[HN Gopher] Desert plants are struggling in higher heat
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Desert plants are struggling in higher heat
Author : LinuxBender
Score : 63 points
Date : 2021-06-26 13:56 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.scientificamerican.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.scientificamerican.com)
| datameta wrote:
| I think perhaps the gravity of the situation concerning all
| ecosystems could be illustrated effectively if government "open
| comment" boxes were effectively ddos'd with articles like these
| from all manner of publications. Major systemic change is
| necessary from the top down. The individual environmentally
| conscious contribution, even if widespread, can certainly help
| but it cannot outstrip the negative pattern of a well organized
| pervasive attitude that does not take findings like those in the
| article into account.
| throwanem wrote:
| Good luck DDOSing /dev/null.
| ianai wrote:
| Just write your representatives in Congress, the President, and
| participate in your civic duties. DOS'ing some poor saps inbox
| isn't it.
|
| Edit-Also be polite. No death threats...
| the8472 wrote:
| > No death threats...
|
| Carbon footprint reduction is inevitable. Your choice, Mr.
| Congressman, is whether it will be smaller shoes or fewer
| feet.
| datameta wrote:
| Absolutely. Polite discourse is the most effective way. Often
| it's better to write nothing at all than to write something
| in anger.
|
| I was modeling my thoughts on the hundreds of thousands of
| Net Neutrality comments that were received by the FCC a few
| years ago. That they doctored the perception (using bots)
| that the proportion of submissions against upholding net
| neutrality was higher than it really was is another story..
| jfengel wrote:
| Everyone in the government already has all of the facts. They
| are not unaware of it, or of the gravity of the situation.
|
| It's just that some of them don't believe it, and were voted in
| by supporters who don't believe it. They aren't going to turn
| around to their constituents and say "huh, turns out climate
| change is real and bad, so I'm going to do the opposite of what
| I promised when you voted for me." No amount of scholarship
| will ever change that.
|
| As for what will... search me. It seems to be self-reinforcing
| at this point. Maybe the steady drumbeat of articles like this
| will help change the minds of ordinary people, though I can't
| see how.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| hm.. bad advice? Panic and fear block intelligence. Public-
| facing orgs get messaging all the time, by definition, so they
| are already in some state driven by self-interest,
| requirements, motivations and ability, to be overly general.
|
| Instigating panic, fear, dread and a host of other human
| responses, by "agitating" .. is a physical option and really
| courts disasters of all kinds.
|
| On the other hand, many thousands of reports generated in the
| last two decades, is also apparently not enough either.
|
| Alert! Aware! .. and encourage, analyze, communicate.
| datameta wrote:
| Agreed.. My point is not to overwhelm a key figure/government
| body emotionally but rather highlight that it isn't that
| every so and so often there is a finding of this nature but
| rather that they happen _all the time_ and from all sources.
| So that partisanship cannot be easily used to dismiss the
| information.
| neom wrote:
| I thought a good idea might be to get some very very talented
| ux/ui/illustration folks together with a few people who are
| well versed in the various aspects of climate change, and take
| the time to make a very succinct, easy to understand and
| beautiful microsite that shows the coalescing of all of the
| aspects of change that result in a crisis. I think if people
| can see them all together and understand how the positive
| feedback loops are connected, it would help people think
| individually about what aspects they could realistically
| tackle, as well as the magnitude of the problem.
|
| People can very clearly see the system is falling to bits, but
| I'm not sure most people understand it's actually a group of
| interconnected systems. I mean, they know, but I don't believe
| it's easy for people to wrap a mental model around all this. I
| also think there are still very many people who believe it will
| not affect them meaningfully within their lifetime.
| datameta wrote:
| This idea if well executed and spread virally could be
| _rather_ effective. I have seen how useful a properly put
| together website has been in helping organize efforts in
| contacting representatives, increasing voter turnout, and
| scheduling protests.
| neom wrote:
| I agree it would need to be very well executed, but there
| are some strong minds around. You'd need a great domain and
| really great team, and some press (even if just tweets from
| people with huge followings).
| doitLP wrote:
| Please do this. Everything from kelp forests dying to bug
| populations diasappearing to the unsustainable mining of
| gravel needs to be displayed in a way that really
| communicates the breakneck pace at which we're headed for
| doom. But it needs to be presented in an exquisitely wel-
| done, bare-facts way that ends with a CTA (unlike for example
| Kurzgesagt which is just depressing)
|
| I bet a lot of people would like to help for free. Most of us
| feel helpless most of the time.
| pope_meat wrote:
| I don't remember the last time I saw a lady bug.
|
| I do remember seeing them all the time 20 years ago.
| ajuc wrote:
| They already know, it's just that fossil fuel industry sends
| checks not articles.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| I'm really interested in cloud seeding for localized reduction in
| solar radiation.
|
| This approach works well for oceans...
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_cloud_brightening
|
| I suppose that we might start treating the earth like a garden we
| need to take care of?
| lisper wrote:
| Why would this be unexpected? Just because desert plants can
| endure conditions that seem difficult _to us_ doesn 't mean that
| small changes in the environments that they evolved to survive in
| should not result in conditions that are difficult for them. The
| Sahara was a grassy savannah for a while before the last round of
| climate change [1].
|
| [1] https://www.livescience.com/4180-sahara-desert-lush-
| populate...
| furgooswft13 wrote:
| If it's unexpected it's scarier.
| syops wrote:
| There are people who deny the effects of climate change and/or
| deny that it is occurring. Melting ice and desert plants not
| being able to survive in the desert are indications that change
| is happening and such indications can't be reasonably believed
| to be a liberal conspiracy.
| saalweachter wrote:
| I'll believe this is unexpected because I'm not a plant-ologist
| and don't really have well-calibrated expectations of desert
| plant response to temperature, but --
|
| Isn't it like a known thing that photosynthesis stops happening
| at higher temperatures? I've been worried about the impact of
| days-over-100-degrees on crop production for years.
|
| Is "unexpected" in this headline standing in for "now
| demonstrated in the wild, counter-intuitive if you don't know
| that biology is highly sensitive to temperature, expected by
| people in the field", or if I knew more about desert plant
| biology, would I be more shocked than I am now?
| pvaldes wrote:
| Not so unexpected in fact, and more complex than just "desert
| plants are dying".
|
| ps
| defterGoose wrote:
| Nothing n, unfortunately
| aurizon wrote:
| I wonder if people with missile tech will destroy all coal and
| gas generating plants - even those in foreign countries = the
| beginning of climate wars. The USA/China/Russia could do this now
| - if they wanted to? Might be a good movie script in that as
| well?
| furgooswft13 wrote:
| lol targeting ICBMs at China and Russia will surely help stop
| global warming
| fogihujy wrote:
| Yeah, but I'm not sure a nuclear winter is preferable...
| bruce343434 wrote:
| To be fair, it would cool things down
| [deleted]
| klyrs wrote:
| If China wanted to get rid of coal power plants, they'd
| probably stop building them first.
| lisper wrote:
| The scariest thing to me about climate change is the rate at
| which it is happening. We bought a house in the Bay Area 11 years
| ago. It didn't have air conditioning. The builder said we
| wouldn't need it. We added a unit anyway and for the first few
| years we barely used it, maybe one or two weeks out of the year
| to cool the top floor on exceptionally hot days, which back then
| was the low 90s.
|
| Since then, 100-plus-degree days have been happening more and
| more regularly. We're adding a second AC unit because there have
| been days that the first one just can't keep up. All this in 11
| years.
|
| This keeps me up at night too:
|
| https://www.cnn.com/2021/06/17/us/earth-trapped-heat-doubled...
|
| There was a time when I was fairly sure that climate change would
| lead to the collapse of civilization, but there was no way I'd
| live to see it. Now I'm not so sure about the latter.
|
| [UPDATE] There is also the sobering realization that even if we
| brought carbon emissions to zero tomorrow (which is obviously not
| going to happen) even that would not actually solve the problem.
| We're at 50% over pre-industrial CO2 with no viable way of
| getting rid of it, so _at best_ it 's going to stay that way for
| a long, long time.
| darkerside wrote:
| CO2 stays in the atmosphere for a long time, but things like
| methane break down much more quickly. In the short term, we'll
| have better luck by reducing methane as well. Of course we'll
| still need to cut carbon over the longer term, but it's not as
| dire as you think.
| lisper wrote:
| > it's not as dire as you think.
|
| I would like nothing more than for you to be right about
| this. But I don't think you are. We're at 420PPM CO2 right
| now. Even if we cut CO2 emissions to zero and eliminated all
| methane emissions, we'd still be retaining heat at a rate
| that is more than enough to produce a blue-ocean event [1] in
| the next decade or two, after which we're probably screwed.
|
| [1] https://glennfay.medium.com/the-blue-ocean-event-will-be-
| a-t...
| TigeriusKirk wrote:
| Active carbon removal and other geo-engineering actions are
| the inevitable path we'll have to go down. The only
| question from my viewpoint is how much we're going to
| suffer before we accept that.
| lisper wrote:
| > how much we're going to suffer before we accept that
|
| And whether it will even be _possible_ by then to remove
| enough carbon to make a difference. It 's far from clear
| that it's even possible now. It took several hundred
| million years for nature to sequester all that carbon in
| the first place. It has taken us a mere 300 years to
| release it, but releasing carbon is one hell of a lot
| easier than sequestering it. And we're staring down the
| barrel of a blue ocean event in the next few decades,
| possibly even the next few years.
| germinalphrase wrote:
| It feels like a lot of environmentalists are reluctant to
| acknowledge this as it could further reduce the public
| will to act. Carbon removal/geo-engineering (if possible)
| are the silver bullet(s) allowing us to never break our
| bad habits.
| labster wrote:
| Of course it sounds like it, but we really need to do all
| the things. We don't need to take our foot off the
| accelerator pedal because we have brakes--it sounds
| really stupid that way.
| germinalphrase wrote:
| No argument here. Particularly because it isn't even
| clear that we _can_ scale carbon removal.
| GoodJokes wrote:
| You just linked to a blog by someone who is not a
| climatologist. Seek out better resources to understand the
| timescales and gravity of the situation better. I suggest
| the carbon brief, realclimate.com, and this super helpful
| blog on tipping points: https://climatetippingpoints.info/
|
| Not skeptic or denialist sites.
| elbasti wrote:
| > We're at 50% over pre-industrial CO2 with no viable way of
| getting rid of it, so at best it's going to stay that way for a
| long, long time.
|
| It's much worse than this. For a long time the "worst case
| scenario" was the possibility that we'd unlock positive
| feedback loops that release methane (80x as "warming" as CO2)
| that had been long locked in arctic permafrost.
|
| Remember the phrase "runaway climate change"?
|
| Yeah. It happened. Even if bring human carbon emissions to
| zero, the world will continue to warm.
|
| This is why of the utmost importance to stop fossil fuel
| emissions NOW... so we can win ourselves some time to maybe,
| just maybe, figure out clean carbon removal.
| revscat wrote:
| Won't happen under our current socioeconomic regime. If there
| is profit to be made, fossil fuels will be sold unless there
| are drastic changes made to the systems which allow it.
| Sharlin wrote:
| Note though that the warming was _always_ going to continue
| even after reducing emissions to zero, because it takes time
| for a complex system to settle into a new stable state. This
| is only one of the many effects that make highly nonlinear
| systems difficult to intuitively understand. The math is
| clear, though (although many of the myriad feedback loops
| involved are still poorly understood).
| akomtu wrote:
| Something doesn't add up. The gov officials have fairly
| complete data on climate change and yet they don't act. When
| the coronavirus pandemic was an imminent treat, the gov shut
| down the economy. Now, when the global warming is supposedly
| going to wipe out the planet in ten years, the gov acts as if
| it's not a big deal. It's even going to allow the economy to
| fully reopen by end of year, which means more needless
| driving and more emissions.
| mhfhncx wrote:
| I'm not surprised you're so afraid if you trust CNN to tell you
| the truth about this. They have admitted that fear sells and
| they're keeping you up at night on purpose. They've
| demonstrated, repeatedly[0], their willingness to completely
| fabricate information in order to draw views and that climate
| change is the next big thing after COVID to help them recover
| ratings [1]
|
| Sorry, but you might as well be getting science info from
| Weekly World News. CNN is projecting a nightmarish fantasy for
| clicks and views, full stop.
|
| [0] https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-bombshell-memory-hole-d20
|
| [1] https://youtu.be/Dv8Zy-JwXr4
| Tiktaalik wrote:
| The place that has seen this biggest, most obvious to human
| eyes delta is up North. In Canada's arctic, the Inuit are
| having to adapt rapidly as things that used to be predictable,
| like when the sea ice is going to melt, are now no longer
| predictable. They've apparently seen startling changes within
| just a generation.
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/may/30/canada-inuits-...
| djinnd wrote:
| There are quite a few highly populated areas in the world where
| the Air conditioner is on the whole year round.
| lisper wrote:
| You have missed the point. The problem is not that we have to
| run the AC more than we used to. The problem is that our
| situation changed from one where we barely needed AC to one
| where we now need it regularly in a mere 10 years.
| pengaru wrote:
| There's some interesting classes by Al Bartlett on youtube
| where he discusses population growth and the exponential
| function in general, he was a professor at Boulder, CO.
|
| One of his salient points IIRC was when you're living
| through an exponential curve that's approaching some crisis
| threshold, be it population growth leading to civilization
| collapse, or some resource consumption exhausting its
| supply, it happens _very_ abruptly because you jump from
| just halfway to the end, which through a linear lens
| appears very distant, to at the critical end, in just _a_
| _single_ doubling period.
| Proven wrote:
| > [UPDATE] There is also the sobering realization that even if
| we brought carbon emissions to zero tomorrow (which is
| obviously not going to happen) even that would not actually
| solve the problem.
|
| Why are you concerned about doing something about it, then?
|
| > All this in 11 years.
|
| Climate doesn't change in 11 years. More likely you've added
| 20-30 lbs and a pair of 300W GPUs since then.
| slibhb wrote:
| > There was a time when I was fairly sure that climate change
| would lead to the collapse of civilization, but there was no
| way I'd live to see it. Now I'm not so sure about the latter.
|
| Even if climate change significantly affects our lives, why
| would it cause civilization to collapse? It seems just as
| plausible that adverse conditions will increase the necessity
| of civilization, of strong social bonds and mutal reliance.
|
| It's very interesting to me that, when talking about climate
| change, we tend to assume everything is negative. Surely there
| are some upsides (the only one I ever hear about is Arctic
| shipping routes). But I think we have no good reason to be
| making claims like "civilization will collapse". This seems
| like millenarian thinking, people like the idea of living in
| the end times.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Crop failures, extreme climate changes we cannot mitigate the
| effects of cost effectively (coastal infra and housing). We
| depend on things that grow (both plants and animals) to
| survive ourselves.
|
| I would not bet on this bringing people together, unless it's
| the very well off ("the haves") against those without who
| will be exposed to more suffering.
| slibhb wrote:
| How about huge swathes of land opening up in Canada,
| Greenland, and Siberia that have massive quantities of
| untapped natural resources? I'm telling you, we're going to
| roll with this thing. Bump in the road.
|
| But there's no point in arguing about it. When we all die
| and civilization hasn't collapsed, we'll all know I'm
| right.
| imtringued wrote:
| I don't think Canadians will welcome a huge wave of
| refugees that dwarfs their own population with open arms.
| lisper wrote:
| For Greenland to become fertile its ice sheet would have
| to melt, and that will leave major cities underwater. And
| climate change is not going to magically stop once that
| happens. Greenland might be fertile for a little while, a
| few decades maybe. Then what?
| slibhb wrote:
| Cities aren't going to submerge overnight. The process is
| slow enough so that, if necessary, we will have plenty of
| time to adjust by moving inland, building dikes, and so
| on.
|
| When you're on your deathbed and civilization hasn't
| collapsed, I wonder if you'll think of this thread.
| lisper wrote:
| Like I said above, I would like nothing better than to be
| wrong about this. In fact, I have never wished so
| desperately to be wrong about something as I have about
| this. So yes, if civilization outlives me I will
| definitely think of this thread.
|
| If, 10-20 years from now, there are world-wide food riots
| because of global crop failures and the entire western US
| is burning in one gigantic continent-wide forest fire,
| will you?
| slibhb wrote:
| Yes, if something like that happens, the people making
| dire predictions would have been right.
| jghhnbcfg wrote:
| Good lord, climate fatalism at its finest folks, right
| here.
|
| I'll tell you what, I'll ask my dad if he remembers the
| first person in the 1970s who told him the world was
| going to end in ten years due to global cooling
|
| I remember in the 90s it was the ozone hole that was
| going to cause us all to burn
|
| When everything is relatively fine -- climate will
| change, of course, as it always has, and humans will
| adapt -- I won't think of you, or this thread, because
| why would I waste my time?
|
| But I'll remember all the fearmongers and doomsayers and
| chicken littles, more generally
|
| Every generation has them
|
| Read this and calm down
| https://m.barnesandnoble.com/w/apocalypse-never-michael-
| shel...
| mkr-hn wrote:
| I got to struggle to breathe from smoke from a fire 2300
| miles away and from dust that dimmed the skies from the
| Sahara on the other side of the planet in the space of
| one year. This is real.
| CheezeIt wrote:
| But neither of those events were caused by global
| warming.
| [deleted]
| lisper wrote:
| > as it always has
|
| But that's the thing: it hasn't always. For the last
| 10,000 years the climate has been relatively stable, and
| that is the reason that human civilization was able to
| emerge in the first place. It's hard to build cities if
| the arable land moves every 10 years.
|
| Yes, every age has its doomsayers. But this time it
| really is different.
| mkr-hn wrote:
| The problem isn't strictly long-term rise. The big issue
| is the threshold where storm surges from hurricanes
| overwhelm our ability to block it and pump out what gets
| through. New Orleans is well into recovery from Hurricane
| Katrina, but the next direct hit will arrive inches
| higher than 2005 if it happens in the 2020s. How high
| does a wall need to be to block the storm surge of the
| monster hurricanes of the coming decades?
| germinalphrase wrote:
| By natural resources, do you mean fresh water and arable
| land?
| sabujp wrote:
| Desert plants as we know them today
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