Scientists may have solved a mystery about sea-level rise | Hacker News Reader

Scientists may have solved a mystery about sea-level rise

washingtonpost.com

78 pointsMz69 comments

So the mystery was because the original paper had flaws in it's methodology? That's anticlimactic.

Welcome to science!

Also, not just flaws in methodology, but also flaws in its model, which is a more significant issue. Making better models & checking them against reality is a big part of science. It's not necessarily that the original author fucked up; it's that our knowledge of the world improves (we hope) over time.

Ah, okay, that seems like an important distinction.

And the new paper likely has flaws in its methodology as well.

Mystery #2! Double climax!

The main factor seems to be that Munk simply over estimated the sea level rise. It is things like this that make me a skeptic about the anthropogenic global warming claims.

"First, they say, the estimates of 20th-century sea-level rise used by Munk were too high."

And anticlimateic. :]

So they mention that the asymmetrical melting of glaciers contribute to "wobble". Do commute patterns with millions of vehicles exerting force on the earth along non cancelling routes, contribute to additional wobble?

The total mass of all cars in the world is on the order of 2e12 kilograms. Since most routes cancel, drop that by an order of magnitude or two. The mass of the ice melting just from Greenland in a year is 2e14 kilograms.

(Edit: the car mass number was 1e3 too small, thanks to mikeash for correction.)

Edit2: the car mass number was right, but both numbers should have been in tonnes. Now it's right. I should sleep now.

As another data point, the annual groundwater withdrawal from the Colorado river basin is estimated at 5.6 km^3/year over 2004-2013. (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2014GL061055/abst...) Since 1m^3 is 1000 kg, that's 5.6e12 kg/year in that one basin.

The above groundwater figure (and other water-related quantities, like snowpack and reservoir storage) are pretty much at the edge of what can be detected by current gravity-based techniques using GRACE (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_Recovery_and_Climate_E...).

Figure 2 in the linked paper (if you have access) shows a nice sinusoidal-like graph of mass in the Colorado basin over this time period. It's a monthly measurement, so daily mass flows like cars would not be present (even if the measurement were precise enough to get at them).

So this is quite interesting: could it be that the total volume of ore excavated per year is comparable to the total volume of new seawater from melting ice? It looks like 5e13 kilograms of ore are excavated per year [1]. At an average density of <5 kg/l, that is the same volume as 1e13 kg of water, or 1/20 times the meltwater from Greenland. No solution to rising oceans :(

[1] http://www.ilocis.org/documents/chpt74e.htm

OK, I read this and I had some disbelief. It starts with a total of 23 billion tonnes of ore, and ends with a volume equivalent to 1.5 meters of the whole country of Switzerland being excavated per year.

That seemed high, but it turns out that independent estimates of just coal excavation are 8 billion tonnes per year. So my disbelief was wrong.

And then, looking at it the other way, this makes it evident how much burning all that coal could change global CO2.

There are about 1e9 cars in the world. Your 2e9kg figure is off by about three orders or magnitude.

Ah, crap, you're right.

Thanks for the quick napkin math. Great to see it distilled for easy comparison, however, wouldn't glacial melt also be characterized by some cancelling out effect?

The mass of men and their contraptions probably do not exert enough force anyway.

https://what-if.xkcd.com/8/

http://talkorigins.org is an amazing resource for the scientific perspective on Creationism vs. Evolution. It details neatly all the creationist arguments then thoroughly debunks them with overwhelming scientific evidence, complete with references. Is there a similar site that does the same for climate change?

http://creationwiki.org/Index_to_Creationist_Claims responds to arguments by Talk Origins. Is there a similar site that does the same for climate change?

Better, is there any site that lists all arguments from all sides and reach a conclusion? If they don't reach a conclusion, do they have a issue tracking system and leave the issue open for anyone to find easily and respond?

Debates should have a programming language, have CI for new arguments, have unit tests to check logic, have issues tracked and collaborated on GitHub.

I would love a site that categorized each argument and the supporting evidence pro and con for a given topic. Would be a wonderful resource.

How would that work? For creationism/evolution would it be one column with facts and another with a lot of bunk? What's the point?

Sadly it would probably never work. Your comment is a good illustration of why.

It might give people a good jumping-off point for figuring out which set of arguments is fact and which is bunk.

Do you know if there exists some response to the Creationwiki responses? I'm having a hard time finding it, if it exists.

Or is there anyone who has gone through some of the arguments there? It's hard for me to imagine nobody on the searchable web has made a response to the claims there.

I have not found responses to CreationWiki's responses. Talk Origins doesn't have to respond to CreationWiki since it's not well known. There's no need to respond if no one knows there are responses. Either that or both sides rest their case.

We would need a publicized tracking system for debate arguments to know whether that's the case.

Thank goodness for Creationism, if it didn't exist as a prominent example of the USA's embarrassing pockets of highly organised anti-science propaganda then it would be much easier for people to believe the conspiracy theories that suggest climate change is an elaborate hoax.

Yes, Skeptical Science. See:

https://www.skepticalscience.com/argument.php

The only issue with that site is it seems to refuse to admit certain things. Take a look at this: https://www.skepticalscience.com/co2-limits-poor-poverty.htm

Their response fails to even address the argument that CO2 limits will impact cheap, dirty coal that provides power for the poor. Instead, they try to change the argument to see who will be most impacted by climate change.

I hate arguments like that because it gives denialists all the more fuel to work with. Just flat out admit that this will deny the world cheap energy in the short term but it's a price that will have to be paid to deal with the issue. Then the discussion can actually move to a place where we figure out how to subsidize energy for the poor.

It’s also a crappy solution in the short term. Using coal power in very densely populated areas (especially ones without strict air quality standards) causes off-the-charts-terrible air pollution, leading to massive health problems, of which none of the costs flow back to the coal producers/distributors or power plant operators. Just look at the current conditions in Chinese and Indian cities.

If coal is the only possibly affordable energy source in these countries given their current level of wealth/development, then we’d all be much better off in the long run if rich countries would heavily subsidize developing-country energy production of basically any other type (and the residents of those areas would benefit starting right away).

Likewise, we should do everything we can to reduce the health/environmental impacts of cooking using indoor wood fires, either by subsidizing cleaner fuels or at least improved wood stoves, or via electrification. Probably also a good idea to work on alternatives to fire for clearing large amounts of land for agricultural use.

CO2 emissions are gradually changing the planet, and we should reduce them for the sake of future generations, but breathing smoke every day is killing millions of people per year.

The worst of this is that the question "how are the poor impacted" isn't even part of the debate whether anthropogenic global warming is a real phenomenon.

So it gives fuel to anthropogenic climate change skeptics without even being about that.

I'm not entirely sure that your argument is true though. Coal was cheap but isn't really the cheap fuel anymore. Also, in developing areas, it may be cheaper to use distributed renewable than to build out the grid.

By all means, if you have definitive arguments that agreements like the recent one in Paris will hurt the poor more than climate change will, please share them. But it's certainly not clear that its the answer, even limiting scope to just energy sources, and ignoring the detrimental impacts of climate change on subsistence farming.

>if you have definitive arguments that agreements like the recent one in Paris will hurt the poor more than climate change will

You missed the whole point of my argument (or just didn't read it) and did the same thing I criticized skeptical science for. The side effects of climate change being terrible do nothing to dispute that fact that in terms of cost per KwH, energy prices will increase. We need to admit that and address it rather than constantly bring up the benefits of slowing climate change down instead.

Here is an analogy to illustrate the point in a different subject.

Alice: "We are tripling the cost of bread because it's unhealthy to eat too much bread."

Bob: "I eat lots of bread because I can't afford the other food."

Alice: "But this is much healthier for you because you won't be eating so much bread. There have been many studies showing that bread is unhealthy."

Bob: "If I can't eat bread, I don't think I will get enough calories."

Alice: "You will have to eat something else, because bread is unhealthy."

Bob: "But I can't get anything else for the same cost."

Alice: "Bread is unhealthy. What aren't you understanding? Here is are links to more studies."

Do you see how Alice is failing to address Bob's concern or really even acknowledge it?

>Coal was cheap but isn't really the cheap fuel anymore.

That's only because natural gas got even cheaper than coal. Both are still cheaper per KwH than renewals without subsidies or externalities calculated in.

>Also, in developing areas, it may be cheaper to use distributed renewable than to build out the grid.

If they are fine with unstable power, sure. However, this still doesn't take into account the massive populations in China and India that have electricity from a grid already based on dirty energy.

I guess I'm still not seeing your point, but you're also not acknowledging mine.

Based on your hypothetical conversation, you seem to be saying that it is beyond doubt that these agreements will overall increase the cost of a certain standard of living. Since you haven't offered to provide any evidence to back up your claim, I'm forced to make some assumptions about your assumptions: that you're assuming that a certain standard of living has a fixed energy requirement (it doesn't), and that the current prices for energy will remain the same as they get adopted around the world (they won't).

For example, renewables are intermittent, but storage is getting incredible cheap, and the grid in these areas can also be quite intermittent and unreliable. For example, current lithium ion batteries cost ~$0.20/kWh stored, which may be massively under the cost of building out the grid. And that price is getting much cheaper faster than any of the experts predicted.

So, if somebody has a full economic analysis that supports your claim of bread costing three times as much but no other cheaper alternatives being available, I'd like to hear it. I'd also like to hear why you're certain that coal will be the cheapest even after building out energy infrastructures. These are assumptions that might be true, but don't seem very true to me, and definitely don't seem firm enough to discount skepticalscience's answer.

Ok, let me make it more clear: Skepticalscience's answer did not address the concern at all.

They did not try to argue that energy will be cheaper/the same after we impose taxes. All they implied was that climate change was bad for the poor, which does nothing to address the concern.

Your point about renewable energy being cheaper seems to ignore all of the current cost per KwH measurements available, so I chose not to argue with that because it's not based on anything but opinions about what might happen in the energy market.

Maybe you misunderstand the purpose of the site. Its purpose is to educate in climatology (and related Earth sciences), not deal with politics.

You cannot argue with physics in a way "yeah but it will be really bad for the poor". It's up to humans to construct human societies, physics doesn't care.

Meh, standard ploys from the tobacco-industry playbook.

http://www.skepticalscience.com/ has a similar model, although by the nature of the content it may not be that easy to read if you don't have a certain level of scientific education.

> Is there a similar site that does the same for climate change?

It's not in Q&A form but NASA's site summarizes what is known: http://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/

Why are the skeptical science links being downvoted? Is there something we should know?

Edit: Looks like they are bouncing back. Still curious about the negatives though.

Skeptical Science should be treated as just one biased resource among many, when all too often people point to it as being the definitive source for answers about climate research.

Sure, let's "teach the controversy"! :-)

I don't know whether to laugh or cry. AGW, just like evolution theory, is one of the biggest scientific accomplishments of humanity.

> Is there something we should know?

You should know that there are many people in the world (and some even read HN) that do not want to admit existence of AGW, since it requires changes to their own moral compass called "free market".

Same deal as with evolution. However, HN demographics has less tendency to have "literal belief in the Bible" as moral compass, compared to "free market", hence the difference.

There's the straw man of the day.

No, there is evidence for serious correlation between free market belief and not believing in AGW (for example: http://www.ibtimes.com/climate-change-deniers-tend-embrace-f... ; all the studies I found are behind paywall, it's also mentioned by Naomi Oreskes). Now of course it doesn't apply to all people who think free markets are good idea (just like creationism isn't belief of all Christians), only those who are "fundamentalists" - they think that the free market is somehow the source moral good (for example, that other forms of wealth redistribution are morally unacceptable).

And it's understandable, because fixing AGW problem requires global action, which is not possible in market conditions. To fix AGW, you have to give up belief of free market as the only possible solution for things (and therefore as an ultimate source of moral good). I don't think most people who so staunchly believe in free market that they do not believe in AGW actually realize this fact, it seems to be completely analogous to creationist Christians.

Actually, I think it would be interesting to meet a person who doesn't believe in AGW, yet has no problems with government regulation. But I haven't met anyone like that.

So that's why! It has always puzzled me HNs hivemind bias against AGW. The correlation between believing in the free market and denying AGW makes so much sense.

Sorry, you got it wrong. The hivemind bias is for AGW.

Seems to me either there are a lot more people supporting the AGW theory or the ones who doesn't support it vote less

Funny, someone came in to prove my point by downvoting me immediately. (feel free to skip upvoting because this is funny :)

climateaudit.org ( http://climateaudit.org/ ) examines sometimes the technical issues in climate research.

Pretty much guaranteed to be opposed by many HN readers, but interesting reading regardless.

Not mentioned yet is http://realclimate.org and its Wiki.

desmogblog is pretty good for that.

The comments in the article from the climate change skeptics hurt to read.....

"Are you suggesting that the oscillating ice ages are caused by a slowing and speeding up at the earth's core?"

Always interesting to hear people who openly deny science attempt to reason about science.

I used to work with a young-earth creationist pharmacist who spent a lot of time talking about how evolution was impossible since the second law of thermodynamics says that entropy increases over time -- so it's impossible for evolutionary complexity to increase.

Wasn't sure how to respond to that one.

I recommend enthusiastic and intentionally stupid agreement.

"You're right! For all this evolution stuff to work, you'd have to have some massive source of energy sitting in the sky or something."

<beat>

"Sure is hot today."

This is one of the old standbys. Deleting the clause "in a closed system" and pretending the 2nd law is still valid without it. I wonder what this person would say if you asked them why you needed a different flu vaccine each year.

Probably "I don't need a vaccine"

Well, given that the person a pharmacist, I would hope that's not the advice they give.

That always troubled me until I read an article a couple of months ago about a new discovery with regard to the attempts to recreate the start of life. Basically, it said that biological self-organization and replication satisfies the 2nd law if you count the excess heat that is given off during the process. In other words, the chemical processes that power life are a reduction from a complex form to a simpler form and and the generation of heat. For instance, most organisms eat food, digest the food, which breaks down the complex chemicals to simple ones, and generate heat. So, while an organism may evolve into a more complex form, in the environment, it is creating entropy overall. This satisfies the 2nd law and explains evolution (a higher order life process).

If the argument that evolution is impossible because thermodynamics was correct, everything humanity does would also be impossible. When we're not at war, most of the things we do is organizing matter, locally decreasing entropy. The key word is, locally. Our trucks and cranes burn fuel to organize matter. So do our bodies, and so do cells our bodies are made off.

Tell them they are exactly right, only exception possible would be if there is some massive energy source pouring energy into the system. This is best done outside on bright sunny days.

What is the relationship between energy and entropy? (Genuinely curios, I'm not a creationist, I personally rank Darwin right up there with Newton and Einstein)

Simply put, the earth isn't a closed system, so the laws can't be applied just to earth.

All arguments, for and against, on evolution and the second law of thermodynamics.

http://creationwiki.org/Index_to_Creationist_Claims#CF:_Phys...

I read several yesterday on a story about the same topic that made no sense until I realized the commenters were confusing latitude with altitude while patting themselves on the back for being smarter than those elitist Harvard types.

so basically we're all going to die.

Yeah. But that's true anyway. "Death and taxes" -- we were all born under sentence of death. Ain't none of us getting out of here alive.

Funny to see you downvoted, have an upvote instead. Reality is a harsh mistress apparently. Makes you wonder if the same people that are harping on promoting science and only trusting in the facts are the ones that would downvote a comment that is about as factually true as possible. Uploading and resurrection are - for now - hard SF and well over the horizon of the final sunset for everybody living today.

Yeah maybe 'tis the season. I got nailed on a (true) Jesus comment earlier. Made me LOL.

On a sufficiently long time horizon, yes.

Not all that long actually. A century or so should do it.

I thought this may be regarding the effect of ground water extraction causing coastal cities to sink 10+ times faster than sea level rise.

http://meetingorganizer.copernicus.org/EGU2014/EGU2014-14606...

Still interesting though.

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