[HN Gopher] Arctic Ocean started getting warmer decades earlier ...
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Arctic Ocean started getting warmer decades earlier than we thought
Author : rgrieselhuber
Score : 200 points
Date : 2021-11-30 13:13 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.cam.ac.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.cam.ac.uk)
| Rury wrote:
| I'm surprised this is news to people. The earth (and Arctic
| Ocean) has been warming ever since the last ice age. Places like
| the Great Lakes used to be frozen glaciers thousands of years
| ago.
| depingus wrote:
| Your flippant comment unfairly trivializes the article; either
| on purpose or because you didn't read it.
|
| From the article: "When we looked at the whole 800-year
| timescale, our temperature and salinity records look pretty
| constant," said co-lead author Dr Tesi Tommaso from the
| Institute of Polar Sciences of the National Research Council in
| Bologna. "But all of a sudden at the start of the 20th century,
| you get this marked change in temperature and salinity - it
| really sticks out."
| SirSourdough wrote:
| It's news because it's a more nuanced claim than your "general
| ocean warming has occurred over thousands of years" claim.
|
| The claim is that the marked increase in warming in the 20th
| century began decades earlier than was previously believed, not
| just that there was once an ice age and it's warmer now.
| waterthrowaway wrote:
| Hello!
|
| I'm a physical oceanographer which means my job is to figure out
| how the water moves and delivers heat through things like math
| and models. Paleoclimate isn't my expertise but I figured I'd
| chime in on some of the climate skepticism here.
|
| Oceanographers would be the first to admit that modeling-
| predicting changes in the ocean is very hard. Especially more
| regional features like an intensified warming in the Labrador
| Sea. That is because even state of the art models have coarse
| resolution and our initial conditions for far in the past are
| poor. However, anthropogenic climate change is not a regional
| effect.
|
| It's like if first I asked you, what will happen if I hit this
| window with a hammer? It will break. Now what if I ask you where
| every piece will go?
|
| Also I've seen in this thread people saying that global climate
| change has been overhyped. From the science side this paper does
| a great job of evaluating our models from the past:
|
| https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/288430943.pdf
| echelon wrote:
| What's your impression of the Clathrate gun hypothesis [1]? Is
| this something to be concerned about?
|
| Are there any other runaway processes that could take us by
| surprise? Peat bogs and permafrost hydrates?
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis
| [deleted]
| mempko wrote:
| I am often shocked how a community like HN could have so many
| global warming skeptics. It doesn't make sense to me because
| people who deal with software should understand complex
| systems. Should understand how hard understanding complex
| systems are. And should understand how dangerous it is to
| disrupt complex systems so dramatically like we did the
| climate.
| time_to_smile wrote:
| The bottom line is that the real impacts of climate change
| strike real, existential fear in a lot of HNers and many of
| them simply cannot handle that cognitively.
|
| People are drawn to tech in a large part because of their
| belief in the power of technology and the limitless
| possibility of the future. The very real potential impacts of
| climate change in our lifetime pose as serious threat to
| this.
|
| Rather than struggle with this most people here (or maybe a
| few loud, happy to flag comments they disagree with people)
| find it much easier to simply dismiss everything as excessive
| hyperbole.
|
| Climate change unquestionably posses a real threat to our way
| of life, and at this point mitigating it does as well. People
| in tech are used to only thinking in terms of optimism and
| finding a way to solve problems and really can't deal with
| serious problems that might not have a solution, but rather
| only different forms of compromise.
|
| Unfortunately the skeptics here are very aggressive. I have
| had several comments this week flagged for no other reason
| than disagreement (I know this because they have all been
| unflagged upon review).
|
| It's somewhat ironic because this bizarre extreme reaction
| from this community really makes it all the more clear that
| something is really wrong.
| vixen99 wrote:
| And what does it tell you that sadly there are bizarre
| extreme reactions elsewhere on this climate question?
| Before the British Government was forced to insist that the
| police use their existing powers to stop climate protesters
| preventing people from going about their ordinary business
| which including several people trying to get to hospital
| for cancer treatment, we learnt about non-climate-skeptic
| aggression on a physical level. The leader of their group
| famously declared he would not move even if the motorist
| was carrying a dying person to hospital. That's religious
| fervor of a kind reminiscent of the 14th C. We do indeed
| need to find ways of presenting our ideas and thoughts non-
| aggressively because none of us know the final truth about
| the immensely complex system that is the Earth's climate.
| bts327 wrote:
| Propaganda and hyperbole aside, it must be clear to even the
| most obtuse among us that the earth is a finite system sphere
| with finite system resources. Even if it isn't as bad as
| we're being led to believe, the steps we could be taking to
| mitigate a positive feedback spiraling collapse in the system
| loop are things we should be doing anyway. I don't see how
| anyone here can argue that generating millions of one-time-
| use plastic receptacles is a good idea in any system or in
| any way sustainable long term, so what is the harm in making
| the changes we should be making now, as if it were as bad as
| we're being led to believe?
| xscott wrote:
| Why do people conflate climate change with plastic? Does
| creating reusable glass or metal containers use less energy
| or create less CO2 than making things from plastic?
|
| Plastic pollution (particularly in the oceans) is really
| disturbing, but other than burning it, I don't see what it
| has to do with warming.
| brnt wrote:
| Before we were concerned with the climate, we were with
| the environment. The amount of plastic pollution,
| especially the potential impact of microplastics, is part
| of that, like global warming. At least in my view, I see
| them all as negative impact on our environment. At
| minimum, negative for ourselves.
| xscott wrote:
| Mercury, pesticides, and plastics in the ocean are
| horrible in my opinion. However, I've seen more than one
| person who seems to think recycling is going to have an
| effect on atmospheric CO2 levels.
| pharmakom wrote:
| I once met a developer who claimed he didn't believe climate
| change was real because the software used for modelling isn't
| used by many people and probably has lots of bugs. I don't
| agree, but it was an interesting take.
| xscott wrote:
| Bugs and grad student software aside, ask anyone who thinks
| they can rely on a model to predict the future to implement
| a model of: a simple pendulum, a double pendulum, the three
| body problem, the stock market, and then finally the
| climate.
|
| Those are roughly in order of difficulty, and if they fail
| at an earlier one, you shouldn't trust the later ones. The
| first one isn't even chaotic, and I wouldn't trust a model
| built from first principles alone to be in phase past a
| dozen cycles or so.
|
| You can curve fit things after the fact (interpolation),
| but extrapolation is always on shaky ground.
| smaddox wrote:
| Large scale climate models are more like modeling the
| possible energy distributions of such pendulums into the
| future. That can be done analytically for pendulums. You
| can do it analytically for very simple models of climate,
| too, but more complex models that include enough of the
| forces to be predictive require computers.
| xscott wrote:
| I've heard similar arguments before, but the details
| really matter. The amount of heat and CO2 is going to
| rely on things like albedo on the ground and from cloud
| cover, as well as plant mass and more. I think it's a
| mistake to ignore feedback on any of that, and it doesn't
| take too many moving parts with feedback to create a
| chaotic system.
|
| If nothing interacted with each other, I think you could
| make reasonable energy-in / energy-out models. However
| even looking at big low-pass averages, plants/algae use
| CO2, and heat creates clouds, and clouds block sunlight,
| and so on. Unlike a double pendulum that bleeds a small
| amount of energy to friction, the climate bleeds a lot of
| energy into space, and the amount of energy it loses is a
| function of clouds, plant life, etc.
| allemagne wrote:
| It might be true that tech people work more intimately with
| complex systems than people in most other fields, but that
| could also mean that there is more opportunity for getting
| away with obfuscation or representing a false level of
| confidence (and also dealing with people who do this).
|
| Maybe that understanding of complex systems could be more of
| an unconscious understanding that talented people can act out
| intuitively, or compartmentalize for a specific domain.
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| "Global warming" in the United States is a political issue
| that has nothing to do with science. A lot of our news
| reporting has so many contrary "scientific" studies that the
| average person doesn't know who to trust.
|
| Thus appeals to authority have no meaning if people don't
| trust that authority. The end result is anyone saying stuff
| they like is correct and anyone that isn't is wrong.
|
| The US also has a problem with people active trying to
| cripple and downsize government because it steals their money
| and tells them what to do.
| wonderwonder wrote:
| '"Global warming" in the United States is a political issue
| that has nothing to do with science'
|
| Replace Global Warming with almost any other scientific
| concept and you would also be right. The fact we have
| politicized everything in this country is not a strength
| and is going to have negative long term knock on effects. I
| see the politicization of the covid vaccine giving general
| anti vaxxers validation now and would not be surprised to
| see a resurgence of measles in the near term (couple of
| years). I am completely comfortable with everyone making
| their own choice on the covid vaccine (I am vaccinated), I
| get the concern and there is enough noise that I understand
| their viewpoint. Politicizing it though has been the wrong
| approach, we cant let people have their own opinions
| anymore, everyone that disagrees is the enemy. This is the
| same with climate change, immigration and presidential
| elections. Issue is that the political parties know that
| doing this makes their base rally tighter and establishes a
| motivational us vs them narrative. Its not going to end
| well.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| US Citizen here -- I think that science plays an important
| role on both sides, but the cynical manipulation of news
| stories by the Oil and Gas industry and their well-paid
| allies, is backfiring finally. Please note that four
| prominent Republican Senators with Big Oil ties gave a
| press conference this year, and did not deny Climate
| Change.. this is news
| wonderwonder wrote:
| They dont have to deny climate change, they just have to
| vote like it doesn't exist and blame things like
| government overreach or protecting jobs or energy
| independence. Best of both worlds, it allows them to come
| off as reasonable without losing any donors.
| bink wrote:
| I don't see "many contrary 'scientific' studies" in the
| news. What I do see is almost universal consensus among
| climate scientists that humans are accelerating climate
| change, with a few news personalities criticizing
| predictions that were off by a few degrees or inches of sea
| level rise and pretending that those errors somehow
| invalidate the general consensus. It's disingenuous at the
| very least to suggest that these errors disprove
| anthropogenic climate change or that there are valid
| studies that support both sides.
| rglover wrote:
| The skepticism isn't focused on whether it's happening (or
| even scientifically possible), it's on how much hyperbole is
| attached to the claims being made and how does that align
| with observed/measured reality. When the news is shouting
| "omg panic!! code red!!" based on the least realistic models
| in the IPCC reports, anyone who is intellectually honest says
| "well, wait...what aren't we being told here?"
|
| Because that happens more often than not, skepticism is
| further excited when you get politicians who claim to be in
| favor of climate change policy, only to then go and fly
| private jets, buy ocean front property, etc. This gets
| conveniently ignored by folks who have turned climate change
| into a religion.
|
| Every time you even begin to say "hey, we should consider
| this..." people sperg out and start calling you a "climate
| change denier" or some other disparaging term. Literally
| turning their brains off to counter argument because they
| can't handle the idea that they're living in an incomplete
| reality.
|
| There is absolutely nothing controversial about saying "let's
| look at all sides and evaluate carefully" (the scientific
| process as we've agreed upon it for millennia). People have
| been radicalized and frightened to the point where they no
| longer think rationally about the problem (and solutions) and
| instead get hyper-tribalistic, shouting down any reasonable
| discussion that doesn't automatically agree with their point
| of view.
|
| That's why people are skeptical.
| Klarios wrote:
| While I think you underestimate what this means for a lot
| of 'other' people than 'us' (comparable rich people) it has
| hard/deadly affects already.
|
| And even less human critical things are also dramatic just
| not for everyone. When you tell me all coral reefs are
| dying I really think this is very bad.
| rglover wrote:
| No, my opinion includes concern for developing nations.
| Not allowing them to access fossil fuels or other forms
| of cheap plentiful energy means they can't develop
| properly (i.e., permanent impoverishment).
| time_to_smile wrote:
| > "omg panic!! code red!!" based on the least realistic
| models in the IPCC reports,
|
| You mean articles like this _Climate change: IPCC report is
| 'code red for humanity'_? [0]
|
| Because that specific quote, "code red" is not BBC
| editorialization. It is a direct quote from UN Secretary-
| General Antonio Guterres [1]
|
| > Today's IPCC Working Group 1 report is a code red for
| humanity. The alarm bells are deafening, and the evidence
| is irrefutable: greenhouse-gas emissions from fossil-fuel
| burning and deforestation are choking our planet and
| putting billions of people at immediate risk.
|
| People accuse you ave being a skeptic not because you are
| saying "hey, we should consider this...", it's because, as
| exemplified by this exact comment, you are deliberately
| misrepresenting your position to make it seem more
| legitimate. "Code red" is not based on the "least
| realistic" models, they are based on our current pathway,
| that was what made the most recent IPCC report so alarming.
|
| Climate change poses an extremely serious, near term threat
| to our very way of life. I know that this can be hard to
| accept, but it is important to, at the very least, not
| silence those who are pointing this out.
|
| 0. https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-58130705
|
| 1. https://www.un.org/press/en/2021/sgsm20847.doc.htm
| rglover wrote:
| > you are deliberately misrepresenting your position to
| make it seem more legitimate
|
| I'm literally not. It's in the report [1]. Your
| condescension here is exactly what I'm getting at. You
| assume I'm an idiot because we disagree.
|
| [1] https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/downloads/report/I
| PCC_AR6... (Page 304, lines 15-27).
|
| Edit: not my own math but this is important, too, and
| further cements my point: https://twitter.com/RogerPielke
| Jr/status/1424718032279011339.
| [deleted]
| time_to_smile wrote:
| I'm honestly confused as to whether or not you are
| willfully trolling, tricking yourself, or just very
| scared. You're playing the exact tricks here that I just
| pointed out in the previous comment but I'm genuinely
| unsure of your motives. (btw, I don't think you're an
| idiot, I don't think most climate skeptics are idiots, I
| think they're terrified beyond what they themselves even
| realize)
|
| The page you linked to says that RCP 8.5 is very
| unlikely, but none of the "code red" reports claim
| otherwise.
|
| All of the "code red" reports claim that we are virtually
| certain to be unable to stay below 1.5 preindustrial.
| This is RCP 4.5 and above. Something that if we had this
| conversation 20 years ago was also viewed as very
| unlikely.
|
| I think either you don't know or are wildly
| underestimating the severe impact that these alternative
| pathways will have on human populations. RCP 8.5 is as
| horrific as it is unlikely, but all the other pathways we
| are rushing towards are still absolutely "code red".
|
| In the early 2000s most people earnestly thought we
| wouldn't get past 1C, now that is impossible.
|
| It's not even worth getting into all the ways that many
| people agree the IPCC reports tend to be a bit
| conservative. I'm fine throwing out all of these
| concerns, and sticking with just the report, but even
| with just the report, even on RCP 4.5, we're in very real
| trouble. It is absolutely a 'code red'.
| rglover wrote:
| > I'm honestly confused as to whether or not you are
| willfully trolling, tricking yourself, or just very
| scared.
|
| None of the above. I'm reading the report and forming my
| own opinion while factoring out the hyperbole and panic
| of the media, politicians, etc. My motivation is thinking
| for myself and considering whether all of the theatrics
| align with the reality in front of me (they don't).
|
| To further elaborate on my skepticism, perfectly valid
| technologies that could have been implemented decades ago
| (while there was plenty of awareness of this problem, as
| well as "global cooling") like nuclear have been
| foolishly ignored, discredited, etc. The primary argument
| I hear is "too expensive" and "too long to build," yet
| somehow congress manages to find money for inanities to
| the tune of billions every year. You'd think if this was
| seriously catastrophic, we'd be going in to debt to
| finance better energy solutions.
|
| All of what I said above combined with that tells me the
| motivation of the people trying to scare everyone is
| disingenuous. When someone's actions don't align with
| their speech, it's often indicative of dishonesty.
| Considering how much money is at stake, the probability
| of that is increased.
| mythrwy wrote:
| An understanding that dealing with super complex systems with
| lots of interacting variables are very hard to accurately
| model and prediction value is likely to be low?
|
| Plus maybe just a general distaste for propaganda.
|
| For my own part I believe humans are affecting the climate to
| some extent. I don't see how anything else would be possible.
|
| But I'm early 50's and have been watching this closely for 30
| years and don't believe the hype and doomsday predictions
| anymore. I don't think the models are good enough to say what
| will happen in sum. Should we get off fossil fuels and stop
| polluting? Yes as fast as practically possible. Is OMG the
| world ending oceans collapsing 12 years from now? Probably
| not and they don't actually know that.
| JohnClark1337 wrote:
| Just because you're good at software doesn't mean you have to
| view the rest of reality the same way as everyone else who's
| good at software. This is just one aspect of life. Most
| people can not be completely divided into two groups, people
| pick and choose elements that make up their worldview which
| leads to many variations of belief.
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| There is something about software engineering, and I'm going
| to get hammered for this, that seems to convince people that
| everyone are idiots and doing it all wrong. It might be from
| personal experience explaining their field to family and
| friends, or perhaps it's brought about by constantly building
| things for themselves, idk. They seem to have especial
| disdain for scientists, who have a long and stories
| reputation as the intellectual elite, which might just rub
| their egos the wrong way.
| nnvvhh wrote:
| I think the superiority felt by some software engineers
| stems from the simple fact that they are paid a lot and are
| seen as smart and valuable in the culture. They have
| economic power, and work on something that seems
| incomprehensible to many everyday people. The subject
| matter may also have something to do with it. We're taught
| that lots of problems can have their details reduced and
| abstracted away, and I think engineers can ignore the
| normal human elements of life that have a real effect.
|
| This is more armchair Freudish, but I also think that a
| feeling of intellectual superiority makes up for other
| areas that are lacking in similar feelings of value and
| power. Life as a computer science student is not cool or
| fun or sexy, so you fall back on what gives you power in
| wider society. Sort of like the idea that poor whites fall
| back onto their whiteness. People jockey for position using
| whatever they have.
| 0_____0 wrote:
| Not only are they paid a lot, but they basically start
| their careers being paid lavishly in places like the SF
| Bay Area. To a 22 year old fresh grad, what does it tell
| you when life immediately rewards you with a top 10%
| income bracket out of university?
|
| This extends to the techno-elite as well. What drives the
| CEO of an electric car company to declare that the way to
| improve urban mobility is to build roads in tunnels
| underground? Well, clearly he must be doing something
| right, he's the richest man on earth!
| ghostwriter wrote:
| > They seem to have especial disdain for scientists, who
| have a long and stories reputation as the intellectual
| elite, which might just rub their egos the wrong way.
|
| another reason could be that the level of reproducibility
| of results and openness and availability of sources (data,
| code, papers) in modern "science" branches is appallingly
| low for the software folks to take them (the scientists and
| their results) seriously by default.
| spiralx wrote:
| > They seem to have especial disdain for scientists, who
| have a long and stories reputation as the intellectual
| elite, which might just rub their egos the wrong way.
|
| Doubly so for anything vaguely related to social sciences
| and other fields where theorising from first principles
| isn't the norm. "Historical" sciences such as astrophysics
| and epidemiology often get short shrift here as well.
| Engineers in general seem to be prone to opining outside of
| their area of expertise, the Salem Hypothesis that a
| creationist with an advanced degree was more likely to be
| an engineer than any other field was noted back in the
| early days of Usenet:
|
| https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Engineers_and_woo
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| what a great link. Thanks for sharing.
| UnFleshedOne wrote:
| To be fair, given recent reproducibility fiasco, social
| sciences were scorned for a good reason.
| Teever wrote:
| Is there anything to indicate that computer science and
| computer engineering will avoid their own reproducibility
| fiasco?
| waterthrowaway wrote:
| If you are interested in the irreducible imprecision of climate
| models this paper is fun too
|
| https://www.pnas.org/content/104/21/8709
| moffkalast wrote:
| I'm not sure if you're the guy to ask, but I'm sure you're
| aware of the continuing acidification of the oceans via CO2
| absorption. From what I've heard it's highly unpredictable as
| to how it will actually affect ecosystems, but supposedly
| some molluscs are already having reproductive issues as their
| shells tend to dissolve at some point in the growing cycle.
| The predictions I've read point to a likely oceanic food
| chain collapse in 15-25 years, not to mention the decrease in
| fertility that fish seem to be experiencing from higher
| temperatures.
|
| Is that roughly correct?
| pvaldes wrote:
| Overfishing masks that effects also. There is not reason to
| think that fish fertility as a global concept would change.
| Some species would decrease and other increase but
| jellyfishes would be the real culprits in most cases if you
| see a big decrease or recruitment when the water is warmer.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| I heard whispers of "its too late" in the early 90s, with
| respect to the top meter of ocean and the biological life
| cycles there being broken.. yet we had the international
| CFC ban and that was a success at breaking the Ozone Hole,
| which made things better.. Let's be eyes-open on every
| detail, but be aware of the despair aspect too .. "collapse
| in X-X+10 years" is overwhelming to many ears, and we do
| not know the future.. hth
| jedmeyers wrote:
| > "collapse in X-X+10 years" is overwhelming to many ears
|
| "collapse in X-X+10 years" is not usually as overwhelming
| compared to what follows it. And usually, was follows is
| either we have to drastically raise taxes or abolish
| capitalism altogether and implement authoritarian
| governments, because as we know, only the capitalist
| societies damage ecosystems.
| aaronbrethorst wrote:
| I can't tell if you're trolling or legitimately arguing
| for ecofascism.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Trolling. The "because as we know, only the capitalist
| societies damage ecosystems" was the giveaway.
|
| Or perhaps not exactly trolling. Might be pointing out
| that this kind of thing is actually being seriously
| proposed as the solution in certain quarters.
| tomp wrote:
| > hit this window with a hammer? It will break.
|
| Isn't this more akin to saying, the window broke before the
| hammer hit it, so the hammer couldn't have been the cause?
| bena wrote:
| Don't argue the metaphor.
|
| He's saying it's hard to predict results from certain causes
| because the process is chaotic.
| ghotli wrote:
| "Don't argue the metaphor" is such a good line for so many
| arguments. Noted and thanks.
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| Yeah. But truth be told, I think the use of the word
| "like" makes it an analogy.
| shkkmo wrote:
| Actually the use of "like" it makes it a simile. It's the
| explanation that follows that makes it an analogy.
|
| Both analogies and similies are really just overlapping
| categorical subsets of metaphors.
| dgb23 wrote:
| ,,Don't argue with the rhetoric"
| shockeychap wrote:
| I get that, but I think you might also be missing something
| in the urgency to derive one particular meaning from the
| metaphor.
|
| Imagine coming upon a window that was broken, and inferring
| that it must have been broken by "a thing". So you look for
| evidence - a rock, a hammer, something - all the while
| proclaiming that the cause was a given. All the while, you
| overlook that the initial fracture was there from the
| beginning and carried along every day by comparatively
| small amounts of thermal stress.
|
| Could that also be a metaphor for some of the climate
| change hype? (I don't use the word "hype" to imply false. I
| use it in the context of "to promote or publicize
| extravagantly".)
| nosianu wrote:
| > _Isn 't this more akin to saying, the window broke
| before the hammer hit it, so the hammer couldn't have
| been the cause?_
|
| It's not true though if you want to use your metaphor for
| climate change.
|
| https://www.carbonbrief.org/scientists-clarify-starting-
| poin...
|
| > _Scientists generally regard the later part of the 19th
| century as the point at which human activity started
| influencing the climate. But the new study brings that
| date forward to the 1830s._
|
| This was well before the date in the article.
| bena wrote:
| That's an entirely different metaphor though.
|
| That's the point.
|
| He's not talking about the causes of climate change or
| anything like that. He's explaining a specific phenomenon
| using an analogy. Whether or not you believe climate
| change is anthropocentric is immaterial to how this
| phenomenon manifests. And to help people understand how
| this phenomenon works, he used the metaphor of the
| shattered glass.
|
| It actually does not matter what shattered the glass. He
| said hammer because a hammer would work. It could have
| been smashed with a frozen, medium-sized cat for all it
| mattered.
|
| The point is, once the glass is shattered, you cannot
| predict where each piece is going to fall.
| cletus wrote:
| > It's like if first I asked you, what will happen if I hit
| this window with a hammer? It will break. Now what if I ask you
| where every piece will go?
|
| I don't like this analogy. A better example might be that if we
| set fire to all the forests, it's going to get hotter. It's
| true in the short term but the long term effects can be
| debated. And unfortunately there's a history of predictions
| that haven't come true to deal with.
|
| There are a bunch of unanswered questions around rapid warming.
| Like the doom and gloom scenarios of a tipping point or runaway
| global warming. The obvious question I have is: if this is a
| real possibility, why hasn't it happened in the last several
| billion years? The Earth has been warmer than it is now.
|
| Another is that rapid warming over short periods isn't that
| unprecedented [1]:
|
| > One of the most surprising findings was that the shifts from
| cold stadials to the warm interstadial intervals occurred in a
| matter of decades, with air temperatures over Greenland rapidly
| warming 8 to 15degC (Huber et al. 2006)
|
| To be clear, I'm not a climate change denier. I'm a climate
| change fatalist. By this I mean that whatever is going to
| happen is going to happen and there's really nothing you can do
| about it now other than finding cheaper alternatives to bad
| behaviours (eg solar becoming cheaper than fossil fuels).
|
| If the pandemic has taught us nothing else, it's that many
| people are staggeringly selfish and are quite willing to let
| other people die rather than they being mildly inconvenienced.
| There's no way people are going to make their lives more
| expensive or more inconvenient for climate change.
|
| [1]: https://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/abrupt-
| cli...
| chana_masala wrote:
| Thanks for adding the further context here. I'd like to add
| context to your point:
|
| > If the pandemic has taught us nothing else, it's that many
| people are staggeringly selfish and are quite willing to let
| other people die rather than they being mildly
| inconvenienced.
|
| I don't believe that "anti-maskers", who you are probably
| referring to, are significantly more selfish than "maskers."
| If you understand that most of them truly believe masks are
| not helpful, and even some believe they are harmful, then to
| them it's more than just "I'd rather kill people than be
| inconvenienced." They don't believe they are killing anyone.
| stuff4ben wrote:
| This is fascinating! We've always blamed climate change/warming
| on man-made activities, but this study is saying Arctic
| Atlantification predates the industrial revolution (or at least
| occurs at the same time). Not that I want to see continued use of
| fossil fuels in place of more sustainable options like nuclear
| and solar/wind. But what if scientists have been wrong about the
| causes of global warming?
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > but this study is saying Arctic Atlantification predates the
| industrial revolution (or at least occurs at the same time).
|
| No, it isn't. It says it starts at the beginning of the 20th
| century, the industrial revolution usually dated as mid-18th to
| mid-19th century. The former is neither before nor at the same
| time as the latter.
|
| > Not that I want to see continued use of fossil fuels in place
| of more sustainable options like nuclear and solar/wind. But
| what if scientists have been wrong about the causes of global
| warming?
|
| There is no good reason to think that they have, and this study
| does not at all contravene, or even call into question, the
| consensus on the causes of warming.
| yessirwhatever wrote:
| > There is no good reason to think that they have, and this
| study does not at all contravene, or even call into question,
| the consensus on the causes of warming.
|
| From the article:
|
| > "Climate simulations generally do not reproduce this kind
| of warming in the Arctic Ocean, meaning there's an incomplete
| understanding of the mechanisms driving Atlantification,"
| said Tommaso. "We rely on these simulations to project future
| climate change, but the lack of any signs of an early warming
| in the Arctic Ocean is a missing piece of the puzzle."
|
| I'd generally encourage people to be skeptical of everything,
| but I'd call this a really good reason to be skeptical.
| dtech wrote:
| It can just as well be an explanation why climate models
| have been pretty consistently under-estimating warming of
| time though.
| hinkley wrote:
| James Watt's first heat engine went online the same year as
| the American Revolutionary War. We might recall also that one
| of the uses of his machines was to keep coal mines from
| filling up with water (ie, increase coal production).
|
| This has been going on for a long time, and steel production
| was a major factor long before Watt.
| draw_down wrote:
| > But what if scientists have been wrong about the causes of
| global warming?
|
| I'm not sure we can realistically go down that road,
| politically speaking. Look at everything that's happened with
| covid- what we said wasn't _wrong_ , you just misheard us. If
| anything, climate change is even more entrenched politically.
| 9oliYQjP wrote:
| The article makes no mention of the warming predating the
| industrial revolution. Rather, the quote below indicates a
| marked change in temperature at the beginning of the 20th
| century.
|
| _When we looked at the whole 800-year timescale, our
| temperature and salinity records look pretty constant," said
| co-lead author Dr Tesi Tommaso from the Institute of Polar
| Sciences of the National Research Council in Bologna. "But all
| of a sudden at the start of the 20th century, you get this
| marked change in temperature and salinity - it really sticks
| out._
| Klarios wrote:
| It potentially explains more/better/more fine-grained how our
| future will look like.this will not suddenly revert our
| assumptions on CO2 being the fundamental factor of man made
| global warming.
|
| We are not that uncertain about climate change.
| time_to_smile wrote:
| In William Ruddiman's _Plows, Plagues, and Petroleum_ [0] he
| argues that even human agriculture has been enough to tip the
| CO2 scales in favor of not entering a new ice age.
|
| > But what if scientists have been wrong about the causes of
| global warming?
|
| This would require several, distinct and unrelated fields of
| science being wrong about the way CO2 and other GHG have in the
| past and currently regulate the Earth's temperature.
|
| There is no question that CO2 in the atmosphere has been
| rapidly rising.
|
| There is no question that humans have been the cause of this
| rise, it's just basic math given the wild amount of
| hydrocarbons we combust every year.
|
| So while it's possible that scientists are wrong in the big
| picture sense it would require a sea-change in our
| understanding of climate from every perspective as well as
| being a remarkable coincidence that we are seeing the impact we
| are in correlation to our own CO2 emissions.
|
| A far, far more likely explanation is that the Earth's climate
| is even more sensitive to small changes in CO2 on a small time
| scale than we have previously thought.
|
| 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plows,_Plagues_and_Petroleum
| mathieubordere wrote:
| This article does not say global climate warming is not man-
| made, it just states that "Atlantification" is a process that
| warms the Arctic Ocean even more.
| goohle wrote:
| OMG. Do you know meaning of "acceleration" word in
| "acceleration of warming"?
| sjwalter wrote:
| What if the rate of change commonly accepted by mainstream
| climate scientists is off by 10%? 50%? More?
|
| What if the alarmism and depression-inspiring shrill
| shrieking is doing more harm than good?
| revolvingocelot wrote:
| What if you're just asking questions, y'know?
| time_to_smile wrote:
| A bit terrifying that your other comment which was
| pointing out this "just asking questions" behavior[0] was
| immediately flagged and removed.
|
| It's wild to me that a group of people that tends to be
| educated, intellectual, and curious about complex systems
| instantly starts to lose it's collective mind when faced
| with an existential risk. It feels like living in a
| Lovecraft story where the only response to horror is
| madness.
|
| [0] https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Just_asking_questions
| tzs wrote:
| > But what if scientists have been wrong about the causes of
| global warming?
|
| That is _extremely_ unlikely. We can measure the spectrum and
| intensity of incoming solar energy and of outgoing radiation
| from Earth, and see that we are gaining. We can see that much
| of that gain is due to incoming energy heating things which re-
| radiate that energy in infrared which we can see gets trapped
| by CO2.
|
| We can tell by looking at the isotope distribution of the C in
| the CO2 where it comes from. CO2 from still living or recently
| living (say dead for only a few hundred years) has a different
| isotope distribution than CO2 from long dead or never living
| sources. This lets us tell that most of the CO2 increase over
| the last couple hundred years is from burning fossil fuels or
| an increase in geological processes that release long trapped
| CO2 such as volcanic activity.
|
| The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere that we can tell from that
| did not come from living or recently living things matches
| fairly well with what we know of volcanic activity and how much
| fossil fuels we burn, giving us enough data to conclude that
| most of the warming due to CO2 is due to human emitted CO2.
|
| For that to be wrong would require that we have massively
| overestimated how much fossil fuels we use and massively
| overlooked a large amount of volcanic activity.
| mythrwy wrote:
| Ok, but more heat means more water vapor which means more
| cloud cover which means less heat. More CO2 means more plant
| growth which means less CO2 as the carbon is tied up.
|
| It's not one factor you can examine cleanly in isolation.
| There are many many interacting factors.
| tomtomistaken wrote:
| > All of the world's oceans are warming due to climate change,
| but the Arctic Ocean, the smallest and shallowest of the
| world's oceans, is warming fastest of all.
|
| The article talks about the Arctic Ocean. It is not denying the
| warming of the world's ocean due to climate change.
| refurb wrote:
| Exactly! The article mentions it's been warming since 1900
| which is a scant decade after industrialization began. It seems
| to suggest other factors are contributing to global warming!
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > The article mentions it's been warming since 1900 which is
| a scant decade after industrialization began
|
| The industrial revolution is generally dated from 1760, which
| is...somewhat more than a decade before 1900.
| refurb wrote:
| See other reply that shows CO2 emissions were negligible
| until 1900?
|
| How are we driving mass warming in 1900 when CO2 emissions
| were barely 1% of what they are today?
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > See other reply that shows CO2 emissions were
| negligible until 1900?
|
| Literally, no, where? Even if I did see one claiming
| that, I've also seen the charts of net atmospheric CO2
| from human activity that show a sharp rise already in
| progress by 1800.
| option_greek wrote:
| Just grasping at straws. Without taking into
| consideration, the magnitude of co2 getting emitted, we
| can even blame cavemen with their cook fires for global
| warming.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| for context, greenhouse effect was first described in 1824
| and a good approximation of the warning effect of doubling of
| atmospheric CO2 was made in 1896 (+2.5~4 C) [0]
|
| From 1800 to 1900, CO2 ppm rose from 280 to 300
|
| Of course, from 1900 til today it has risen to over 400ppm
|
| My point is, we were burning a significant amount of coal
| throughout 1800s - Acid rain was happening in the 1850s [1]
|
| [0] http://interactive.fusion.net/200-years-of-climate-
| science-a...
|
| [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid_rain
| refurb wrote:
| But we've doubled CO2 and haven't seen a 2.5 to 4C
| temperature rise? What do you mean "good approximation"?
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| 280 to 400 is not doubling
|
| I guess I was quoting the source in saying the pencil and
| paper estimate is in line with modern climate models
|
| edit: from a cursory googling, looks like 450ppm is in
| line with 2C warning while 600pm is the higher end at 4C
| warning
|
| note also temperature lags behind co2 (since heat is
| captured cumulatively over time) so even if we stabilized
| now at ~412ppm we will continue to see warming
| [deleted]
| scollet wrote:
| How do you perform RCA on such a complex system?
| hinkley wrote:
| If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.
| tdrdt wrote:
| Personally I am still not convinced climate change is completely
| caused by human activity. But I think we are accelerating a
| natural climate change.
|
| _"Climate simulations generally do not reproduce this kind of
| warming in the Arctic Ocean, meaning there's an incomplete
| understanding of the mechanisms driving Atlantification,"_
|
| My takeaway: because we still know so little about the mechanisms
| we should be more careful about our environment. It's very naive
| to pump tons of CO2 into the atmosphere without knowing what will
| happen.
| karmelapple wrote:
| Do you consider yourself in agreement with scientists that
| focus on studying the climate, or in disagreement with them?
|
| From what I understand, the scientific consensus [1] is not
| that climate change is completely caused by human activity, for
| the very reason you mention: it's complicated. :)
|
| But like you also mention, the consensus is that we are we are
| at least partially causing it, even if it's not "completely."
| If we're not causing 100% of the change, but perhaps 50%, I'm
| not sure if that's much of a distinction in terms of what
| policy to change. Do you agree?
|
| [1] https://climate.nasa.gov/scientific-consensus - "Climate-
| warming trends over the past century are extremely likely due
| to human activities." It does not say or imply 100% due to
| those human activities. The ACS says, "The Earth's climate is
| changing in response to increasing concentrations of greenhouse
| gases (GHGs) and particulate matter in the atmosphere, largely
| as the result of human activities." Even there, it's not saying
| completely, although it's saying largely, which definitely has
| a distinction.
| tdrdt wrote:
| _Do you agree?_
|
| Absolutely!
|
| I think we are very 'unlucky' (stupid) that we are
| accelerating a natural climate change that causes global
| warming.
| peteradio wrote:
| I think it's interesting to consider the scenario that
| humans are not causing the climate to change, but it is
| changing catastrophically nonetheless. How is our strategy
| different? Is it at all?
| tdrdt wrote:
| Well lets say natural global warming will cause a rise of
| 5degC in the next 50 years. Then we have 50 years to
| adapt. But when we accelerate this change we might need
| to adapt in 5 years. And we might even cause a rise of
| 6degC instead of 5. I believe those are the big problems
| we are facing.
| Zababa wrote:
| I think in that case we would focus on ways to cope with
| climate change. For example, air conditionning everywhere
| would make sense. What's difficult about the current
| crisis is that you can't use too much energy to fight it
| without making it worse.
| blackbrokkoli wrote:
| Please elaborate how air conditioning is going to prevent
| a destabilization of democracy around the world as
| millions of climate refugees run out of places to flee
| too?
| w-j-w wrote:
| https://xkcd.com/1732/
| xscott wrote:
| Do you ever wonder why that comic only goes back 22,000
| years? If it had gone back just a little more, say 25,000
| years (a rounder number), it would be much more complicated
| to explain what happened.
|
| If it had gone back 400,000 years, which is basically nothing
| in geological scales, it would bring up some really
| interesting questions.
| WithinReason wrote:
| That XKCD concatenated data from different studies with
| different temporal resolution, so it's very misleading. Past
| data came from Marcott et. all, who said:
|
| "the paleotemperature records used in our study have a
| temporal resolution of about 120 years on average."
|
| "no temperature variability is preserved in our
| reconstruction at cycles shorter than 300 years, 50% is
| preserved at 1,000-year time scales, and nearly all is
| preserved at 2,000-year periods and longer."
|
| Recent data came from yearly measurements, so preserves
| variability on a yearly basis.
|
| In other words, the way past data was determined, sudden
| changes would be hidden, like the temperature spike that it
| shows in the 20th century.
| listless wrote:
| Let's just say for a moment that human-caused climate change is
| either minimal or even non-existent. At this point, would we
| even be able to admit that? So much political and scientific
| capital has been invested here that if we were to find out that
| maybe it's not what we think it is, it would do catastrophic
| damage to people's faith in science and institutions. And they
| are precariously positioned as is.
| soperj wrote:
| It would do more damage to keep lying at that point.
| pjkundert wrote:
| I think that the whole "Trust the Science" trope has already
| damaged people's faith in science and institutions.
|
| If we had, instead, encouraged "Trust the Scientific Method"
| and taught people to think and replicate claims, we'd be in a
| much better place.
|
| But, the lack of access to raw datasets (and the packaged
| code to transform them into claimed results) has led to a
| total "trust" environment, with no ability to "check
| scientist's work".
|
| What other outcome could we have expected?
| q1w2 wrote:
| This was especially poignant in the spring of 2020 when
| scientists and health officials were telling people that
| masks were NOT effective at preventing covid-19 infection.
| ...and that such idiotic positions were amplified on social
| media and opposing opinions were silenced.
| listless wrote:
| People forget this ever happened. Our memory is short. I
| would add to this that cloth masks barely work at all,
| and yet we're still encouraging people to wear them (1).
| It's this kind of thing that we need to stop doing. Just
| tell people the truth and encourage them to wear a
| surgical mask.
|
| 1) https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20210907/masks-limit-
| covid-s...
| awild wrote:
| I've seen this trope of a lack of trustable science often
| here. But the people not trusting the science (that I've
| come across) would usually not have the ability to
| replicate science anyway, for a lack of education. The
| other group to not "trust the science" usually is making
| their money in some of the causes of global warming.
|
| Just a few weeks back, Saudi Arabia (and some other
| countries I'm missing) insisted on weakening the claims
| made in a joint statement/study of the COP.
|
| The lack of trust in science (imho) stems from the fact
| that pretty big news organisations (fox, Bild etc) are
| doing their best to ease the cognitive dissonance of their
| audience by claiming them unreliable. The ivory tower is
| just a propaganda trope at this point
| notreallyserio wrote:
| Another significant factor is the belief we are in the
| end times and thus whatever we do doesn't matter (or
| worse, may delay the end). A large minority believes
| this[0], but they have outsized influence among
| politicians, at least in the US.
|
| Further, they believe that their holy literature is
| perfect and because science changes, science must be
| wrong[1]. Therefore, we should just follow what the book
| says, which is that there will be a rapture.
|
| 0: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-
| tank/2010/07/14/jesus-chris... where christ's return
| means the end times. 1: unfortunately I don't have a
| citation for this, but it's something I've seen a lot.
| pjkundert wrote:
| The assumption of universal ignorance on the part of
| non-"scientists" is ... pretty amazing.
|
| I think we'd be pretty amazed at what people can
| discover, when the raw data and the analytical procedures
| used to draw conclusions from that data are exposed to
| scrutiny.
| awild wrote:
| I think you're confusing something here. I'm not claiming
| we don't need open data nor am I claiming that the non-
| academic populus would be unable to make interesting
| observations with open data. I'm saying that of those
| people that deny scientifically validated claims (like
| climate change or the efficacy of vaccinations) the
| majority would not be able to make interesting (and
| valid) observations, nor would it be in their interest to
| do so.
|
| I know how to run climate simulations, given a huge dump
| of climate data I would _not_ be able to draw any new
| conclusions out of it, I can guarantee that to you.
|
| My point is that this idea that distrust in science stems
| from a lack of open data is wrong, and instead product of
| concerted and ongoing effort of propaganda and defunding
| of academia. Climate change is at this stage more a
| political problem than it is a scientific one.
| listless wrote:
| I don't think it's a trope - unfortunately. There's so
| many examples of people using "science" as a political
| football that they've undermined themselves. We've got
| public health experts encouraging people to protest
| racial justice in the height of a pandemic as if a virus
| cares about the nobility of your cause, and that's just a
| most recent example. History is littered with us being
| wrong or just downright manipulative with data / science
| / experts.
|
| Said to say that I think parent thread has it right -
| people need to have faith in the method - not the experts
| - and realize that the method does not yield infallible
| results. It's simply the best mechanism for getting the
| truth with the data we currently have. And people need to
| be able to parse out when they are seeing data-driven
| conclusions over when experts are just saying
| dumb/political things. That can't be a referendum on
| "science".
| thepasswordis wrote:
| We have seen this cycle play out in the past.
|
| There was a time when you were meant to trust the church.
| You weren't allowed to read the bible or interpret it
| yourself, since that was the role of a priest.
|
| It was not a good system, and the people who were in charge
| of interpreting the scripture for people used their station
| to enrich themselves and levy power over the people who had
| to come to them.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| >But, the lack of access to raw datasets (and the packaged
| code to transform them into claimed results) has led to a
| total "trust" environment, with no ability to "check
| scientist's work".
|
| Even if raw datasets were available, I suspect 95%+ of
| people lack the ability to draw conclusions from them.
|
| A majority would fail simply in the step of opening a
| browser and navigating the internet to get to the dataset.
|
| And then a sizable portion would fail at figuring out which
| programs to use to analyze them.
|
| And then a sizable portion of those would not understand
| the math to be able to understand the measurements they
| would be making.
|
| The emergence of certain mostly trustworthy organizations
| filled with mostly trustworthy people is what has gotten us
| humans this far. People do not have the capacity to be able
| to comprehend and analyze all of nature, they will have to
| rely on trustworthy specialists.
| ghostwriter wrote:
| > And then a sizable portion of those would not
| understand the math to be able to understand the
| measurements they would be making.
|
| There's a sizable portion of so-called scientists that
| neither know nor understand math either [1]
|
| [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/math/comments/1xfa8p/medical
| _paper_...
| [deleted]
| pjkundert wrote:
| That's the beauty of the Scientific Method.
|
| It doesn't take a multitude of people to falsify an
| unsound claim.
|
| It only takes _one_ counterexample.
|
| Could it be that "Trust the Science" is simply an attempt
| to prop up faulty science that can't survive scrutiny?
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| The data should, of course, be made available so anyone
| can try to verify.
|
| But at the of the day, for the most complicated topics,
| we will have to trust others.
| consumer451 wrote:
| > Let's just say for a moment that human-caused climate
| change is either minimal or even non-existent.
|
| But we know that this is not the case. To me, this exercise
| is along the lines of wondering what the universe would be
| like if the cosmological constant had a different value.
|
| It's a discussion about a theoretical world which does not
| exist, isn't it? What is the point then?
| Proven wrote:
| > Personally I am still not convinced climate change is
| completely caused by human activity
|
| I'm not concerned at all.
|
| The real problem is that the silly efforts to "do something"
| are a collosal destruction of wealth while having no effect
| whatsoever on climate.
| anonymouse008 wrote:
| My biggest concern is the lack of attribution to earth's orbit
| around the sun...
|
| if our Goldielocks zone is so precious, then one would expect
| any deviation in the orbit to deliver measurable differences in
| effects caused by earth's proximity to the sun, no?
| boc wrote:
| I used to think this until someone pointed out that the earth
| isn't a fixed distance from the Sun.. it varies throughout
| the orbit from a minimum of 91 million miles to a maximum of
| 94.5 million miles away.
|
| So there's already a 3.5 million mile margin of error in our
| Goldilocks zone... we'd have to go way beyond a few miles of
| annual change to feel any impact.
| Voloskaya wrote:
| The Goldielocks zone is not tiny by human standard. It's goes
| from about a third of earth orbit's radius, to 10x it's
| radius. However climate would be extremely different at 0.3x,
| 1x and 10x, which I assume is what you really meant.
|
| The orbit of Earth is also extremely stable, barely changing,
| and with time the earth is getting farther from the Sun, not
| closer, as the Sun is slowing losing mass since it's burning
| fuel to produce heat and light. The speed at which we are
| getting further away is however ridiculously tiny: a few
| centimeters a year.
|
| To give you a sense of perspective, earth is closest to the
| sun in January and furthest in July. It is ~5 million
| kilometers nearer in January, and that only amount to about 6
| or 7% more solar energy received.
|
| So, any deviation of earth orbit's over the past 100 years
| that would explain climate change would need to be massive.
| Not the kind of things we wouldn't notice, and also not the
| kind of things that would allow us to be talking about it
| today. If earth's orbit was changing that much, that would
| mean our solar system is not stable, probably making life
| impossible.
| marstall wrote:
| for reference, here's a look at what co2 emissions were 120 years
| ago ... https://skepticalscience.com/EmmissionsAcceleration.html
| HamburgerEmoji wrote:
| For more context, CO2 ppm was ~1000 less than 50m years ago.
| q1w2 wrote:
| Two things I find unsatisfactory in these data...
|
| 1. It doesn't touch on the Earth's natural absorption of CO2 -
| so we cannot conclude here that the additional CO2 emitted
| remains in the atmosphere (I mean we know that from other
| research, but this link is silent on that mitigation).
|
| 2. The cumulative numbers are pointless and misleading. CO2 is
| known to have a half-life on the order of under a century, so
| posting cumulative numbers gives the reader the misconception
| that the only way back is to extract CO2 from the atmosphere
| and that the situation is much more irreversible than it is in
| the long term.
| moffkalast wrote:
| It's true, there is some absorption:
| https://www.eea.europa.eu/ims/ocean-acidification and it's
| gonna make the situation so much worse it's hard to even
| imagine right now.
| shkkmo wrote:
| I find the term "half-life" in this context misleading,
| possibly because I am coming from a nuclear science
| background where half lives are stable because they are the
| probabilistic result of nuclear decay. The chance of a given
| atom decaying doesn't change no mater how many you have or
| what you do.
|
| With CO2, the absorption probability is flexible and can
| depend on how much CO2 is in the atmosphere (as well as a
| large number of other factors.) To me this makes "half-life"
| a poor metaphor for CO2 absorption.
| codingdave wrote:
| CO2 has a half-life of 120 years, so it seems like a chart of
| data covering 120 years is appropriate.
| q1w2 wrote:
| None of the charts seem to take into account any absorption
| at all, regardless of the duration. Having a chart 120
| years long, and not including absorption, means all the
| numbers are significantly wrong.
|
| Also, 120 years is on the upper range of most estimates,
| and does not assume any increased absorption despite the
| fact that we've almost doubled the concentration of CO2.
| mertanj1 wrote:
| Amazing input.
| truthwhisperer wrote:
| very nice article.
|
| Fear sells. The whole climate debate is about how we can
| distribute wealth. First step, spread fear amongst the youth
| because the older, mostly conservative public won't listen at
| first. Especially the young white females are sensitive because
| of their mother feelings and protective childhood.
| johnohara wrote:
| There are enormous amounts of hydrocarbons beneath the Artic
| Ocean and the world has known that for many decades. If those
| resources could be extracted without extreme complication and
| expense the world would have done so before now.
|
| It makes me wonder whether the "normal state" of the Arctic is in
| fact lush and tropical and what we are witnessing is its return
| to that state, albeit accelerated by humankind's increasing
| presence and its invention of industrial processes that use those
| hydrocarbons.
|
| Given the exploration that has already taken place over the past
| decades, one would assume there are core samples, or core sample
| data, located somewhere that indicate the true nature of the
| changes the Arctic Ocean has experienced and continues to
| express.
| pezzana wrote:
| > The researchers used geochemical and ecological data from ocean
| sediments to reconstruct the change in water column properties
| over the past 800 years. They precisely dated sediments using a
| combination of methods and looked for diagnostic signs of
| Atlantification, like change in temperature and salinity.
|
| Then, from the original paper:
|
| > Here, we use lipid-based water temperature proxies (UK37 U 37 K
| and TEXL86 TEX 86 L ) and benthic foraminiferal data
| (distribution and d18O) to reconstruct changes in water mass
| properties. Specifically, we examined anomalies in our proxy
| records to identify diagnostic signs of Atlantification. On the
| basis of a precise chronology, we combine our results with other
| local climate records to provide an integrated understanding of
| Atlantification and resolve its timing. Last, our reconstructions
| are compared with records of ocean and atmosphere circulation
| patterns to investigate the connections between the high Arctic
| and North Atlantic dynamics.
|
| https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abj2946
|
| Lipid-based water temperature proxies use the distribution of
| lipids deposited by organisms in sediment to deduce temperature.
| And...
|
| > Benthic foraminifera are single-celled organisms similar to
| amoeboid organisms in cell structure.
|
| https://pubs.usgs.gov/pdf/of/of99-45/foram.pdf
|
| So the technique appears to be based on isotopic and lipid
| analysis of sediments deposited by certain organisms. If you can
| date the sediments and are confident in the link between analyte
| concentration and temperature, and correct for various factors,
| you can reconstruct a time/temperature plot.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Are they sure they have control over all the confounders?
| People are still fighting over 24-isopropylcholestane and
| oxygenation.
| bit_logic wrote:
| I agree that climate change is an issue, but I've become so
| disappointed in the environmentalists response to it. They simply
| resort to zealotry over their one "true" solution without any
| practical considerations. For example, the one "true" solution
| that they consider as only acceptable is replacing all cars with
| full EVs. Which is foolish considering the urgency (2050
| according to IPCC is a tipping point). They ignore that the
| battery technology simply isn't there yet or the infrastructure.
| Instead of their plans, consider this much more quickly
| achievable alternative:
|
| - Government policy should require a regular hybrid as the base
| minimum in all new cars. It's 2021, there's no excuse now for a
| car to be pure ICE.
|
| - New policy to favor PHEVs. The battery in one full EV can build
| four PHEVs. A 50 mile PHEV gets most of the benefits of CO2
| reduction of a full EV. Also no new infrastructure is required,
| overnight level 1 charging is good enough. The suburbs will buy
| PHEVs (since they have a garage), the urban areas will buy
| hybrids (which will now be the minimum).
|
| - All utility type vehicles (mail trucks, garbage trucks,
| delivery trucks), must be full EV. These vehicles are the perfect
| fit for the current battery technology (overnight centralized
| charging, frequent stops on short routes).
|
| - Slowly raise the gas tax. Slowly is important otherwise there
| will be riots. But the impact on low income population should be
| minimal with the increasing supply of used hybrid and PHEVs.
|
| The key feature of this plan is that it's a fast way to reduce
| CO2. Instead, look at what the infrastructure bill and the
| proposed BBB is doing. Billions on new charging stations, current
| version of BBB would reduce PHEV tax credit. Is this really the
| best way to get quick action on reducing CO2 from cars? Aren't
| those billions better spent getting hybrids and PHEVs (which have
| none of the charging or range issues of full EVs) to the public
| as quickly and widely as possible? Why is the goal suddenly to
| make all cars full EV, isn't the actual goal to reduce CO2 as
| fast as possible?
| barbazoo wrote:
| > I've become so disappointed in the environmentalists response
| to it. They simply resort to zealotry over their one "true"
| solution without any practical considerations. For example, the
| one "true" solution that they consider as only acceptable is
| replacing all cars with full EVs
|
| I'm not sure where you get that from but it's not at all what
| I've been experiencing. Yes, the overarching goal is to reduce
| green house emissions but how to get there is quite diverse and
| usually laid out in details in for instance the green parties'
| platforms, e.g. https://europeangreens.eu/positions/climate-
| energy, https://www.greenparty.ca/en/platform/green-future and
| contains more than just individual mobility. Similarly,
| Greenpeace: https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/issues/climate-
| change-impacts...
| time_to_smile wrote:
| As someone who does statistical modeling for a living (though not
| climate related), one thing I've found fascinating is that many
| climate skeptics, particularly on HN, will focus on the
| difficulty scientific models have in making accurate predictions
| about the near term impact of climate change.
|
| While this is true (modeling a complex system such as the Earth's
| climate and all of it's positive and negative feed back loops is
| incredibly challenging), the implied assumption from people that
| use this critique is that uncertainty will always fall on the
| side of "better than expected".
|
| People that have been closely following human ecology for the
| last decade or so have repeatedly found the opposite to be true.
| "Faster than expected" is somewhat of a joke in certain
| communities since it seems that the more we learn the more we
| realize how large the impact of rapid accumulation of CO2 in the
| atmosphere really is, and how quickly this impact develops.
|
| That's not to say model uncertainty == doom, but assuming that
| model uncertainty == "this is fine" is a more dangerous and naive
| assumption.
| dls2016 wrote:
| I've always been worried that estimates and predictions in the
| IPCC reports, for instance, are much too conservative. The
| reports are averages, in some sense, of thousands of peer-
| reviewed publications.
|
| It's hard to get your publication accepted into the scientific
| mainstream if your predictions make you sound like an alarmist
| crank.
| refurb wrote:
| Well all be dead of Omicron before global warming gets us.
| xscott wrote:
| I've seen this sentiment a lot, and it doesn't make any sense
| to me. How can you "trust the science" and peer review, but
| only when it's scary? If it's not scary enough, you
| hypothesize it being biased?
|
| How is that better than the crowd who thinks it's biased the
| other way? It's just as easy to imagine your publication
| won't get accepted into the scientific mainstream unless it
| conforms to the prevailing narrative.
|
| What's the value of peer review if either of these biases
| (deniers or alarmists) is correct?!?
| dls2016 wrote:
| In the IPCC case, the report itself says the evidence rules
| out less than 1C of warming but can't rule out more than 5C
| of warming by the end of the century. My views are
| perfectly consistent with the science... it's simply that
| the science is very limited when it comes to analyzing
| "tipping point" scenarios.
|
| But, yes, I also have some qualms about peer review.
| xscott wrote:
| If the science is limited in that area, why do you
| believe tipping points (positive feedback) will be
| horrific? There's just as much reason to believe that
| negative feedback (the good kind) will keep things from
| going off the charts.
|
| Either way, it's not scientific thinking, and it isn't
| trusting the experts either.
| [deleted]
| refurb wrote:
| Nobody is saying "it will be better than expected" they are
| saying "the models could be wrong".
|
| And that's played out already? So not exactly a low probability
| scenario.
| rp1 wrote:
| So if the models are wrong, and wrong in such a way that the
| impact of climate change is much worse than they predict,
| then what?
| refurb wrote:
| But that goes both ways?
|
| If I told you "my model predicts a 50% chance you be
| diagnosed with cancer and a 50% chance you wont" how do you
| make a decision. When both are equally probable?
| notreallyserio wrote:
| When the options are keep smoking or stop smoking, the
| obvious choice is to stop smoking to improve your odds.
| The positive side effects are worth it on their own.
| refurb wrote:
| That's if you have solid evidence that smoking harms you.
| syshum wrote:
| Except here the options are not as simple as "stopping
| smoking" which in this context would be "stop emitting
| co2" doing so would cause extreme economic harm, lower
| living standards SUBSTANTIALLY, and be very regressive to
| the poorest people.
|
| Smoking is not needed for life to function, energy
| production, food production, heating, etc is very much
| needed for life to function.
| triceratops wrote:
| > cause extreme economic harm, lower living standards
| SUBSTANTIALLY, and be very regressive to the poorest
| people.
|
| Isn't that a bit hyperbolic?
|
| "Extreme" economic harm? Define extreme, please. Also
| account for all the increased economic activity related
| to climate change mitigation (renewable energy, carbon
| capture, construction).
|
| "lower living standards SUBSTANTIALLY" - Climate change
| will do that too. Try cooling your house cheaply, or
| getting enough freshwater or fresh produce when the
| climate goes haywire.
|
| "be very regressive to the poorest people." - Again,
| needs context. The "poorest people" are precisely the
| ones who will suffer the most if climate change isn't
| averted. The Indian subcontinent, to take one example,
| will have acute water shortages and/or sea-level rises
| (in Bangladesh) which will lead to crop failures and
| famine.
| notreallyserio wrote:
| Put another way, ignoring the risks and contining our
| reliance on CO2 and methane and etc emissions has put our
| economy and living standards in jeopardy, especially for
| the poorest people.
|
| It didn't have to go down this way but certain powerful
| folks have been more interested in maintaining the status
| quo than making improvements, and that pattern continues
| today. Even basic economic concepts like externalities
| are ignored because folks embrace thought-terminating
| terms like "job-killing policies".
| ziddoap wrote:
| There isn't a 50/50 distribution of models predicting
| nothing and models predicting something negative.
| dtech wrote:
| So far over time the climate has been warming faster and
| there have been more problems consistently than the median of
| models up to that point predicted, so "And that's played out
| already" is very wrong.
| fastball wrote:
| I seem to remember Al Gore basically telling us the world
| would end a while ago.
| refurb wrote:
| " In 2009, Al Gore loosely cited researchers and said
| there was a "75% chance" the ice could be gone during at
| least some summer months within five to seven years."
| projectileboy wrote:
| Oh my god, I wish more people would say this, and understand
| it. When thinking about any projection, "might not be that bad"
| == "could be much worse".
| mrfusion wrote:
| So you're saying we can't be sure about our models but we can
| be sure that they're wrong in a certain direction.
| tdrdt wrote:
| The problem is that since the sixties scientists are predicting
| doom and this is causing people to become skeptical about new
| insights.
|
| For example, after decades of sea level doom scenario's people
| are saying it is "slower than expected".
| scroot wrote:
| As I understand it, human intervention is one of the biggest
| unknowns in any of these projections. Despite the inadequacy
| of the global response, there _have_ been important human
| interventions since the 1960s. For example, in the US the EPA
| was created in 1970 and there were Clean Air Acts prior to
| that.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Definitely not. The 1990 IPCC report predicted between 2.0
| and 7.3mm/year and satellite altimetry shows average of
| 3.4mm/year since then. This is an acceleration from 1890-1990
| rate of 1.0-2.0mm/year. IPCC 1990 was right on the money.
| lostcolony wrote:
| "scientists"
|
| No. Popular media. Scientists will say something like "wow,
| this particular study shows us hitting 1 degree of warming by
| 2010, and 2 degrees of warming by 2030 at the current rate,
| which would lead to gradual melting of the ice caps", and in
| the popular media that becomes "SCIENTISTS PREDICT ICE CAPS
| WILL BE ENTIRELY GONE BY 2010!" Because the nuance was not
| understood, and alarm gets readers/watchers.
|
| I will also remind you the same people who would claim it's
| slower than expected because of what scientists have said in
| the past are the same people who will call out that in the
| 1960s scientists were predicting global cooling as evidence
| why the science is wrong. I.e., even though those positions
| are counter to each other, they both work in service to "the
| science is always wrong" narrative, and that's really the
| bias at play.
| [deleted]
| time_to_smile wrote:
| > people are saying it is "slower than expected".
|
| Can you give me some citations for this? I've looked around a
| bit and all I can see is "faster than expected"
|
| In fact sea-level rise is another great example of what I'm
| talking about. Dr. Richard Alley gave a fantastic talk this
| summer about how we can expect very rapid, very sudden ice
| sheet collapse, and therefore should also experience
| potentially very rapid sea level rises[0].
|
| However, as he repeatedly points out in the talk, because
| these sudden collapses are incredibly hard to simulate and
| predict they are excluded from all IPCC models. He doesn't
| deny that predicting when and exactly the impact is an
| incredibly hard modeling problem, but at the same time makes
| it pretty clear that this known unknown, so to speak, is very
| real and very likely to have a major impact.
|
| Edit: you should watch at least the beginning of the talk
| because he explicitly mentions a 2008 piece in the guardian
| and other cases of "slower than expected".[1]
|
| 0. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0MnX_sjXMio
|
| 1. https://youtu.be/0MnX_sjXMio?t=100
| andrew_ wrote:
| It's enhancing confirmation bias.
| [deleted]
| someguydave wrote:
| Ok but as a statistical professional don't you thibk that all
| "X than expected" stories be written with a preregistered
| hypothesis from some earlier date which can be linked?
| Otherwise they are a press release.
| Unbeliever69 wrote:
| I must not pay attention, but how common are climate skeptics
| on HN?
| krastanov wrote:
| Might be some confirmation bias on my end, but it seems
| common, especially if you turn on "show dead comments" in
| your account settings.
| Unbeliever69 wrote:
| I didn't know dead comments was a thing. What is the
| correlation between dead comments and climate denialism
| being common on HN?
| scollet wrote:
| It's more a correlation of dead comments and value added.
|
| I haven't seen a compelling denialist argument, so maybe
| they're dead because they're not compelling?
|
| From a distance I'd estimate maybe 40-50% of commenters
| are in the leaning neutral sceptic to oil apologist zone
| but I'm probably biased.
| krastanov wrote:
| My bad, I was vague. It is *very* common to see one or
| two conspiratorial crazy "global warming is a hoax"
| comments that are just flagged and dead. It also
| definitely happens, but less reliably, to see "middle
| brow" "polite but trivially wrong" climate change
| denialism comments that are either downvoted or dead. I
| have also seen non-downvoted comments of that nature, but
| these were not what I was referring to (and they usually
| have well argued factual responses).
| avgcorrection wrote:
| Newspapers should just make section called It's Worse Than We
| Thought.
| revolvingocelot wrote:
| Should be interesting to see all the climate deniers of this
| orange website ignore the mountains of evidence for the
| phenomenon, and grasp tightly the scanty data that allows them to
| JAQ off [0] about how ooh maaaaybe we don't need to do
| aaaanything! What if we're wrooooong? The idea that we're "wrong
| about the causes" of global warming requires denial of basic
| chemistry and settled paleontological records in order to support
| itself. Does it matter that the linked article explicitly points
| out the better-understood causes-and-effects of warming trends on
| ocean statistics? Absolutely not. The supporting links are not to
| the paper itself, but to "skeptic" sites. Great stuff.
|
| Me, I wouldn't carry water for the people intentionally
| destroying our planet's ability to support life-as-we-know-it for
| less than six figures, but I suspect that these people do it for
| free.
|
| [0] https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Just_asking_questions
| NDizzle wrote:
| How will increasing taxes in western society fix this? Hubris,
| almost Hillary levels of hubris.
| revolvingocelot wrote:
| > How will increasing taxes in western society fix this?
| Hubris, almost Hillary levels of hubris.
|
| I think you're replying to the wrong person, except there's
| no one else in the thread as of now mentioning taxes. So I
| guess you're participating in the proud internet tradition of
| putting words in people's mouths.
|
| What's really incredible is that it's not like I wrote a huge
| wall of text. It's not difficult to see that I didn't mention
| taxation or "Hillary" in my root level comment. What do you
| gain from this nonsense?
| NDizzle wrote:
| What other suggestions do you have for what "we" could do?
| China won't do anything, neither will India or Russia, by
| the way. So what are we doing? It'll boil down to
| effectively taxing companies and people. I skipped ahead a
| few steps in the discussion. Sorry for spoiling it.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| china has a plan to be carbon neutral, they have good
| incentive too, their healthcare costs from coal pollution
| are wild
|
| they are going nuclear, hydro, wind, solar, anything but
| coal
| [deleted]
| revolvingocelot wrote:
| I don't think you really understand what the word
| "discussion" means. But I'll bite -- well, I'll nibble.
|
| The weasel words "effectively taxing" can be twisted to
| cover literally every policy lever possible to deploy in
| our current democracy-corporatocracy, from actually
| taxing to removing the massive subsidies currently
| enjoyed by polluting industries to adding subsidies to
| better solutions, so between that and your baseless
| assertions, you're "right" by preemptive technical
| knockout: you "win". Since you assert that use of policy
| levers are all "Hilary"-class hubris, a signifier of
| other... "cognitive differences" between us, I don't
| think a discussion with you will be fruitful; you're
| clearly not "discussing" in good faith.
| [deleted]
| barathr wrote:
| This article, connecting a decline of sea ice to Western U.S.
| wildfires, has also been on my mind lately:
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-26232-9
| dukeofdoom wrote:
| Dubai is in the desert and is more than thriving. On Average I
| was colder there than in Canada. Every indoor place has great Air
| Conditioning. Drinkable Water is converted from Ocean water. Its
| a model of what a future city could look like in the worst case
| climate change scenario, if human ingenuity is able to thrive.
|
| Though, I'm still not convinced climate change will be all that
| bad. Making cold uninhabitable places in North Canada, and Russia
| more habitable for humans and wild life would be great. They also
| found palm fossils outside Calgary. So its not like Earth is not
| in a climate change cycle naturally.
|
| And the people fear mongering about the collapse of civilization
| to advocate for certain politics, should be more worried about
| the immediate threat from bioterrorism, COVID lockdowns, or even
| the type of civilization breakdown that is happening in South
| Africa.
|
| I'm personally in support of a high energy future, and I think
| Nuclear Energy is the most realistic way we will get there.
| bena wrote:
| > Every indoor place has great Air Conditioning.
|
| And all that heat has to go somewhere. And the hotter things
| get, the more those air conditioners will have to work:
| producing more heat. Implying air conditioning is the solution
| to climate change is kind of like suggesting we drop ice cubes
| in the ocean to cool it off.
|
| > Though, I'm still not convinced climate change will be all
| that bad. Making cold uninhabitable places in North Canada, and
| Russia more habitable for humans and wild life would be great.
| They also found palm fossils outside Calgary. So its not like
| Earth is not in a climate change cycle naturally.
|
| The problem is that we honestly don't know what the effects
| will be. How disrupting those ecosystems will impact other
| areas. We've already learned the devastating effects invasive
| species can have on areas, on how improperly planned damming
| and levee construction can fuck up our coastlines, suggesting
| that making Northern Canada a temperate zone is no big deal is
| just willfully ignoring all the knock-on effects that will
| bring.
|
| Also, North Canada wasn't always in the North. So the fact that
| palm fossils were found there isn't proof that the North was
| once tropical, it's just proof that palms once grew there. That
| area could have been in the tropics. I don't remember all of
| the continental shifts caused by plate tectonics, but things
| have moved quite a bit in the some 4 billion years the Earth
| has existed.
| hinkley wrote:
| It's worth noting that thermal efficiency is dictated by the
| delta T, so an air conditioner pushing twice the temperature
| difference burns more than twice the energy and produces more
| than twice the heat.
|
| And the more heat we drive into urban spaces, the bigger the
| Heat Island Effect will be. There are twenty variables we can
| be tackling here and we need people tugging at all of them.
| More trees, better albedo on built structures, retrofitting
| for energy efficiency, and and and...
| dukeofdoom wrote:
| So just curious, how does it compare bringing 40 degrees
| Celsius down to 21 degrees, vs 0 degrees upto 21 degrees.
| Is heating more energy efficient than cooling? My practical
| experience has been that AC costs less, than heating a
| home.
|
| Considering that if anywhere Solor panels could work well,
| the Dubai desert is near tops for efficiency. This also
| offsets any deficit. And Dubai also has seasonal
| temperature variations, winter they are around 29 degrees.
| I wouldn't be surprised that the total energy expenditure
| for a home in Dubai, is less than a home in Northern Canada
| .
| bena wrote:
| Some quick checking and Dubai is around 12,000 kwh per
| year per household and California is around 6000 per year
| per household.
|
| My point was that A/C is really just changing the
| equilibrium of a small area. Making a building cooler
| means you have to make some other area warmer.
| Supermancho wrote:
| > Dubai is in the desert and is more than thriving
|
| I'm not sure why you think that. The amount of work and
| resources that go in to making it partly habitable is immense.
| Without oil money, it would be desolate and empty. Without it
| we would see the slave cities, surrounding the shiny buildings,
| completely swept away. As a city, it's an economic sinkhole not
| a prosperous one.
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| Why only 800 yrs? In terms of geological record that seems like a
| very small window.
| bink wrote:
| It covers the industrialization era and several hundred years
| prior. I think it's a good window to use to determine human
| impact.
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| Maybe. But it also completely ignores the possibility it's a
| natural cycle, or at least hiccup.
|
| I'm not suggesting it's not human-made. But using only 800
| yrs can't really say with authority one way or another
| either.
| irthomasthomas wrote:
| If they went back 900 years they would have met the Middle Age
| Warm Period.
| bbarnett wrote:
| Harvest trillions of fish, and you remove a massive cause of
| ocean water sub-currents.
|
| How do millions of salmon, halibet, swimming and moving water,
| huge schools of fish, change currents?
|
| Well they're mostly gone now, compared to 100+ years ago.
| rlpb wrote:
| What evidence is there that fish cause ocean currents?
| dtech wrote:
| It seems unlikely that fish are more influential than earth
| rotation, sun etc. The energy difference is very large.
| Cd00d wrote:
| You're arguing that fish cause ocean currents?
|
| Are airplanes the source of wind?
| bbarnett wrote:
| Cows apparently cause a massive environmental impact. Goats,
| without predators, can turn plain and even forest into
| desert.
|
| Animals cause impact to the environment. we've removed
| trillions of tonnes of active biomass from the oceans.
|
| What impact has that?
| bink wrote:
| No one is saying fish don't have an impact on the
| environment. You're apparently arguing that they have an
| impact on ocean currents, which is a claim that is out
| there enough that people at least expect a source.
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