakly founded as your counter-example suggests.
|
| [0] http://atmenv.envi.osakafu-u.ac.jp/aono/kyophenotemp4/
| svara wrote:
| > Could be that and explanation to the final part of the curve?
|
| In principle yes of course, but 1) there's an obvious mechanism
| which gives you a clear prior and 2) this is not the first time
| people have looked at this type of data and the results are
| consistent across species and locales [1].
|
| Makes looking for "alternative explanations" look like
| motivated reasoning to me.
|
| You might have a point if you actually had particular insight
| on how the species and cultivars used in Japan changed over
| time.
|
| [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenology for a starting
| point.
| asdff wrote:
| They got around this problem by not considering the hybrids,
| but Prunus jamasakura. Here is what they wrote in one of the
| source papers on how they inferred the species of the trees in
| the historical record(1).
|
| "First, we determined the species of the most common cherry
| tree at Kyoto during the historical period. In the modern
| phenological observations by the Japan Meteo- rological Agency,
| Prunus yedoensis (Japanese common name, Somei-Yoshino) is
| considered representative of all cherry trees, and its full-
| flowering dates are observed by most meteorological stations in
| Japan, except those in Hokkaido District and the Ryukyu
| Islands. However, P. yedoensis is an ornamental tree developed
| in the mid- dle of the 19th century, and it did not exist
| before that. Many descriptions in old documents suggest that a
| native species, Prunus jamasakura (Japanese common name,
| Yamazakura), was grown in Kyoto and its suburbs, and it was
| planted also in the ground of the imperial palace from ancient
| times. Therefore, P. jamasakura was the most common species of
| cherry tree in Kyoto until the middle of 19th century"
|
| 1. https://rmets.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/joc.1594
| martingoodson wrote:
| This ignores the fact that temperature has a known strong
| effect on flowering time [1]. It's the obvious and evidence-
| based reason for the phenomenon, so there isn't any basis to
| invent some other reason to do with hybrid genetics. Especially
| since there is no evidence for your hybrid hypothesis
| whatsoever.
|
| There is also no reason for corn getting bigger when climate
| change happens so a 'similar plot' would not make us conclude
| anything of the sort. This is therefore a terrible analogy. In
| fact the evidence is that climate change will _reduce_ corn
| yield [2].
|
| [1]
| https://enveurope.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s12302-0...
|
| [2] https://exhibits.stanford.edu/data/feature/corn-and-
| climate-...
| throwaway5752 wrote:
| Actually a really good point. This is just a correlation with
| an imprecise causal link, even if global warming is clearly the
| most likely factor.
|
| Direct observations of the warming over centuries are direct
| proof of climate change, in addition to proof in ice cores,
| tree rings, and sedimentary deposit patterns (among others) of
| prior rates of change being much more gradual.
| onetimemanytime wrote:
| It could be a coincidence but honestly if we see too many of
| these records, it _may,_ actually be a forest.
| trynumber9 wrote:
| That's awful. A longer growing season. Truly, we will never be
| able to accommodate such radical changes.
| soperj wrote:
| So previous record was in the 1400s, and was one day different.
| If this is directly tied to climate change then what was the
| cause then?
| antasvara wrote:
| I like to think of this from a statistical perspective, where
| climate change makes the _mean_ peak bloom come earlier in the
| year. However, there are lots of external factors that can
| affect peak bloom date as well. If you look at the graph in the
| linked article, you 'd see that there's a wide variety of
| different peak dates even in the 1400's but that the overall
| trend is towards earlier in the year as we get closer to
| present day.
| soperj wrote:
| There's been 2 peaks in March since the year 2000, and one
| was on the very last day of March. This is clearly an
| anomaly.
|
| If the article was about mean peak bloom then I wouldn't
| really have anything to say about it.
| aeturnum wrote:
| Climate does fluctuate and there is randomness. When you look
| at the tend you can see how the line has recently taken a
| dramatic turn.
|
| The takeaway is that we've seen these conditions once in the
| last 1200 years, but based on recent data we expect things to
| continue to get hotter. As I saw someone say: don't think of
| this as the hottest year on record, think of this as the
| coolest year for the rest of your life.
| scaladev wrote:
| >think of this as the coolest year for the rest of your life
|
| As someone who had to suffer through -40-45degC winters all
| my life, I can live with that. I don't know if it's due to
| climate change, but this winter was pretty tame. Only a few
| -40degC days in total, not three to four weeks as it always
| had been previously.
| klyrs wrote:
| In urban northern Canada, this sounds pretty great. Rural
| parts are facing a significant challenge, because ice roads
| are freezing later, and thawing earlier.
| smiley1437 wrote:
| Assuming you are not just trolling, random fluctuations are
| expected to create the occasional outlier.
|
| The difference is the steep trend in the past 150 years.
| Alupis wrote:
| OK, but do we have more data points for these cherry
| blossoms, or just the one the article is pointing out? How do
| we know this isn't another random fluctuation for cherry
| blossoms?
|
| Could it be global warming? Sure, but we need to be careful
| with our confirmation bias.
| sueders101 wrote:
| >do we have more data points for these cherry blossoms
|
| Yes, the article includes a nice graphic showing the "peak
| bloom day of the year". It shows that average peak bloom
| date has been getting steadily earlier in recent history.
| throwaway5752 wrote:
| Obviously. It will continue to break that record for the rest of
| the century. We have unchecked global warming.
|
| For example, this article about it from just 4 years ago shows an
| obvious trend: https://www.economist.com/graphic-
| detail/2017/04/07/japans-c.... This year's peak is just below the
| bottom of the chart (March 26) in the Economist article. The
| Osaka University chart in the linked BBC article shows just how
| abrupt and accelerating the trend is in the last 150 or so years,
| and real changes in the last 10.
|
| We are all in real trouble.
|
| edit: whoever you are can brigade and flag my posts, but it won't
| change anything.
| aceon48 wrote:
| Lol ok so there was global warming in 812 for the early bloom
| or what? Some things just cycle.
| aphextron wrote:
| >"Some things just cycle."
|
| What are local maxima?
| wtallis wrote:
| The article makes it clear that 812 is merely the extent of
| the historical record-keeping, not that 812 had a remarkably
| early peak. The article also includes a graph that
| illustrates no obvious cyclical behavior over that time span.
| throwaway5752 wrote:
| I'm sorry that you don't understand means, statistical
| distributions, or standard deviations. Your "gotcha" is a
| self-own in that regard.
|
| Or, by all means show some evidence that the evidence in the
| linked article (Osaka U publication) is tied to any cycle. I
| am willing to just look at it with my own lying eyes and see
| an abrupt trend that begins in the mid-nineteenth century.
| That visual evidence in addition to the mountains and
| mountains of data, theory, research and proof behind global
| warming that agrees with what is plainly obvious are
| convincing to me.
| lostcolony wrote:
| So to be clear (some responses imply this, but I figured it's
| worth calling out) - "since 812" is not saying 812 it was
| this early. It wasn't. This is the earliest -we've ever
| recorded-. And the records go back to 812.
| WhompingWindows wrote:
| Starting comments with "lol ok" isn't in keeping with HN
| guidelines, by the way.
|
| Some things cycle, and some things trend. Look up the CO2
| concentrations in the atmosphere and tell us: is that cycling
| or is it trending upwards? Look up the temperature in the
| past 100 years and tell us: is that cycling or trending
| upwards?
|
| Judging based on your "lol ok", you may not be here to
| advance the dialogue.
| yourmom2 wrote:
| are you one of the "enlightened" american hackers?
| ecf wrote:
| At first I thought there was a typo and the article meant 1812.
| But no. They really mean 812.
|
| As someone in their late 20s, I don't see how the future of Earth
| in another half-century is anything but bleak.
| TheAdamAndChe wrote:
| The future will be different, and we will have to adapt. But to
| see it as bleak is to embrace the pessimistic interpretation,
| which while sometimes accurate isn't always the best way to
| view things.
|
| Humans are the most adaptable species on the planet. We can
| purposefully manipulate our environment for our purposes. Our
| adaptability will help us going forward.
| TLightful wrote:
| Yay, technology and adaptability will allows us all,
| eventually, to exist drinking dust and looking after termites
| as pets.
| eloff wrote:
| More like half-millennia that we'll be dealing with the fallout
| from climate change. The next 50 years won't even be the
| fastest paced period of change. It's pretty bleak.
|
| If there's a silver lining it's that on time scales of tens of
| millennia we might have avoided descending into another glacial
| period - which would be disaster for the northern hemisphere,
| erase Russia and Canada, and wipe out a sizable or even
| majority share of current crop production. It's tough to say if
| that would even matter to humans so far into the future, but
| maybe it's a small consolation.
|
| The next ten generations or so are going to have some
| incredible challenges to overcome.
| wunderflix wrote:
| 30 years ago my mum said the same about the coming next 30
| years. I am not saying that your hunch is wrong. I just want to
| caution that people were thinking similarly a while back. Don't
| underestimate the will and resourcefulness of men.
| titzer wrote:
| People can. not. understand. exponential growth.
|
| Things are really speeding up! Half of all CO2 emissions by
| humans have been since... _1990_. https://ieep.eu/news/more-
| than-half-of-all-co2-emissions-sin...
|
| Global emissions are higher than they were in 1990, and
| higher than the average over these last 30 years. And still
| increasing.
| wunderflix wrote:
| If you acknowledge the negative effects of potential
| growth, do you also see the upsides of it?
|
| Exponential growth in smart people working on solutions for
| example. 1 year ago no one assumed that we would have 4
| working vaccines already deployed to millions of people.
| titzer wrote:
| I am told day-in and day-out about how awesome this
| exponential growth thing is. Month after month, year
| after year, they just keep stuffing this exponential
| growth right up my in face without me even asking for it.
| Exponential growth has got the entirety of the world's
| mindshare behind it. It's not enough to just constantly
| scramble everything and revolutionize everything, and eat
| everything up. Ya can't even utter a word against it;
| everyone must bend a knee to it. It's the only model that
| anyone seems to be able to think of. "Circle the wagons,
| someone criticized it!" The reality is that we get
| nothing but exponential growth, and promises of more
| exponential growth. It's the only future we see now. It's
| the only answer have to any kind of problem. What are we
| going to do about all this debt? Exponential growth. What
| are we going to do about retirement? Exponential growth.
| What are we going to do about the climate? Exponential
| growth. How are we going to feed our exponential growth?
| More exponential growth. We're addicted to exponential
| growth mindset and we are now _incapable_ of imagining
| anything else. No, I don 't need to constantly mouth
| platitudes about the upsides of it, not anymore. Not
| after the rivers and fields I frequented as a kid are
| choked with garbage and plowed under for subdivisions.
| But oh yeah, exponential growth. Everybody loves it.
| Can't say a word against it. Like a watermelon growing in
| a lightbulb. This exponential growth thing isn't gonna
| work out in the end, people. But hey, your computer is
| fast, you little ingrate.
| the-dude wrote:
| Please, I remember we would all die a horrible death due to a
| nuclear armageddon.
|
| When that didn't happen, we would all suffocate because all the
| forests would die due to acidrain.
|
| Then we would all die of skin cancer due to the ozone-hole.
|
| I actually remember the nuclear effects from Tjernobyl, glad I
| didn't die then.
| titzer wrote:
| They only have to be right once....
| bosswipe wrote:
| Who is "they"?
| titzer wrote:
| The same amorphous "they" that denialists are always
| talking about being wrong.
| musingsole wrote:
| Go read Wheel of Time and pay particular attention to
| Ishamael/Moridin's character arc.
|
| They only have to be right once, sure, but the entire
| fabric of existence is working against 'them' to make sure
| it will never happen.
| eloff wrote:
| > Please, I remember we would all die a horrible death due to
| a nuclear armageddon.
|
| That's not off the table at all, it's just not talked about
| much anymore.
|
| To take your argument seriously, past performance does not
| predict future results. The fact that we've avoided disaster
| in the last 80 years does not mean we will be so lucky with
| climate change. It's certainly not a reason to ignore the
| risks - the ozone hole situation improved because the nations
| of Earth took united and conclusive action to halt it by
| banning CFCs.
| yongjik wrote:
| > Please, I remember we would all die a horrible death due to
| a nuclear armageddon.
|
| And then leaders of superpowers talked to each other, signed
| treaties, and decided not to start a nuclear war, because
| nobody likes dying.
|
| > When that didn't happen, we would all suffocate because all
| the forests would die due to acidrain.
|
| So nations signed treaties and laws to limit sulfur and NOx
| emission, which worked.
|
| > Then we would all die of skin cancer due to the ozone-hole.
|
| Yep, treaties and laws. No more CFC, no more ozone hole.
|
| > I actually remember the nuclear effects from Tjernobyl,
| glad I didn't die then.
|
| OK I'll grant you that this was overblown a bit.
| ed25519FUUU wrote:
| What about global cooling scare[1], which obviously turned
| out to be nothing but I'm sure was used to scaremonger
| people?
|
| OP wasn't saying that they weren't real issues. In fact
| they were all serious! I think he was saying there's
| nothing good about falling into a nihilist hole. Living
| together on Earth is hard and takes cooperation. There's
| plenty of room for the innovators but no room for the
| defeatist.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_cooling
| yongjik wrote:
| From your link:
|
| > Academic analysis of the peer-reviewed studies
| published at that time shows that most papers examining
| aspects of climate during the 1970s were either neutral
| or showed a warming trend.
|
| I'm too young to have read anything about Global Cooling
| during the 1970s, but I can confidently say that, by
| 2021, I've seen way more "Ha ha scientists warned about
| Global Cooling in 1970s which makes the theory of Global
| Warming invalid!" than actual "Scientist So-and-so warned
| that the Earth is Cooling." It's basically historical
| revisionism for selling an agenda.
| kbelder wrote:
| I still think cooling is a larger long-term threat than
| warming. Warming is a temporary disruption for humans,
| but the biosphere will, overall, flourish. Cooling is
| more of a general threat to Earth life, and it's pretty
| sure to happen. We are subject to periodic ice ages. The
| difference, I guess, is that the warming is upon us NOW,
| while the ice age is potentially 50,000 years off.
| wtallis wrote:
| If you believed that humans are causing global warming,
| then you wouldn't have to worry about the possibility of
| global cooling: we can obviously put a stop to _that_ if
| we ever find ourselves facing the onset of a real ice
| age.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Technically, we're _experiencing_ an ice age, albeit the
| tail-end of one:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaternary_glaciation If it
| ends, things don't look good for us; we'd have to re-do
| all our infrastructure at the _least_.
| ska wrote:
| Right in your link:
|
| "Some press reports in the 1970s speculated about
| continued cooling; these did not accurately reflect the
| scientific literature of the time, which was generally
| more concerned with warming from an enhanced greenhouse
| effect."
|
| i.e. even in the 70s scientist were worried about warming
| because they saw concerning data.
|
| people getting concerned out about nonsense in the press
| has been with us since there was a press (cf 80s satanic
| panic) ... but that doesn't mean people being concerned
| about something in the press is nonsense.
| the-dude wrote:
| > And then leaders of superpowers talked to each other,
| signed treaties, and decided not to start a nuclear war,
| because nobody likes dying.
|
| Well, actually the Russians ran out of money.
| handol wrote:
| I'm not an expert on this, but 'ran out of money' doesn't
| sound like a real explanation for the collapse of a
| government. That state has the authority to make money,
| it can't simply run out of it's own currency.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| A country can print as much currency as it wants. In that
| sense it cannot run out of money. What it can't do is
| print as much currency as it wants, and still have people
| want that currency, or have them accept it at the
| previous value. In that sense a country certainly can run
| out of money.
|
| Take a step further back. As Thomas Sowell says,
| economics is the study of the allocation of scarce goods
| that have competing uses. In a free economy, money is how
| we organize that. But even if we had infinite money, that
| wouldn't give us more of anything else. It would just
| mean that everything cost infinite dollars to buy.
|
| The problem that the Soviet Union had was that their
| economy couldn't produce enough to supply their military
| competition with the US. "Ran out of money" is one way of
| describing that, but the literal number of rubles in
| circulation is not at all the issue.
| dylan604 wrote:
| But if you spend that "own" currency on building military
| equipment that doesn't work instead of farming to feed
| your citizens, that "own" money doesn't spend very far
| when buying from outside sources.
| ska wrote:
| > Well, actually the Russians ran out of money.
|
| As a pithy summary of what happened to the USSR, that's
| not bad. As a summary of nuclear non-proliferation it's
| ahistorical.
| cgriswald wrote:
| I remember a New Agey book talking about California becoming
| an island, the Mississippi River flooding the Great Plains
| essentially splitting the US in two, and Florida being
| completely underwater... by like 1990.
|
| That said, just because some people take hysteria to the
| extreme doesn't mean the threats aren't real. The nuclear
| annihilation one in particular came down to a handful of
| people steering the ship blind and somehow not running into
| the rocks while their first mates were screaming at them to
| turn the other way.
| kbelder wrote:
| True, but it means that you maybe shouldn't partake in
| extreme hysteria.
|
| I vividly remember my teacher in High School asking the
| students to raise their hands if they thought there would
| be a nuclear war with the USSR in their lifetime, and I was
| the only kid in my class who didn't think there would be.
|
| I imagine that there would be a similar response now, if
| you asked a bunch of kids if civilization was going to
| collapse due to global warming in their lifetime.
|
| Doesn't mean that global warming isn't a problem, just like
| nuclear war wasn't a problem; it just means that people
| have a hard time evaluating risk and likelihood.
| rsynnott wrote:
| > Please, I remember we would all die a horrible death due to
| a nuclear armageddon.
|
| That was a significant risk at one point.
|
| > When that didn't happen, we would all suffocate because all
| the forests would die due to acidrain.
|
| Eh? Who told you that?
|
| > Then we would all die of skin cancer due to the ozone-hole.
|
| That was a serious, but ultimately very tractable problem,
| with an expensive but feasible solution, which was taken.
|
| > I actually remember the nuclear effects from Tjernobyl,
| glad I didn't die then.
|
| See answer two.
|
| Global warming is most similar to number three, but the
| solutions are far, far more expensive, and may have been left
| too late.
|
| Ultimately "something bad nearly happened, but it was
| averted" doesn't form a great basis to assume that the next
| very bad thing will also be averted.
| musingsole wrote:
| "something bad nearly happened, but it was averted" is
| literally the story of life on Earth.
| haltingproblem wrote:
| Good points.
|
| Don't forget the prediction of mass starvation made in the
| 1970s for the 80s, updated to the 90s then the 2000s and so
| on and so forth.
|
| Galactic gloom and doom is probably written into our genes
| which is why it makes its way into almost every western
| religion. Armageddon. We need to balance our natural
| proclivity for gloom and doom with plausible scenarios like
| pandemics, asteroid strikes, obesity epidemic, population
| declines instead of fantasy one that never come to pass or
| ones we have no control over.
| ska wrote:
| > Don't forget the prediction of mass starvation made in
| the 1970s for the 80
|
| This didn't happen at any significant scale; I mean there
| were (correct) concerns about geopolitical forces leading
| to things like the mid 80s ethiopian faminei impact but no
| concern about wide spread starvation.
|
| There _was_ concern about mass starvation in the earlier
| part of the century, and it was pretty well founded. This
| changed due the "green revolution" and massive increase in
| food production.
|
| What this shows is that predictive models can be made
| obsolete by new technology.
|
| Unfortunately, a lot of people take the wrong lesson from
| that. The assumption that new technology will arrive in
| time to address a well predicted problem is dangerously
| irrational.
| haltingproblem wrote:
| "Dangerously stupid"? Please review the HN site usage
| guidelines.
| ska wrote:
| I'll have a look bit suspect it's on the right side of
| them, it's an assumption not a person; updated anyway.
| the-dude wrote:
| In the 70s we would all freeze to death due to a new ice
| age. Thanks for the heads-up.
| titzer wrote:
| No scientist ever seriously suggested this. At most they
| pointed out that a new ice age was coming...on schedule.
| In a couple thousand years.
| haltingproblem wrote:
| "the prognosis is for a long-lasting global cooling more
| severe than any experiened hitherto by civilized
| mankind." [1]
|
| [1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii
| /003358...
| titzer wrote:
| ....8000 years from now, as part of the normal
| interglacial cycle, which is exactly what I said. And
| given that civilization is less than _10000_ years old,
| just returning to the previous ice age would technically
| fulfill the quote you tried so hard to pull out of
| context. Did you actually even read the entire abstract?
| throwaway5752 wrote:
| _Please, I remember we would all die a horrible death due to
| a nuclear armageddon. When that didn 't happen, we would all
| suffocate because all the forests would die due to acidrain.
|
| Then we would all die of skin cancer due to the ozone-hole.
|
| I actually remember the nuclear effects from Tjernobyl, glad
| I didn't die then._
|
| In all of those cases they were massive problems that took
| massive efforts to fix. Have you heard of SO2 scrubbers? The
| Clean Air Act? The Montreal Protocol? The bunch of dead
| liquidators in Chernobyl?
|
| For that matter you missed tetraethyl lead gasoline
| additives, dioxins, asbestos, and cigarettes. There are too
| many massive problems and too frequently there are greedy
| (evil?) people fighting to keep the status quo.
|
| What's different is that global warming has been blunted by
| icecap melting, ocean warming, and ocean thermal expansion.
| We've used up our budget, and it will get abruptly worse. The
| sheer quantity of energy is beyond any prior problem humanity
| has ever created and you can't bargain with thermodynamics.
| Now it's our turn to deal with a problem, like previous
| generations did in the examples you mentioned.
| bosswipe wrote:
| Your argument is a pretty obvious fallacy: some things didn't
| happen in the past so this other unrelated thing won't happen
| in the future.
| FiReaNG3L wrote:
| Wow, 1 generation survived all kinds of terrible events, so
| it surely means this was all made up and that there's no
| problems that could eventually lead to catastrophy over a
| 'long' period of time that is more than the lifespan of one
| human being.
| hnuser123456 wrote:
| strawman
| fsflover wrote:
| I don't see a strawman here. Care to elaborate?
| musingsole wrote:
| > 1 generation survived all kinds of terrible events
|
| That isn't even close to the GP's argument. The steelman
| is every generation encounters existential problems that
| get exaggerated to apocalyptic proportions but that
| history is also a very long story of those existential
| problems being dealt with in one way or another. (And in
| the voice of GP "I lived through one such cycle")
|
| The black-pilled people would counter that civilization
| today has an unprecedented number of ways in which to
| destroy itself and so that destruction is inevitable.
|
| The counter to the black pill is that it's missing
| historical information which shows humanity has been
| successfully walking this tightrope for far longer than
| anyone thinks.
| WhompingWindows wrote:
| Do you believe in climate science? I can't abide climate
| denialism, it's already led to hundreds of thousands of
| deaths via air pollution having been worsened by fossil
| fuel's deleterious smear campaigns against climate science.
|
| Parent comment is not talking about cataclysmic death, he's
| talking about the destruction of our ecosystems. It will
| indeed be bleak when rampant forest fires destroy our
| forests, when the sea levels rise and take out whole swaths
| of valuable real estate. You may think this is fear-
| mongering, but whatever your opinion, molecules have inherent
| properties that your opinion doesn't affect.
|
| This is simply physics, CO2 and methane and other gasses will
| trap heat, rendering all of the biosphere changed, ice
| melting, forest fires worsened. It's already happening and it
| will get worse.
| airhead969 wrote:
| It will take 100-200 years to get really bad, but the inertia
| of the energy in the water cycle is the concerning point.
| [deleted]
| yosito wrote:
| What do you think the future of earth was like in 812?
| tasogare wrote:
| Before 1000 AD there was movements in Europe speaking about
| the imminent destruction of mankind.
| gus_massa wrote:
| Try to read the best models for the next 50 years by serious
| scientific groups like the IPCC. Try to ignore the denialist
| and alarmist reports that get to the front page of newspapers.
| Blikkentrekker wrote:
| I do not understand the data in this article.
|
| Do all these trees bloom in unison? The scattered data seems to
| suggest there is variance between individual trees?
|
| If there is variance, then how is decided what the start of
| spring is and at what point the tree as a collective species
| blooms?
| jfengel wrote:
| They all bloom within a few days to a week of each other. The
| variance is due to local conditions of sunlight, temperature,
| etc. The entire process is quite sharp: it goes from nothing to
| stunning blooms to empty in the space of a week or so.
|
| For normalization, they measure the "peak" bloom, the day with
| the most trees in blossom at once.
| jariel wrote:
| The chart shows a trend over the last few centuries towards
| earlier blossoming, but it definitely precedes Co2 levels and
| actual temperature changes. Which is interesting.
| [deleted]
| godmode2019 wrote:
| I would like to see the cluster of locations they said Hiroshima
| was the location for the early bloom this season.
|
| I don't imagine the early records had every city in the country.
| Maybe the main two cities. Sample variance would increase over
| time.
|
| Also what us the age of these trees given the history of
| Hiroshima.
|
| The source paper states urbanisation in the title, but its not
| mentioned in the BBC article.
|
| Also the trend reversal happened around 1800 which is well before
| most people talk about the human effects of industry.
| Brendinooo wrote:
| If you didn't read the article, the headline could be
| misunderstood: records have been kept since 812, and the previous
| record was in 1409.
|
| As an aside, it's pretty incredible to have 1200 years of data
| for this.
| titzer wrote:
| Headline could as well be read "Earliest peak since records
| began in 812".
| spoonjim wrote:
| Everyone knows that all "world records" are only since record
| keeping began. The difference is that in the US that means
| about 200 years while in Japan it means more than a thousand.
| scarmig wrote:
| Not quite. Oftentimes we use proxies for historical data.
| For instance, you might look at the composition of annually
| stratified sediments to get a sense of climactic and
| environmental conditions. This gets us approximate but
| reasonable estimates of e.g. the temperature, but can't
| really be said to represent a "record."
|
| Even for cherry blossoms, they put off pollen, so you could
| probably do something similar. It'd be tricky to get a fine
| enough resolution (I'd be impressed if you could even get
| estimates as specific as month-level). Though the millenium
| of data would be awesome for verifying the proxy.
| matkoniecz wrote:
| Ice cores are pretty amazing.
|
| > Cores are drilled with hand augers (for shallow holes)
| or powered drills; they can reach depths of over 3.2 km,
| and contain ice up to 800,000 years old.
|
| > The physical properties of the ice and of material
| trapped in it can be used to reconstruct the climate over
| the age range of the core. The proportions of different
| oxygen and hydrogen isotopes provide information about
| ancient temperatures, and the air trapped in tiny bubbles
| can be analysed to determine the level of atmospheric
| gases such as carbon dioxide.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_core (edited for SI
| units preference)
| blondie9x wrote:
| So many world records involving the climate have been
| broken in recent years. Is there still hope left for our
| planet? I was in the ocean a few months back and the water
| was calm, the sound of the waves was peaceful. The beach
| was beautiful. But there was a problem beneath the surface.
| Plastic everywhere. Pieces of it broken down throughout the
| water and when I exited the water it was all throughout the
| sand as well. I walked up the entire beach and plastic was
| everywhere. Throughout such refined sand. I hit a low that
| day. Sometimes I lose hope, I'm just not sure we will be
| able to right our course towards sustainability and
| minimalism in time to avert climate disaster and this sixth
| mass extinction in the anthropocence. I just hope one day
| when I'm old I will not lose the sakura blossom festivals
| altogether and that posterity will still be able to enjoy
| the tranquility of a new spring.
| jansan wrote:
| Japan has a company that was founded in 578 and still exists,
| so why not keep records.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kong%C5%8D_Gumi
| missedthecue wrote:
| That must be the only construction company that has lasted
| longer than one business cycle.
| virgilp wrote:
| No longer exists as an independent company though.
|
| > In January 2006, after falling on difficult times, it
| became a subsidiary of the Takamatsu Construction Group.
|
| The oldest one that still operates independently appears to
| be still from Japan, though:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nishiyama_Onsen_Keiunkan
| dang wrote:
| 1409 is plenty early and less ambiguous, so I've put that in
| the title instead.
| etiam wrote:
| Sorry, but that seem unambiguously inaccurate.
|
| To me that reads like 1409 had an even earlier blossoming,
| and still holds the record, whereas what's actually reported
| is this is a new earliest since records began. Granted, it's
| not much difference between 26th and 27th, (and the peak must
| surely be at least a little bit subjective?) but if we're
| disambiguating, why not 'earliest peak since records began,
| in 812' or similar. At least that's consistent with what's
| being reported.
| dang wrote:
| OK, changed again!
| [deleted]
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-03-30 23:01 UTC)