[HN Gopher] Greenland's ice sheet is releasing huge amounts of m...
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Greenland's ice sheet is releasing huge amounts of mercury into
rivers
Author : mef51
Score : 138 points
Date : 2021-05-26 17:44 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.newscientist.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.newscientist.com)
| est31 wrote:
| There is also the ticking time bomb of the Camp Century remains:
|
| > In 2016, a group of scientists evaluated the environmental
| impact and estimated that due to changing weather patterns over
| the next few decades, melt water could release the nuclear waste,
| 200,000 liters of diesel fuel, a nontrivial quantity of PCBs, and
| 24 million liters of untreated sewage into the environment as
| early as the year 2090. Transition in ice sheet surface mass
| balance at Camp Century from net accumulation to net ablation is
| plausible within the next 75 years under one climate model, and
| after another 44 to 88 years the buried wastes could be exposed
| between 2135 and 2179.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camp_Century#Residual_environm...
| Proven wrote:
| 10% of global discharge.
|
| Move along, nothing to see here
| spicyramen wrote:
| Greenland just looks bigger in the maps
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| A big tangent but I remember a podcast with Sir David King, UK
| chief scientific advisor
|
| - So, Sir David, what's worries you most?
|
| - The Greenland Ice Sheet. If it melts human civilisation is
| finished.
|
| - oh. And err is it melting?
|
| - Yes, and accelerating.
|
| - Oh.
| wiremine wrote:
| I couldn't find the original source, but here's a link that
| mentions the comment. Anybody have the original source?
|
| https://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/pt.5.020563/fu...
| samatman wrote:
| Estimates of total Greenland contributions to sea-level rise by
| 2100 range from a low of 2.1cm to a high of 5cm.
|
| I'm going to choose to worry about other things.
|
| https://www.carbonbrief.org/new-climate-models-suggest-faste...
|
| Those of you downvoting me to banish your anxiety should find a
| healthier outlet for your issues.
| bregma wrote:
| Yes, but up to 7 m over the next 200,000 years. You might
| want to short boardwalk futures.
| ninju wrote:
| The article does not mention 200,000 years. It calls out
| concerns by the end of the 21 century...which is only 80
| yrs away
| uncoder0 wrote:
| My investment horizon doesn't stretch out 200k years as I
| don't have dynastic wealth so I'll pass on that advice.
| [deleted]
| ska wrote:
| I'm not sure where you got those. IPCC 2019 report estimated
| the Greenland contributions in the 10-30cm range, and the
| link you gave is mostly about newer models suggesting a bit
| higher than 2019 IPCC, so suggest at the higher end (or
| above) of that range.
|
| The only related thing I could find in your linked report was
| to estimate contributions _up_ by 2.6cm /2.8 cm/5cm
| (different scenarios) from CMIP5 to CMIP6, not in total.
| Maybe I missed something?
| jl6 wrote:
| Did he explain why?
| pmastela wrote:
| Could you elaborate as what about the melting of the Greenland
| Ice Sheet was concerning to Sir David King? Is it the mercury
| that is released or the rising sea levels it will cause or
| something else?
| splittingTimes wrote:
| IIRC, when sheet melts, it will release a huge amount of
| fresh water into the salty Atlantic gulf stream and shut it
| down. The convection from top warm water sinking into the
| depth because of a salt concentration gradient will stop
| functioning.
|
| Besides it's climate impact and heat transfer mechanism it
| will likely disturb the other ocean currents that are import
| for a stable climate as well.
| gspr wrote:
| 7 meter rise. If that happens, we're toast.
|
| Yes, an Antarctic melt would be worse, but it's far less
| likely.
| barbacoa wrote:
| Humans have experienced 120m sea level rise since the last
| ice age. We can only hope this last 7m wont finish us off.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| While that's true, we didn't have as many major centers
| with permanent buildings set up. I'm looking for data,
| but I imagine that places like New York would be
| underwater, would they not?
| barbacoa wrote:
| Sea level rise is measured at 3.5mm/yr[1] as of 2016 so
| at current rate it will take 2000 years to hit 7m. NYC
| may be underwater but it would in all likelihood be as
| irrelevant to the future as Tyre or Carthage is today.
|
| [1]https://ocean.si.edu/through-time/ancient-seas/sea-
| level-ris...
| ninju wrote:
| The concern is the acceleration of the sea level rise
|
| "Whether it takes another _200 or 2000_ years largely
| depends on how quickly the ice sheets melt. Even if
| global warming were to stop today, sea level would
| continue to rise. "
|
| -- from the same article (2 sentences later)
| lumost wrote:
| Given the semi-permanent nature of changes at this point
| we should likely start talking in rates of change.
|
| 7 meter rise over 2 centuries can likely be managed in a
| reasonable manner via land taxation, resettlement, wall,
| and levy construction. 7 meter rise in 5 years would
| likely collapse most of the western world as major
| population centers find themselves unlivably under water.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Places like NY would likely spend couple billions to
| invest on dykes and then sell it as new water front
| property...
| fogihujy wrote:
| It's not about the survival of Humanity, but rather about
| global trade disruptions, mass-migrations, and massive
| property damage on a scale we've never seen. Humanity
| will be fine, but if it goes really bad then it will
| cause a lot of suffering and it may take centuries to
| recover.
| PicassoCTs wrote:
| So, if i were to write a algorithm, that determines the
| new shoreline - and buys property there, i could profit
| from this when?
| jfengel wrote:
| It doesn't work like that. We don't get a new shoreline
| miles away.
|
| What we get is every single existing ocean port city
| (which is a lot of the largest cities) being threatened
| by more frequent flooding. They're all right at sea
| level, because that's where you build port cities. Not
| all of these cities really depend on being ports any
| more, but that's how they became major population and
| business centers.
|
| They don't just pick up and move something like that.
| There's no place you can say, "Oh, they're going to move
| New York over to X, so I'll buy land there now". Even if
| they did for some reason decide that it was so bad they
| had to abandon New York (or Charleston or San Francisco
| or lots of others), there's no one place that it goes.
| The whole human geography of it changes.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Property rights tend to require a functional society to
| effectively utilize.
| drknownuffin wrote:
| Now. There are already hedge funds purchasing land based
| on this idea.
| gooseus wrote:
| And the third order effects will be further
| destabilization leading to more wars, which may go
| nuclear, and will all feed back into more environmental
| degradation.
| jeffbee wrote:
| There are unimaginable mineral resources under the Greenland ice
| sheet, stuff that literate humans have never seen and which is
| therefore not describe in any history. There should be enormous
| boulders of pure copper, rich deposits of gold, silver, and lead,
| and of course mercury. Greenland without its ice sheet will be
| like a museum of pre-human geology.
| pcrh wrote:
| This is akin to the "unimaginable" resources in asteroids.
|
| By and large, we really don't need more resources to mine, but
| to use what we have more efficiently.
|
| I'm sure there are a few edge cases, but the attitude that we
| should look for more and more to exploit is what leads to
| deforestation, the biggest loss of species diversity since the
| last ice age, global warming and a serious toll on the health
| of today's people.
| dheera wrote:
| I really hope at some point in the future we will have the
| tech to arbitrarily convert a pile of one element into a pile
| of another element. Without that, colonizing other planets is
| going to be hard.
| leafmeal wrote:
| This sounds really interesting and would love to learn more
| about this. Do you know of any resources, articles, books, etc.
| that talk about this?
| salmonellaeater wrote:
| Wayback machine:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20210524233617/https://thehackpo...
| dang wrote:
| We've banned the originally submitted site as explained here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27293941.
| iab wrote:
| https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:...
|
| Just so that you have the ability to fully ruin your day
| dang wrote:
| We've banned that site and changed the URL above to the article
| it ripped off _and_ didn 't link to, which is like 95th
| percentile blogspam shamelessness. In this case they even
| lifted the title as well. That clears 99.
|
| Submitted URL was https://thehackposts.com/news/greenlands-ice-
| sheet-is-releas....
|
| By the way, for anyone interested, an easy way to bust these is
| simply to pick a likely-unique string from the article you
| suspect of being a ripoff and google it with quotes around it.
| If there's a more original source, it will probably come up:
|
| https://www.google.com/search?q=%22It+is+a+region+that+conta...
|
| Sometimes I have to do this a few times before hitting the
| jackpot, but in my experience: if content looks copied, it
| probably is.
| mef51 wrote:
| Thanks for the change!
| perihelions wrote:
| _" simply to pick a likely-unique string from the article you
| suspect of being a ripoff and google it with quotes around
| it"_
|
| There's also a subtype that deliberately circumvents this
| trick. There is a type of ad fraudster that rips off of, e.g.
| native German-speaking writers, runs their work through
| machine translation, and publishes the English output as
| original.
|
| I encountered several examples on some technical subs on
| Reddit (not yet on HN). It took a disproportionate amount of
| effort to unmask even one -- the method that ended up
| succeeding was to guess which technical terms could be
| idempotent under translation, and (&&) some together until
| the result set is small enough. (It's harder to reverse
| translate, because unless you're an expert translator, you
| probably don't know what the source language was).
|
| I've only seen a handful of these, but because of how
| difficult it is to detect, I'd speculate there could be a
| sizeable population in the wild. The writing is technically
| correct and non-suspicious, because it's written by a human
| expert in another language. It strongly resists reverse
| Google searches. And it resists social unmasking, because
| social groups who speak different languages tend to have
| distance between them.
|
| It's a clever evil.
| dang wrote:
| Excellent point. Links would be interesting if you happen
| to have any.
| perihelions wrote:
| I very briefly skimmed Reddit for examples. This one is
| /r/physics' 4th-most-upvoted post from this week, and
| hasn't been detected yet. It algorithmically substitutes
| random words for their synonyms (poorly); not the machine
| language translation I promised, but it's performing the
| same goal of resisting phrase matching.
| "We knew that the first direct image of a black hole
| would be groundbreaking," said Kazuhiro Hada of the
| "We knew that the first uninterrupted image of a black
| hole would be revolutionary," says Kazuhiro Hada of the
|
| Original is [0] and plagiarized is [1] (linked indirectly
| because the other URL is probably blacklisted on here,
| and possibly malicious).
|
| This one was the cleanest of several examples I found*. I
| think the technique is widespread and broadly successful,
| based on my anecdotal experience. It's easy to find a
| diversity of examples in smaller-sized Reddit subs, the
| ones with less paranoid moderation and spam AI settings.
|
| The machine translation examples are far harder to detect
| (to me); I'll update you if I discover one again in the
| future. The ones I found several years back appear to no
| longer exist.
|
| [0] https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/telescopes-unite-in-
| unpreceden...
|
| [1] https://old.reddit.com/r/Physics/comments/njbrec/data
| _from_1...
|
| * (Because I could reliably identify the original
| document, and because the edit of a direct quotation from
| a named individual is an air-tight example of fraud).
| godelski wrote:
| This specifically mentions indigenous people, but unfortunately I
| don't think many people actually care about them (besides surface
| level). But how does this affect the average person's food
| supply? Don't we get a lot of fish/seafood from the arctic? Tuna
| and crab for example? Seems like it would affect fisheries in the
| north east of northern America and as well as northern Europe.
| That seems like a big deal for a lot of people. Does anyone have
| any more information on this? I imagine a lot of people depend on
| these regions for food.
| mywacaday wrote:
| Whatever global warming does to the planet I'm fairly sure we
| haven't anticipated the worst side effects.
| tryonenow wrote:
| Have we accurately anticipated any benefits? Serious question.
| There's no way that such a massive shift in a complex, chaotic
| system will only be negative.
| Guest42 wrote:
| I'm a little disappointed it got renamed as "climate change"
| because that phrase doesn't have the same level of urgency to
| it although it is technically more accurate.
| czep wrote:
| It used to be called "pollution". Reframing the topic as
| global warming or climate change was a dedicated effort to
| soften the language and introduce room for doubt. I mean,
| everyone agrees that pollution sounds bad and is bad and we
| should stop doing it. But by calling it climate change,
| suddenly there's now an avenue to challenge its legitimacy,
| and shift attention onto the ideological debates. Meanwhile,
| as everyone is distracted, industry gets a free pass to
| continue polluting with zero consequences.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| "Pollution" used to refer to spillage of a different sort:
| https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=pollution
|
| The modern sense of "environmental contamination" in common
| parlance dates largely to the early 1960s:
|
| https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=pollution&yea
| r...
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Love this.
|
| I have never failed to convince anyone in my midwest sphere
| of influence (midwest, know far right and far left folks)
| that 'pollution' needs to be dealt with.
|
| You can replace 'climate change' in an essay with pollution
| and dramatically simplify changing peoples mind.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| <rolls eyes>
|
| The problem was re-framed because western industry mostly
| stopped belching obvious pollution and that framing of the
| problem did not resonate with western voters who could see
| that the rivers and sky were cleaner than they'd ever been.
| It used to be that smog was a feature of weekly weather in
| urban areas and if your dog jumped in a river 50mi
| downstream of a textile factory you'd know what color they
| were making the day before. By the 90s that kind of stuff
| was cleaned up a ton.
|
| Not everything you don't like is the result of the evil
| other guys.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Eh, it's not the same thing as pollution. Pollution to me
| invokes the process where you invent something unnatural
| and dump it into the environment, such as
| tetrachloroethylene. Whereas putting CO2 in the atmosphere
| is a completely normal natural process, and the amount
| we've added has "only" about doubled the usual
| concentration. It's categorically different because unlike
| TCE, which will kill you on the spot if you drink it, the
| downsides of CO2 are not instantly obvious.
| earleybird wrote:
| In perhaps colourful terms - Crap in a river and it's
| polluted for those downstream. This, for me, captures the
| essence of the issue - It's not pollution until you are
| the one downstream.
| ako wrote:
| Pollution is not just about the what, but also about how
| much. One cup of water is good for you, but if you drink
| 10 liters of water on the spot you might die. and that's
| not even close to doubling the amount of water in your
| body.
| czep wrote:
| The problem is that the average voter will not understand
| that distinction. They will be persuaded to vote against
| environmental protections because of the doubt cast on
| "climate change". My original point was about the framing
| of the debate in the public sphere. In an effort to be
| pedantically correct, we've handed the opposition the
| upper hand by allowing them to reframe the debate away
| from the scary word of pollution.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| air7 wrote:
| they're not the same thing at all. Green house gases
| include CO2 and water vapor for example. GHGs are not
| pollutants at all, and pollutants don't cause global
| warming.
| wumpus wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massachusetts_v._Environmen
| tal... -- the EPA can regulate CO2 because it is a
| pollutant, according to the Supreme Court.
| smcl wrote:
| That's an interesting angle, it's funny because I thought
| it was the _other_ way round - that it was changed to be
| more persuasive. I guess "climate change" also opens it up
| to the argument that even skeptics are in agreement that
| climate changes _naturally_ , so they can brush aside
| evidence with "hey we don't disagree but it's a natural
| process and there's some doubt over whether humans are
| responsible" :-/
| leetcrew wrote:
| I'm strongly in favor of prioritizing technical accuracy over
| perceived urgency. when people realize the sky isn't falling
| quite as fast as implied by the terminology, they grow
| cynical.
| smcl wrote:
| I imagine it's partly because because skeptics would have a
| field day any time it snowed a lot or was less warm than
| normal and say "so much for global warming!". It might sound
| obvious and silly to us, but a simple folksy sort of
| observational logic defeating the _so called experts_ can be
| quite persuasive and validating :(
| LanceH wrote:
| Decades ago, I was saying the same thing in the opposite
| direction when backers of global warming were saying, "look
| how hot it is." I'm talking the 80's when I said it was a
| terrible argument, because all it takes is a cold day to
| refute it...and here we are.
|
| I seem to get downvoted every time I mention this, as
| apparently people want to forget global warming was ever
| bolstered by, "look how hot it is" and they would prefer to
| just now ridicule people for the same errors their side was
| guilty of for literally decades.
|
| So yes, the event is real. Ridiculing opponents for making
| the same argument with the same temporary data points isn't
| winning anything.
| legutierr wrote:
| Yeah, that was precisely the point.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| My choice name is "Global Pollution Epidemic"
|
| I think it really captures what the the problem is, rather
| then making it some concept that seems abstract and immovable
| to the average person. Lots of people deny climate change,
| almost no one denies that humans pollute a lot.
| tasty_freeze wrote:
| There are scientific papers from the 1950s which refer to CO2
| induced climate change -- using the phrase "climate change."
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