[HN Gopher] As climate warms, a rearrangement of world's plant l...
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As climate warms, a rearrangement of world's plant life looms
Author : homarp
Score : 107 points
Date : 2021-07-06 17:16 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (e360.yale.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (e360.yale.edu)
| yosito wrote:
| I'm really puzzled by the belief that the world's plant life was
| ever fixed at all.
| kannanvijayan wrote:
| It's been relatively fixed on the timescales that human
| civilization has grown - in particular our modern civilization
| as it exists over the past few hundred years.
|
| As we have developed, we have spent the majority of our human
| productivity on efforts to optimize ourselves, our cultures,
| and our infrastructure for the relatively static status quo
| climate.
|
| This includes the placement of cities, the choice of crop
| cultivars in various regions, the effort put into irrigation
| systems and infrastructure, the planning of building codes and
| expected lifetimes of infrastructure based on regional climate,
| the kinds of diseases and pests we guard against in various
| regions, and on and on. Billions of people depend on those
| optimizations. A slippage of a percent in the effectiveness of
| those optimizations will be counted in the lives of millions.
|
| What we are about to see is the most massive and abrupt,
| systematic disruption of every single one of those careful
| optimizations. This will lead to massive direct suffering, as
| well as indirect suffering as people invariably react to these
| changes, and engage in war over shifting and scarcer resources.
| The chance of these conflicts going large-scale nuclear will be
| far higher than it ever was during the cold war.
| soperj wrote:
| In the timescale that human civilization has grown we've had
| the Bering land bridge. I don't think we've had a relatively
| static status quo climate.
|
| Past few hundred years has had the greatest change in
| temperature in the last 10 thousand years according to tree
| studies.
|
| I don't think you can have it both ways here.
| throw_nbvc1234 wrote:
| > last 10 thousand years
|
| AKA roughly 3% of the times humans have been on earth. Or
| .0002% the age of the earth. But on the other hand, that
| probably doesn't matter much. The difference between human
| made and natural climate change is just the moral
| implications. If there was another (natural) ice-age on the
| horizon, it'd be in humanities best interest to try and
| prevent it.
| moistly wrote:
| AKA roughly 100% of the times humans have lived in
| settled communities.
|
| I would prefer to not live a roaming hunter-gatherer
| life.
|
| Edit: disclaimer--"first settlement" doesn't seem to be a
| settled fact. How permanent must it be? How many
| families? Is purposeful agriculture a requirement?
| graeme wrote:
| The Bering land bridge disappeared 11,000 years ago. The
| earliest human major settlements were formed about 6000
| years ago, in Mesopotamia.
|
| Your whole timescale is wrong. We're not talking about
| humans. We're talking about settled civilizations.
|
| Things didn't fluctuate very much since 9000 BCE, when the
| Bering land bridge went away. All of recorded history is
| since then.
|
| As for recent history it's only really since 2000 we've
| burst out of that range. There was fluctuation before but
| within the post 9000 BCE norms.
|
| https://xkcd.com/1732/
| kannanvijayan wrote:
| The infrastructure, agricultural optimization, crop
| cultivation and breeding, city growth, and other technology
| that supports the several billion people that are alive
| today was built over the last century. The capacity growth
| is also exponential, so the relevant infrastructure is on
| an even shorter timescale than that.
|
| Global ecosystems are also far more stressed from the load
| of humanity than they were 100 years ago. The regenerative
| capacity of biological systems responding to that system is
| not simply "barely at capacity", it is in a negative state.
| On top of that, we will be accelerating the rate of average
| temperature changes, in a time when access to weapons of
| mass destruction (ones that are orders of magnitude higher
| than what existed 100 years ago) are higher than ever.
|
| The nature of exponential growth and what it does to fixed
| capacity regenerative systems is certainly difficult to
| internalize. Cracks form over time as stress is absorbed.
| Collapses happen fast. The transition between the two is
| hard to time.
| spankalee wrote:
| "modern civilization"
| acituan wrote:
| > It's been relatively fixed on the timescales that human
| civilization has grown - in particular our modern
| civilization as it exists over the past few hundred years.
|
| That's the crux of the argument; zoom in enough and it looks
| fixed. Zoom out enough, there wasn't even plants. Framing is
| everything. And it is the best rhetorical device because it
| can be (ab)used to serve even contradictory viewpoints.
|
| > What we are about to see is the most massive and abrupt,
| systematic disruption of every single one of those careful
| optimizations. This will lead to massive direct suffering, as
| well as indirect suffering as people invariably react to
| these changes, and engage in war over shifting and scarcer
| resources. The chance of these conflicts going large-scale
| nuclear will be far higher than it ever was during the cold
| war.
|
| I don't deny the consequences of mistreating the environment,
| but more often than not we are making proportionality errors
| (both by underestimating or over-cathastrophizing it).
|
| I am not trying to be mean to you but want to invite self-
| reflection; apocalypticism has also been a perennial tool in
| our "optimization" toolkit, ironically with catastrophic
| failure modes. Cool-headed rationality and straigthforward
| honesty don't have the same downsides of excessive
| demoralization or creating a credibility fatigue.
| 7952 wrote:
| It seems biased to assume apocalyptism. It is perfectly
| possible to predict mass negative outcomes in a cool headed
| and honest way. Like predicting massive overspends on a
| major construction project.
| acituan wrote:
| > It seems biased to assume apocalyptism.
|
| You might be right. And that is the whole point; how do
| we make sure we are not making proportionality errors in
| _either direction_? What is the objective measure? What
| is the criteria to use to find out _if_ and _in which
| direction_ we are making such an error?
|
| > It is perfectly possible to predict mass negative
| outcomes in a cool headed and honest way. Like predicting
| massive overspends on a major construction project.
|
| I don't think you're necessarily wrong, but also can't
| ignore that the non-linearity and complexity of climate
| science is an unknown quantity more than that of a
| construction project. The reliability of predictions will
| have different upper bounds, and our conveyed sense of
| confidence should reflect that, not the romantically
| moving horribleness of the worst case scenario we can
| think of.
| moistly wrote:
| > how do we make sure we are not making proportionality
| errors in either direction?
|
| LOL, yah, I'd hate for the ocean to not have plastic, or
| CO2 levels to get back down, or to not breathe mercury
| from the local coal plant, or... gosh, any of those
| errors in the wrong direction, you know.
|
| Whataboutism and analysis paralysis are not helpful modes
| of behaviour. Immediate action to begin remedying the
| obvious problems would be helpful. We can do that on an
| individual basis, and must also press those with more
| power to do the same.
| kannanvijayan wrote:
| I'd venture the opposite, that people have an inherent need
| to believe that humanity is special in an objective sense,
| that drastic change and collapse cannot happen in the
| timescales we operate in. An adult variant of "pulling
| yourself under the covers and hoping the monster goes
| away".
|
| After all, wasn't this sentiment one of the reasons we
| collectively failed to address this issue using the
| reasonable mitigations that were available to us when it
| was possible? A belief that the "scaremongering" being done
| by climate scientists for decades was out of proportion?
|
| > Cool-headed rationality and straigthforward honesty don't
| have the same downsides of excessive demoralization or
| creating a credibility fatigue.
|
| I'm confused as to what part of my commentary you found
| irrational or dishonest.
| acituan wrote:
| > I'm confused as to what part of my commentary you found
| irrational or dishonest.
|
| Climate predictions are _complicated_ but the negative
| valence coupled with the _confidence_ in your predictions
| doesn 't represent that. That is what I am calling out as
| proportionality error. It is a version of "this plane
| crashing would be horrible, even though the probability
| multiplier is likely to be very small, I can so vividly
| envision the horrible outcome that I will behave as if it
| is more probable and have a panic attack". There is a lot
| of affective/emotional (so-called) reasoning. Not only
| that, we don't know to what extend (not _if_ ) we are
| projecting our unconscious, personal, perennial problems
| such as fear-of-death onto a global wish of world not
| existing after we die for example. Human beings are
| deeply religious creatures, and in absence of a
| structured spiritual approach to these problems, we are
| prone to deify and mythify what is around us. (To be
| crisply clear, I am not calling anthropogenic climate
| change a myth by any stretch of imagination, but it is a
| certainty that our responses are not in 100%
| correspondence to the _reality_ of it, including as you
| rightly point out "pulling yourself under the covers and
| hoping the monster goes away".)
|
| > After all, wasn't this sentiment one of the reasons we
| collectively failed to address this issue using the
| reasonable mitigations that were available to us when it
| was possible? A belief that the "scaremongering" being
| done by climate scientists for decades was out of
| proportion?
|
| It wasn't the sentiment, it was the act of humbuggery
| around the inflated immediacy and absurd dramatization of
| outcomes, from the likes of Al Gore to Hollywood, that
| either turned people into apathetic nihilism or burned
| out defeatism. I am not saying these are single handedly
| responsible for this response; post-WWII onwards
| especially during the Cold War people have been
| culturally trained for these types of thinking and today
| we are seeing their protracted influence.
| kannanvijayan wrote:
| > Climate predictions are complicated but the negative
| valence coupled with the confidence in your predictions
| doesn't represent that.
|
| You seem to be making the mistake of assuming all
| predictions are similar in scope and nature.
|
| To use an analogy: predicting the specific effects of how
| a blast of heavy radiation will affect a human body is
| _complicated_. But a prediction of "this is going to hurt
| you badly" can be made with high confidence.
|
| There's a universality here regarding complex systems,
| and it applies to human bodies, buildings, economies,
| geologies, and natural ecosystems alike. Complex, self-
| reinforcing systems do not fail linearly. Pressure cause
| cracks and minor symptoms as the system absorbs the
| initial stresses, and at some point systemic collapse
| occurs rapidly.
|
| Concrete spalls, metal rusts, and when the time comes the
| building collapses rapidly as the reinforcing mechanisms
| fail one by one. Cancers form, mild symptoms are felt,
| and eventually the body succumbs in weeks or days as the
| final metastasized stages shut down vital functions. The
| ground is silent as pressure build, tremors are felt, and
| in a matter of seconds heaves to spew its burning
| contents.
|
| The stressors on our world's ecosystems are numerous and
| myriad and well documented. The seas and fish populations
| are strained by plastic pollution and overfishing to feed
| a population that is an order of magnitude larger than
| existed just 100 years ago. Insect populations are
| observably collapsing in many parts of the world. Water
| tables have been severely depleted in many agricultural
| lands, including in many parts of the USA, but also
| places like southern india. These are the observable
| cracks. The article of this subject contains more.
|
| Modern agriculture, at the rate of productivity that it
| operates at now, relies on the existence and viability of
| sophisticated supply chains that mine, produce, and
| deliver fertilizer, pesticides, and other "high-level
| economy" products that themselves depend on deeper supply
| chains.
|
| Climate change and the rapid increase in global
| temperatures introduces a steady grind of increasing
| pressure - a new stressor to this complex system that is
| already heavily stressed to unsustainability, and is
| already showing it cracks.
|
| We know for a fact that the stress will increase steadily
| and inexorably.
|
| It is indeed possible to make high confidence statements
| that this is going to hurt us badly. It is wishful
| thinking to hope otherwise.
|
| What _can_ be hoped for is mitigations. We may be able to
| mitigate some of the damage, if we try hard and fast
| enough.
| moistly wrote:
| You keep insinuating that you are not a denier, but
| really, you are. Climate change is going to rip through
| society like a wrecking ball. At the very least, massive
| crop failures are going to result in a global starvation
| crisis. This is absolutely the truth of the situation,
| but you dismiss it: "affective/emotional."
|
| You turn to apathetic nihilism because your only
| alternative is panic. I myself have turned to opt-out
| nihilism--I try not to own stuff, don't have progeny,
| looking to isolate on a small farm. Greta seems to be on
| a much better track: trying to influence the people who
| can make the decisions that will improve the outcomes.
| Maybe you should give it a shot.
| acituan wrote:
| I think you're confused about the forum you're in. If you
| have a counter argument to people's _arguments_ , all the
| power to you and you're more than welcome to discuss, in
| the hopes that we can learn something more about it. But
| if your argument is mere willful assertion of what is
| already stated, or is calling _people_ names, kindly back
| off.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
|
| > Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation;
| don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't
| sneer, including at the rest of the community.
|
| > Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive,
| not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
|
| > When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead
| of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3"
| can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
|
| > Please don't use Hacker News for political or
| ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
|
| > Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of
| other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us
| something.
|
| Normally I wouldn't want to honor your manner of
| discourse by responding to it, but I want to make the
| case that one can still discuss the contents of an
| argument despite emotionality;
|
| > You turn to apathetic nihilism because your only
| alternative is panic. I myself have turned to opt-out
| nihilism--I try not to own stuff, don't have progeny,
| looking to isolate on a small farm.
|
| I personally am pretty optimistic and excited regarding
| the prospects of tackling this problem, because embedded
| in it a plethora of large scale multi-agent coordination
| problems we ought to solve, and we do have the capacity
| for it. Incidentally, I think individual level solutions
| don't necessarily have the strategic depth to address
| what is essentially a _problem of scale_. But if you
| think you 're doing the right thing, more power to you,
| at least at your scale you couldn't harm things even if
| you wanted to.
|
| > Greta seems to be on a much better track: trying to
| influence the people who can make the decisions that will
| improve the outcomes.
|
| Does her influence look like a success to you? It doesn't
| to me. Maybe there is a self-fulfilling prophecy in
| talking down to people, or appeals to romantic
| emotionality, instead of bringing the best and the most
| rational in them. Maybe rampant consumerism and lack of
| higher-order thinking to maneuver climate change are
| sibling problems, both intimately related to the problem
| of stupefaction of the masses.
|
| Maybe calling people names is part of the shame-politics
| that attempt to turn adults into temporary children.
| Hijacking our deepest fears of ostracism in the name of
| some ostensible "greater good", but inadvertently
| reducing people's agency and higher order thinking, both
| of which are deeply needed to steer out of the problem.
| justinator wrote:
| As with changing temperatures, I don't think it's the fact that
| they're changing, but the velocity of these changes that's
| particularity worrisome.
|
| If a 1,000 year old tree suddenly can't survive in the now new
| climate in the same location, that's a little bit more than
| curious.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Exactly. All life has a capacity to adapt, but it is
| mostly[0] constrained by lifespan. Individual organisms don't
| adapt - their type does, over time, through generations
| breeding and dying. But if the environment is changing faster
| than that - faster than what it takes to cycle through a
| couple generations - then the organism type won't ever be
| able to catch up.
|
| --
|
| [0] - Excluding shenanigans like horizontal gene transfer,
| that are mostly relevant to bacteria and archaea.
| spankalee wrote:
| Who has this belief that you're talking about?
|
| The article starts off with "Previous periods of rapid warming
| millions of years ago drastically altered plants and forests on
| Earth"
| snek_case wrote:
| That's true. There's been multiple ice ages over the eons, not
| to mention shifting continents, and new species radically
| changing the landscape (the land used to be dominated by giant
| mushrooms, before plants came along).
|
| That being said, although climate and the makeup of life on
| earth changes on its own, and can greatly change over time, the
| big difference here is how fast this is happening. I feel quite
| confident that humans will never kill all life on earth,
| because life is very adaptable and resilient. However, rapid
| climate change could result in the loss of a huge amount of the
| biodiversity that exists now. Many species will die, and be
| replaced with more resilient ones.
|
| I think what we're also likely to see, is that some of the most
| adaptable animal species are small animals (eg: rodents) and
| insects, things that are typically considered invasive species.
| Larger animals don't reproduce as fast, and there aren't as
| many, so they have a smaller gene pool that doesn't recombine
| as rapidly as with animals that can produce large amounts of
| babies every year. That makes them way more vulnerable to being
| killed off by climate change. So, yeah, I hope you like cats,
| rats, possums, mosquitos and cockroaches.
| seph-reed wrote:
| At one point I really took it upon myself to have some idea of
| what climate change would be. What I found was:
|
| 1. The greenhouse effect is very real
|
| 2. What that's going to do to ecosystems is largely unknown
|
| Having been made to believe that it was going to cause the next
| mass extinction event, I found #2 fairly underwhelming. Never-
| the-less, this isn't a gamble worth messing with.
| SinParadise wrote:
| > 2. What that's going to do to ecosystems is largely unknown
|
| This is true, but is also a bit of a red herring. All
| hierarchical organizations from the individual to the country
| is optimized to the environmental condition they are situated
| in, and any level of uncertainty at that scope should alarming
| in of itself.
|
| Just two examples of our optimization and as a consequence, our
| lack of resiliency to disturbance: Suez Canal and the Ever
| Given, chip shortage, cargo container mis-allocation in
| shipping that is happening at the moment.
|
| If the poster boy of efficiency, the market is so easily
| impacted, what do you think will happen to lumbering and
| lethargic political institutions that we like to rail about so
| much?
| jbay808 wrote:
| Something to keep in mind about making unknown changes to a
| landscape: it's not by coincidence that most changes would be
| for the worse.
|
| It's not because the status quo is globally optimal, but
| because humans have invested a lot in the way things are.
|
| We happen to have built cities on coastlines, put farms where
| food grows, put bridges where the rivers are, and so on. We can
| shake things up and get unknown results, but most random
| changes will be for the worse because we've molded our
| civilization to the planet we already have.
|
| And this goes not only for humans, but even moreso for other
| species, who are much slower to adapt to changes.
| ericd wrote:
| Right, we've invested a lot in the idea that specific people
| and specific countries own specific pieces of land, we're
| really not well set up for fluid changing circumstances, as a
| civilization. The mass migration and the strains that will
| cause seem like they're going to be rough.
| zpeti wrote:
| I don't know why you're being downvoted. We simply don't know.
| Experts couldn't even predict COVID waves correctly (UK) but we
| think we can predict the entire planets ecosystem changes?
|
| I also think we need to seperate out how humans are driving
| species extinct, and climate change. These two can be very
| different things, yet are always conflated in the media for
| hype.
|
| Most species are going extinct because their habitats are
| actively destroyed by humans, or are fished to extinction, not
| because the planet is warming.
| adamrezich wrote:
| ever since I read this article titled "Clouds May Be the Key
| to a Climate Modeling Mystery"[0], I've come to understand
| that all climate models are basically useless for predicting
| anything. anyone who claims such-and-such will happen as a
| result of climate change, because a model said so, is
| speaking nonsense. the planet is massive and its climate is
| an infinitely fractally complex system. if we can't even
| model clouds with anything remotely resembling accuracy, then
| why do we put any stock in predictive climate models at all?
|
| basically everyone agrees that the climate is changing, has
| always changed, and will always change. there is debate over
| how much of climate change is anthropogenic, but this is
| irrelevant to the point that predictive climate models are
| functionally useless, due to the complexity of the thing it's
| modeling.
|
| [0] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/clouds-may-be-
| the...
|
| downvoters: I would appreciate an explanation as to how my
| understanding of this situation is inaccurate. my views are
| never set in stone, I'm always open to learn new things. I
| just don't see how, short of a complete holistic Matrix-style
| simulation of the planet, one can obtain meaningful
| predictions from a data-driven climate model. I'm wrong about
| a lot of stuff all the time and I'd like to know where my
| understanding of this situation is incomplete or inaccurate.
| moistly wrote:
| > I've come to understand that all climate models are
| basically useless for predicting anything
|
| I am under the impression that the worst-case scenarios in
| most models have pretty much all come to pass, often
| earlier than expected. Seems to me that they've been very
| predictive. It would have been nice had the media more
| accurately delivered those predictions; perhaps it would
| have prompted some early action.
| ximeng wrote:
| Based on reading an article about detailed work on making a
| model more accurate you've concluded that models are
| useless? Just because models aren't infinitely perfect
| doesn't mean they don't have some predictive power. Yes you
| might drop a ball and it gets destroyed by a nuclear
| explosion before hitting the floor but it doesn't mean a
| model that says it will likely hit the floor is useless!
|
| At large scale climate change isn't that complicated - sun
| hits earth, heats it up, some energy escapes. We can get a
| pretty good picture from models and the details just add to
| that.
| adamrezich wrote:
| > Based on reading an article about detailed work on
| making a model more accurate you've concluded that models
| are useless?
|
| no--I, knowing basically nothing about climate science
| and having been taught to more or less blindly trust
| climate models as accurate predictors of the future, read
| an article that said we have no idea how to model clouds
| with anything resembling accuracy, because clouds by
| themselves are crazy complex things. this led me to
| realize that this should have been intuitive knowledge
| without even reading the article, which led me to truly
| consider the scope of the climate system w.r.t. how it
| could possibly be modeled by computers, which led me to
| realize that the idea that it's possible for a data-
| driven computer model to predict anything about the
| future with any kind of reliability is pretty silly to
| begin with.
| lukifer wrote:
| The right way to think about models at this scale is
| complexity isn't "Accurate" vs. "Inaccurate"; it's to use
| probabilistic/Bayesian reasoning. No map is a perfect
| representation of the territory, and no model can
| encapsulate the entirety of the earth. That doesn't mean
| maps and models are useless.
|
| A couple counterpoints from former climate skeptics:
|
| - Richard Mueller is a prominent physicist who founded an
| institute to debunk anthropogenic climate change, only to
| change his mind after thorough examination of the data.
| https://youtu.be/Sme8WQ4Wb5w
|
| - Jerry Taylor is a libertarian and former climate
| debunker for the Cato Institute; a noteworthy pivot
| moment was speaking to a risk analyst for a financial
| institution, whose job it is to make bets on complex
| systemic risks in the context of uncertainty. He claimed
| that from a financial lens, AGW was a slam-dunk case for
| mitigation, not because of the certainty of any one
| model, but of the full probability distribution in
| aggregate. https://www.reckonings.show/episodes/17
| adamrezich wrote:
| sure, that's fine. the problem arises when politicians
| state that things must be done by x date or y year or
| else we're going to have a CLIMATE CATASTROPHE, because
| the models say so. models can't predict anything like
| this
| lukifer wrote:
| I agree there is a moral hazard / perverse incentive when
| it comes to alarmism, especially in politics (eg,
| specious references to "mushroom clouds" in the run-up to
| the Iraq invasion).
|
| But as good Bayesians, we also have to consider the
| opposite case: crises and "black swan" events do happen.
| How do we filter signal from noise? We probably could
| have benefitted from more "enlightened alarmism" re:
| COVID in Jan/Feb 2020, when billions in preventative
| measures could have saved trillions to world GDP (and
| millions of lives).
|
| It's a double-bind politically: given a non-trivial long-
| term risk, how does one frame its urgency? A calm and
| measured tone spurs little action (the unsqueaky wheel
| doesn't get the grease); a tone of urgency and panic
| bypasses badly-needed rational faculties, and/or flips
| the "bullshit detectors" based on the history of
| proverbial boys crying wolf.
|
| While I'm not opposed to FDR-ish green infrastructure
| plans, the answer from economists is undramatic and
| uncontroversial [0]: tax the externality to establish a
| price signal, and return the dividend back to citizens,
| whose consumption behaviors then change in response to
| those signals [1].
|
| Of course, we've had to contend with decades of FUD from
| vested O&G interests, no different than the tobacco
| cancer debacle [2], despite having had credible evidence
| for AGW since the late 70's. I'm happy to concede the
| potential for scientific groupthink and perverse Big
| Government incentives on the green side, so long as we're
| also acknowledging the enormous financial incentives for
| muddying the waters (uncertainty = inaction = status quo
| = profit).
|
| [0] https://www.wsj.com/articles/economists-statement-on-
| carbon-...
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigovian_tax
|
| [2] https://www.barbarafreese.com/industrialstrength-
| denial
| ximeng wrote:
| This just seems like a ridiculous position to hold: data-
| driven computer models can't predict anything with any
| reliability?! Pretty much all predictions about the
| future rely on data-driven models! Yes models are not
| perfect, but the answer's not to close your eyes and
| hope!
| vegetablepotpie wrote:
| > climate models are basically useless for predicting
| anything
|
| That is false. Although you're correct that climate is very
| complex and it is impossible to model every detail. The
| notion that you cannot make valid conclusions from modeling
| because a set of observations do not match models is
| fallacious because it discounts the correct conclusions
| that climate models have achieved. For example, the first
| climate models from the 1960s predicted that the mesosphere
| will contract and cool as a result of increasing co2
| concentrations, and this conclusion has been backed by
| empirical observations. Furthermore, modeling from the
| 1970s by scientists at Exxon Mobile found that by 2020, net
| warming would reach an average of 1 degree centigrade,
| which we've since exceeded.
| adamrezich wrote:
| how is this different than a broken clock being correct
| twice a day? by this I mean to say, just because _some_
| predictions made using _some_ models turned out to be
| correct, why does this validate those or all climate
| models as accurate predictors of the future? the system
| is so complex, poorly-understood, infinitely fractal,
| with endless variables depending upon each other in ways
| that we mostly don 't understand... the models are so
| varied, based on different data sources, some omitting
| entire classes of data entirely... I would be more
| surprised if _some_ predictions _some_ models made _didn
| 't_ end up being true after several years. but that
| doesn't mean they're useful at predicting things going
| forward, by any means.
| homarp wrote:
| https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-how-well-have-
| climate-m...
|
| Conclusion
|
| Climate models published since 1973 have generally been
| quite skillful in projecting future warming. While some
| were too low and some too high, they all show outcomes
| reasonably close to what has actually occurred,
| especially when discrepancies between predicted and
| actual CO2 concentrations and other climate forcings are
| taken into account.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Predicting aggregate impacts of a warm climate decade into
| the future is far easier than predicting the short-term
| process of an unstable system hypersensitive to initial
| conditions.
| throwaways885 wrote:
| As a layman, can you explain to me why a very accurate
| (i.e. small error) model wouldn't still lead to
| catastrophically incorrect results when projected across a
| long timespan?
| jeffbee wrote:
| There's a difference between a fairly simple linear model
| of the climate and trying to guess whether the initial
| conditions of an unstable disease propagation model are <
| 1.0 or > 1.0.
|
| Think of climate modeling as saying that for a given
| species of trees, half of them will be dead at a given
| latitude in 50-100 years, not pointing at a specific tree
| and predicting that it will die on July 7th, 2047.
| jbay808 wrote:
| What do you consider to be catastrophically incorrect?
|
| If the model predicts that a glacier disappears in 2050
| and it disappears in 2070 instead?
|
| Or if the lack-of-model makes a lack-of-prediction about
| glacier disappearance, and then it disappears in 2070 by
| surprise?
|
| Error accumulation makes sense to worry about if you're
| planning a voyage and worried that dead-reckoning
| navigation will leave you kilometres off course. But if
| you're on the voyage already, out on the open ocean, you
| can argue with the navigator's math but you still need to
| navigate -- you won't do better by just blindly insisting
| the boat never left the harbour.
| darkerside wrote:
| Only in that you don't know you're wrong for a much longer
| period of time.
| mustafa_pasi wrote:
| Unknown is bad in itself, both for farming and for wildlife,
| both of which depend on predictable seasonal weather patterns.
| ves wrote:
| We're already in the middle of a mass extinction event:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction
|
| And regarding your second point, we know it won't do anything
| good, but we don't know exactly what (nor could we ever!).
| slibhb wrote:
| How could climate change possibly not cause anything good?
| There will be some positive outcomes associated with climate
| change.
| dependsontheq wrote:
| No - since even warming areas will experience weather and
| climate instability which is very hard to manage. We as
| humans like plants are good at adapting to certain
| conditions, if these conditions are volatile we can't
| adapt. Plants and animals can't adapt.
|
| So no, there is no possibility of anything positive in
| this.
| sfblah wrote:
| Saying there's "no possibility" of something is a
| religious statement, not a scientific one. You should try
| to reframe that in terms of probabilities.
| mrtesthah wrote:
| It's pretty well established by science that the effects
| will be _overwhelmingly_ bad. To try to find the "silver
| lining" in the sixth mass extinction sounds like a
| pundit's exercise in devil's advocacy. You may as well be
| trying to "look on the bright side" of the holocaust.
| sfblah wrote:
| ... except that's _literally_ how science works. People
| _have_ looked into the "bright side" of the holocaust.
| Refusing to expand human's knowledge and understanding of
| the world because of political taboos is a mistake. Yes,
| we wouldn't purposely warm the planet in the interests of
| "increasing our knowledge," but since the experiment is
| already underway, there is an obligation to learn from
| that.
| mrtesthah wrote:
| Is this science that we're doing right now? No, this is
| debate in the service of a particular agenda. No one is
| stopping you from "looking into the bright side of the
| holocaust", as you put it, on your own time. There are
| plenty of holocaust "researchers" who question its place
| in history. I'm sure they would welcome your company.
|
| But if you were to pose that question in the context of a
| discussion about a Holocaust survivor's fund, for
| example, then that's definitely not historical research
| you're engaging in.
|
| Likewise, when you interrupt discussion about global
| warming with "maybe there are good sides", without
| providing any actual evidence for your supposition, then
| your actions have the effect of redirecting the
| conversation _away_ from the scientific consensus and
| casting a shadow of doubt, on the basis of nothing more
| than speculation.
| seibelj wrote:
| Plants love carbon dioxide. That's why it's called
| "greenhouse effect" - greenhouses artificially increase
| the amount of carbon dioxide in order to increase plant
| growth. Trees and plants will grow faster and larger as
| CO2 ppm increases, and we have already observed this.
| adrienthebo wrote:
| The greenhouse effect is due to radiation being trapped
| by the environment, atmospheric or otherwise - not the
| increased CO2. And while greenhouses may have
| artificially increased CO2 to improve plant growth it's
| accompanied with nitrogen fertilizer. The global increase
| in CO2 will only see a minor increase in plant growth but
| will be capped by limited nitrogen, and the hotter
| environment and associated increase in water evaporation
| will lead to reduced plant growth.
| seibelj wrote:
| Not if increased water evaporation leads to increased
| cloud cover leads to increased rainfall. We don't know
| what will happen, it's simply too complex to model
| accurately.
| adrienthebo wrote:
| "We don't know what will happen" is a specious reply
| because the models we do have are continuously improving,
| have been proven quite accurate so far, and backtesting
| continues to refine the behavior. This isn't a matter of
| having no idea what'll happen; there'll always be
| uncertainty but when the models continue to be validated
| and keep pointing at potentially devastating scenarios
| then the prudent thing is to act now instead of hoping
| the models are wrong.
| seibelj wrote:
| What we can definitively say is that CO2 levels have
| increased dramatically since the industrial revolution,
| and their cause is humans burning fossil fuels. On the
| models themselves, if you look deeply at how they are
| created and how they are updated, they involve a
| ridiculous amount of "tuning" where basically they don't
| line up with historical records so they have to
| continually modify them with fudge factors.
|
| I think the central problem is that the way they divide
| the atmosphere / oceans into 100km square grids is too
| large for local weather, but if they shrink the grids it
| takes way too long to run the simulations, so they are in
| a bind. I am of the opinion it's better not to risk
| increasing the amount of CO2 because we don't know what
| will happen. But I wouldn't consider any of our models
| even low-confidence. It is impossible to solve given how
| chaotic nature is, the number of variables, and how slow
| our super computers currently are.
| lm28469 wrote:
| CO2 isn't the only metric to look at to determine if
| plants can grow or not in a given environment...
|
| Rainfall pattern/acidity, humidity, average temperatures,
| extreme temperatures, animals living the the area
| (providing nutrients through body waste and
| decomposition), insect population, &c. are all factors,
| and most of these factors are interdependent
|
| Trees, like animal, migrate, this migration isn't a
| matter of months, or years, but centuries, since the
| lifecycles of trees are very long and their locomotion
| speed is ... limited
|
| If plant kept up with our co2 production we wouldn't get
| a graph like this when we look at atmospheric co2 level:
| https://www.climate.gov/sites/default/files/CO2_emissions
| _vs...
|
| Arguing that "the greenhouse is good because we get more
| plants" is extremely reductive, and factually wrong
| seibelj wrote:
| Plants do not sequester enough additional co2 to offset
| what humans release into atmosphere. But increasing co2
| will increase rate of growth of plants provided other
| limiting factors do not impede growth.
| soperj wrote:
| Their locomotion speed isn't limited. We've planted
| various plants the globe over. It may be naturally
| limited, but it isn't limited any more.
| loopz wrote:
| Flora, fauna and the whole ecology have adapted over tens
| of thousands of years to the current environment we're
| in. Sudden massive changes is more likely to lead to mass
| extinction, adaption due in thousands of years for
| entirely new species. To massively try to force adaption,
| will lead to lots of instability and even worse damage
| than letting nature take its course over a longer
| timespan.
|
| Please see : The Biggest Little Farm
| ConnorBoyd wrote:
| It's called the "greenhouse effect" because the CO2 traps
| heat in the earth's atmosphere, just like the walls and
| roof of a greenhouse trap the heat inside the greenhouse.
| Greenhouses are also enriched with extra CO2 to boost
| yields, but that's not why it's called the "greenhouse
| effect"
| seibelj wrote:
| My point was that we refer to "greenhouse gasses" and
| "greenhouse effect" because these are associated with
| what happens in greenhouses because plants grow better in
| them.
| bpodgursky wrote:
| > we know it won't do anything good
|
| This kind of absolute confidence about an extremely
| unpredictable change in an extremely dynamic and complicated
| system is not remotely scientific. We can predict
| (reasonably) that the changes will be overall worse, but it
| would IMO be pretty shocking if there were _no_ positive
| effects:
|
| - Growing seasons are longer in near-arctic regions - Higher
| CO2 means plants photosynthesize easier, requiring less water
| in desert regions - The arctic passage means shorter cargo
| vessel trips
|
| This doesn't balance out the overall crisis, but there are
| going to be a lot of changes both directions.
| spidersouris wrote:
| I'm trying hard, but I absolutely cannot fathom how these
| "positive effects" can outbalance even 1% of the disastrous
| consequences of climate change. We (i.e. mostly undeveloped
| countries) are about to experience decades of extreme
| hunger, deadly hotness and critical environmental events
| (tornadoes, floods...). That the Arctic ice floe melts
| won't bring any positive consequence except for the fact
| that it will increase trades and shipping with cargoes and
| will thus lead to more emissions. The same goes for plants:
| many species will not survive to the environmental changes
| so CO2 will stay roughly the same. And it goes without
| saying that it's far from being the only metrics at play
| there.
| seph-reed wrote:
| Ah. You're a humanist. I can't argue your religion here,
| but some people don't think humans own the planet, or
| that everything revolves around us.
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| Climate change includes a range of outcomes ranging from
| "terrible for agriculture and many species but possibly
| survivable" to "mass extinction". We're already seeing some of
| the "mild" effects in the form of crop underperformance in the
| Middle East and wildfires all over the world. Many of the worst
| outcomes have to do with tipping points that we don't fully
| understand, some of which seem to be breaking against us.
|
| TL;DR climate change isn't necessarily an extinction-level
| event. It is just _possibly_ an extinction level event. I would
| argue that if you're looking at it and saying "meh" then you're
| not assessing risks properly.
| goatlover wrote:
| It's hard to imagine humans going extinct. An extinction
| level event for organisms which can't adapt fast enough,
| sure. But humans have existed in all sorts of climates from
| the stone age, while colonizing most of the planet. Our
| ancestors survived ice ages.
| blooalien wrote:
| It's actually pretty _easy_ to imagine humans going
| extinct, and taking a _huge_ portion of the _other_ life on
| this planet out with us. As the level of human "crazy" in
| the world grows (seemingly exponentially), I find myself
| worrying more and more about the fact that some of the
| craziest people on the planet (political "leaders" and
| their militaries) have access to _nuclear weapons_ , and
| that's only _one_ potential concern among far too many.
| goatlover wrote:
| To wipe humans out, you would have to make the entire
| planet unlivable, which includes high altitudes, polar
| regions, remote locations, islands, etc. I don't see that
| happening short of a gray goo scenario.
| blooalien wrote:
| I wouldn't totally rule out _any_ doomsday scenario
| really, as long as humanity continues to put the
| greediest and power-hungriest humans in charge.
| jbay808 wrote:
| > It's hard to imagine humans going extinct
|
| http://burro.case.edu/Academics/USNA229/impactfromthedeep.p
| d...
|
| Page 6 helped grow my imagination. The ice ages are not the
| worst it ever was.
| goatlover wrote:
| If it didn't kill of all land animals, then it's still
| hard to imagine humans not surviving somewhere.
| jbay808 wrote:
| Humans are a k-selected species and we die pretty easily.
| What makes you think so?
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Even small changes can move an ecosystem e.g. change altitude at
| which a plant thrives; change depth at which ocean life survives.
| Coffee plants are currently moving - the traditional mountain
| fields are no longer optimal so planting has to be done
| elsewhere. Reefs of course are dying/dead and regrowing in deeper
| water.
|
| Who cares? Folks who depend on food from these ecosystems. They
| have to eat every day/year. They cannot wait for reefs to regrow
| in 100 years, etc.
|
| We can probably react. But will we? We let Cambodian people die
| in the '70s rather that lift a finger. Our track record is very
| poor. Hard to care about people dying halfway around the world.
|
| But politics is very affected. The Cambodian famine created the
| Khmer Rouge for instance.
|
| Imagine refugees from starving countries, looking to settle
| elsewhere. First thousands, then hundreds of thousands, then
| millions, then hundreds of millions. The outcry from 1000's of
| Syrian refugees rocked nations. Now multiply that by 100
| thousand.
| fatsdomino001 wrote:
| Anthropogenic Global Warming is great for plant life. The world
| is greening right now, and that's great for food production and
| lowering world poverty.
| titzer wrote:
| Except it isn't. The Western US is experiencing the worst
| drought in over 1000 years.
|
| And that's on top of the vast reduction in wild spaces, logging
| and burning of rainforests, urbanization, and conversion of
| prairies and grasslands to agriculture.
|
| This is probably the least "green" the world has been for
| hundreds of thousands or millions of years, modulo ice ages.
| fatsdomino001 wrote:
| The Western US is not the whole world. Here's a study from
| NASA that shows the whole world has been seeing significant
| greening in recent decades:
| https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/carbon-dioxide-
| fer...
|
| I agree with you though that deforestation and a lot of
| agricultural practices have been absolutely terrible to our
| environment and need to be addressed with the same level of
| focus that people currently have towards climate change.
| useragent86 wrote:
| It's well known that North America has more and larger
| forests today than it did a few hundred years ago.
| titzer wrote:
| You're gonna need a citation for that statement, because
| everything I know about the US disagrees with that.
| Indiana, for example, was almost completely forest before
| European settlers arrived [1] and has seen forest cover
| reduced by 75%. Most of the midwest is similar.
|
| [1] https://www.nrs.fs.fed.us/pubs/gtr/gtr-
| nrs-p-108papers/02car...
| mklingen wrote:
| And here we see the bad-faith rhetorical goalpost shift
| happening in real time. 1. deny that change is happening. -> 2.
| deny that we have anything to do with climate change. -> 3.
| deny that what we're doing to the climate is bad. -> 4.
| actually, amazingly, claim that what we're doing to the climate
| is good. (you are here)
| fatsdomino001 wrote:
| I agree, we are starting to see the bad-faith posters here
| not engaging in real discussion.
|
| These trolls generally setup strawmen arguments instead of
| engaging with the real points made, terribly unfortunate and
| not a good sign of healthy democracy.
|
| The reality is that yes Anthropogenic Global Warming is
| happening to a certain degree, but even without AGW our
| climate was warming. And thank god for that because we're
| coming out of an ice age... can you imagine if we were
| cooling?! Yeesh, then we'd have a real problem on our hands.
|
| Instead we have an earth coming out of an ice age, getting
| slightly slightly more warmed by anthropogenic causes. The
| main end result of which is a more green earth, more
| agricultural production and less poverty.
|
| Btw, in case you didn't clue into it, you're the bad-faith
| poster in this scenario.
| blondie9x wrote:
| A bit more info on the baobab die off.
| https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jun/11/giant-african-...
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adansonia_grandidieri Heart
| breaking.
| mark-r wrote:
| My first thought when seeing the Baobob picture was I wonder if
| you can still travel to see them before they're gone? My second
| thought was how much CO2 would such a trip generate?
| debacle wrote:
| The trees are rotting from the inside. That's a complex issue
| and doesn't sound like it's from warming. Old live oaks can
| suffer a similar fate, and the issue is usually caused by
| stress on the tree impacting the tree's immune system.
|
| Trees are really good at managing stress from heat, however
| stress from moisture much less so.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| Fungi too!
| dleslie wrote:
| The impact on flora and fauna from human development isn't simply
| from climate change; our localized ecological impacts can be
| quite severe, as well. I feel like our discussion of conservation
| and reasonable limits on development have been lost in the last
| few decades, with environmentalism having become dominated by
| climate change.
| MarkLowenstein wrote:
| Hard to believe that the most important effect of humans on
| plant health wouldn't be invasive species. The article doesn't
| acknowledge that at all.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Humans being the invasive species?
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| You could argue that, but mainly the species that get
| introduced directly and indirectly by human activities.
| i_haz_rabies wrote:
| The gypsy moth problem where I'm from seems like it could
| become genuinely catastrophic in a few years. That or we
| figure out how to seed clouds with BTK /s
| LeonenTheDK wrote:
| Recently moved from a town with an infestation. Returned a
| week later, and no exaggeration, 90% of the leaves in my
| neighborhood had been chewed away. Even ones where
| residents had taken steps to protect the tree. I'm not old
| but I haven't seen devastation like that from an invasive
| species here in Ontario before.
| i_haz_rabies wrote:
| I saved my beech tree by wrapping the trunk in burlap
| starting mid-may, and then burning it/squishing all the
| (thousands of) caterpillars under it on a weekly basis.
| It has been traumatizing, but my tree is fine. I also
| sprayed BTK on my small fruit trees and they have been
| unaffected. So it can be done... but it is time consuming
| and disgusting.
| minikites wrote:
| >with environmentalism having become dominated by climate
| change
|
| Humanity is too selfish to do anything about big problems
| (climate change), of course we're not going to do anything
| about smaller problems (localized impacts). We're not doing
| anything because we expect a magic solution to all of these
| problems to drop in our laps if we wait long enough. I'm very
| pessimistic about the future because we're not doing what we
| need to do today.
| i_haz_rabies wrote:
| It feels like even if we were to invent scalable and affordable
| fusion, EVs and carbon capture tomorrow, we would still be in
| serious trouble.
| deregulateMed wrote:
| Fusion will make chemical reactions that didn't make
| financial sense, possible.
|
| Heck fusion might ruin the price of gold.
| ThomPete wrote:
| 99.999% of all species ever existed are extinct today. Climate is
| always affecting nature, we are the first species who have a
| chance of not joining that statistics.
| justinator wrote:
| What % of species that have existed in the last 300 years are
| now extinct because of us? Is the rate of extinction graph
| linear, or is it trending up logarithmically?
| titzer wrote:
| Very poor reasoning here. 90% of all humans that have ever
| lived are dead. Therefore jump off a bridge right away?
| PicassoCTs wrote:
| In my eyes, the best thing we could do, to help plants "migrate"
| is to take whole pieces of eco-systems and transplant them, with
| the ability to escape. Like a greenhouse, that is artificially
| cooled or heated, but a trapdoor that allows plant off-spring to
| "escape" if the conditions are good enough.
|
| The idea, that we can protect the world from change is
| misguided.All that we can do, is save a maximum of Eco-diversity,
| by offering it transport from closing niche to opening niche - or
| storage, if all niches should vanish.
| lancemurdock wrote:
| the sooner we move to nuclear the quicker we will get to clean
| energy
| mrtesthah wrote:
| Clean energy alone is not nearly enough to solve ecological
| collapse. You also need to stop the conversion of wild areas
| into monocrop agriculture and confine metropolitan development,
| to stop the loss of further carbon sinks. And even once you can
| stop _all_ new greenhouse gas emissions, there's still the
| massive task of removing all the excess CO2 currently in the
| atmosphere, which would otherwise remain for thousands of years
| and continue to drive carbon-releasing feedback loops in the
| permafrost, ocean, arctic ice, and rainforests.
| mellavora wrote:
| you forgot to mention cleaning up all of the plastic and
| other poisons, also it would be nice to preserve some of the
| aquafiers. Oh, and also the dirt (at current erosion rates,
| the US runs out of dirt at the end of the century).
|
| I'm probably forgetting a few things myself.
| Milkman128 wrote:
| nuclear as a tech is great but its still managed by humans.
| rm_-rf_slash wrote:
| A friend of a friend recently planted pecan trees. In 20 years
| when they mature it might be warm enough for them to produce
| pecans.
|
| She lives in New York.
| i_haz_rabies wrote:
| Maybe I can one day achieve my dream of home grown olive oil...
| living in zone 6b.
|
| Also, what is up with all the perfectly relevant comments
| getting downvoted here?
| [deleted]
| tamaharbor wrote:
| Pea-cans or pick-kans?
| dmingod666 wrote:
| There was a time when humans were not the dominant species. There
| will be a time when we will again go lower in the ranks or
| disappear.
|
| In the arrogance of being higher than all things we forget, we
| are but a line item in the larger excel sheet of planet earth.
|
| The threat is not to mother earth - worrying about her is above
| our paygrade. The world is not ending - Its going to get by just
| fine. It will evolve and thrive. What will happen to humans,
| well, that's another story, we'll have to live with the seeds we
| sow.
| autoexec wrote:
| > The world is not ending - Its going to get by just fine.
|
| We may be turning this planet into a lifeless rock. Other
| planets like Mars and Venus are "getting by just fine" by that
| measure. We may not be able to induce a total runaway
| greenhouse effect but killing off the oceans and making much of
| the planet inhospitable is still on the table. Really though,
| environmentalism is more about saving ourselves than our
| planet.
|
| Our sun won't last forever and eventually the Earth will be
| totally destroyed. The less we have to struggle with survival
| due to what we've allowed to be done to the Earth the more we
| can work towards finding new homes.
| 7952 wrote:
| Yes, if you use wishy washy terms like "mother earth" then
| everything can treated as abstract and distant.
|
| I care about humans and want them to survive and prosper. I
| care about wildlife and don't want species to be killed. And as
| humans we can use culture to go beyond our in-built
| programming. Ideas can spread. That _does_ make us different to
| other species. That is not arrogant, it is just the truth.
| titzer wrote:
| Literally thousands of species, from coyotes to whales to
| crows, teach their young survival behaviors and have
| "culture". The more we look at our fellow DNA-based creatures
| on the planet, the less special we are. Personally, I think
| if you _really_ cared about humans, you 'd be interested in
| understanding and valuing the complex and fragile lifeforms
| that are being trampled by our current prevailing societal
| attitude of consumption and perpetual growth and preserving
| those fragile things for future humans to enjoy, instead of
| being mindless consumers disconnected from nature. Jeesh, as
| if no humans in history had fulfilling lives without potato
| chips, bottled water, and endless online entertainment.
| not_jd_salinger wrote:
| > The world is not ending - Its going to get by just fine
|
| This entire school of thinking that has derived from a George
| Carlin bit never ceases to annoy me.
|
| For starters the "world" as some abstract ideal that we find
| comforting only exists because our human minds perceive it and
| imagine it as such. Our planet is just a rock out in spaces
| with some complex chemical reactions fizzlingly along on the
| surface. There is no "mother Earth" that will still be around
| to enjoy the life that reemerges in millions of years.
|
| And there really is no guarantee that it is "going to get by
| just fine". Are you familiar with the current hypothesis behind
| the End-Permian extinction? It's believed by some to have been
| caused by a super volcano that ignited massive coal veins
| around what is today Siberia. Now the scale of CO2 emitted in
| the End Permian was much more dramatic than even current worse
| case scenarios, but we're emitting about 10x faster than lava
| burning coal was able to do back then. The End Permian nearly
| did wipe out life on this planet.
|
| We don't fully understand all the possible CO2 feedbacks. We're
| already in one of the top 6 extinction events on this planet
| and that has little to do with climate change.... yet. CO2 has
| played a surprisingly big role in most mass extinctions.
|
| Now it's certainly a low probability scenario, but it is not
| inconceivable that the end result of our insane release of CO2
| in the atmosphere could lead to an unrecoverable extinction
| event.
|
| At the very least a startling percent of the current species on
| this planet will go extinct (because a startling number already
| have). Corals which have survived plenty of extinction events
| might be replaces with green slime.
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