Antarctica Is Melting, and Giant Ice Cracks Are Just the Start | Hacker News Reader

Antarctica Is Melting, and Giant Ice Cracks Are Just the Start

nationalgeographic.com

157 pointspmcpinto86 comments

I just came back from 7 months on one of the U.S. research stations, doing network engineering and glacier search and rescue. It was pretty interesting to see how fast the glacier face the station was near was retreating each year.

edit: did an AMA while there that hit the reddit front page

https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/5656e1/iama_i_dont_ha...

I've found the coverage of this Larsen C rift to be disquieting since I read that the people studying it don't link the event to climate change:

>"The team say they have no evidence to link the growth of this rift, and the eventual calving, to climate change." https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/06/170602112819.h...

It seems that everyone in the media or commenting on the internet suddenly knows better than the experts on this topic.

All they said was that they don't have evidence for a link, which may be because there is no link, there is a link but they haven't found the evidence yet, or a link was never within the scope of their study.

You're basically claiming they found evidence disproving a link with the "don't link the event to climate change."

>'You're basically claiming they found evidence disproving a link with the "don't link the event to climate change."'

No I am not. But by default I would assume all such events (really every event on earth) are somehow linked to climate change... it is exceptional to me that they claim to have no evidence for this.

Edit: Isn't it interesting that everyone except them (who are the apparent experts here) seems to have no problem linking it with climate change, including me?

This comes up a lot in climate discussions. There's a record hurricane or heat wave, but these things happen randomly so there's no way to say definitively that one particular event would not have happened without climate change.

But we do know that overall, climate change causes stronger hurricanes and hotter heat waves.

In the same way, we know smoking causes lung cancer, but if you're a smoker who gets lung cancer, nobody can say for sure that the smoking caused it, because some nonsmokers get lung cancer too. They just don't get it as often.

"But we do know that overall, climate change causes stronger hurricanes" How do we know this? I can find all sorts of papers predicting stronger hurricanes, but just like the predictions of more numerous hurricanes, there seems to be little observational evidence of the effect.

Here's the measured Accumulated Cyclone Energy, worldwide, 1970-2016. The total energy seems to peak in the mid 1990s. Is this consistent with claims of stronger hurricanes and more destructive hurricane seasons?

https://www.wunderground.com/hurricane/accumulated_cyclone_e...

Nobody can link any particular home run from Barry Bonds to the steroids he took, either.

So you are saying it is linked to climate change anyway (but this is impossible to get evidence for) or what? There is a very curious social phenomenon going on regarding this event.

I'm saying at this point it's wiser to say that it is than to say that it isn't.

Yes, so you think you know better than the experts. This is what I said originally, there is a strange phenomenon in this case that many people think they know more than the people studying this rift, including me.

Wow... just wow. I'm overwhelmingly under-learned on this topic, but from the sounds of scientists, shit is literally hitting the fan. What books and research in the last couple years are good for non-scientists about the effects of rising oceans on socio-economics and politics?

It will be hard to find anything that isn't exceedingly one-sided if socio-economics and politics are involved. One thing to remember when you read that stuff is that the poorest are the ones that suffer the most from the regulations we put in place. For example, I support taxation on any product or service with externalities where it's nearly impossible to price the damage done into the product naturally. Pollution is a perfect example of this. I buy oil from you, but third parties are harmed. Therefore somehow I need to pay a tax and compensate everyone I'm harming. Anyways... who do you think this tax will harm the most? The billionaire oil barons? Of course not. They will still be billionaires. It's the poorest who need cheap fuel so they don't freeze to death in the winter.

If we manage to actually enforce anti-carbon regulation across the globe, who will be harmed the most? It's India, China, and Brazil among others who are still industrializing. It's the people who we're just trying to get up to the point of actually being pretty confident they will get 1-2 meals every day... not even making them wealthy. Often these things are framed to appear to be going after the "evil rich" person who burns coal. Sure, we know burning coal kills lots of people. I would never deny those stats. No one ever talks about how many lives are saved by burning coal. As technology progresses perhaps countries will not need to burn coal to go through industrialization and pull their people off the brink of starvation, but we're nowhere near that today. So we need to consider these types of things as we talk about the socioeconomic and political ramifications of climate change. The solution can't be worse than the problem for poor people.

Distributing the revenue from said taxes back as a public dividend should solve that problem nicely. Since we're all impacted by those externalities a public dividend is only fair. And since the distributed money compensate for increased costs the tax can be pretty high, and thus effective in directing money towards alternate solutions.

... which makes the case that proponents of such taxes are at least partially motivated by anti-capitalism and socialism.

I'm against capitalism, so that would be a fair assessment of me. But if you really want a label, try geo-libertarian, I'm definitely not a socialist.

In any case, even hard core capitalists would recognize the value in controlling extenalities to help the market economy do its things.

If it helps I'm not a proponent of taxes per se. The tax I'm advocating could just as easily be described as rent. It is my hope that a fair, and effective, rent extraction from our shared capital (land, pollution rights, spectrum bands and so forth) could actually help abolish unfair and damaging taxes like income taxes.

Yes, it is melting and some of the before/after photographs are the most devastating evidence.

There are some famous photos of Patagonia 100 years ago and today...anyone remember them?

I managed to find these before/after photos of glaciers in Alaska.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2972130/Globa...

The greed of those already dead will kill us all.

Some perspective from someone who is definitely concerned about climate change: antarctica as a whole is losing 100 cubic kilometers of ice per year [1] of its 30,000,000 cubic kilometers[2]. So at current burn rates it will be another 300,000 years before antarctica has melted. Short of radical acceleration, we aren't losing antarctica any time soon.

[1]https://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/20100108_Is_Antar...

[2]https://www.sciencedaily.com/terms/antarctic_ice_sheet.htm

We should start angling for the contracts to build the seawalls that big cities are going to need over the next 50 years.

And there's way more to it than that. Waste water will have to be pumped out of storm water systems rather than flowing. Salt enters ground water and causes changes. Things like underground car parks become problematic. Rivers don't flow the same and may need gates to keep high tides and storm surges out. The flow changes cause silting and river travel can be affected. Storm surges should be handled by your wall, but they are terrifying for low lying areas.

Could ice shelves breaking off accelerate the rate with which methane hydrocarbons are launched into the atmoshpere?

The real problem here is businesses who are causing this are externalizing their costs to everyone else. So I have to buy an expensive EV, I have to willingly pay more for energy, I must willingly inconvenience myself to bring a reusable bag to the grocery store. Until we make those who are causing this pay the real costs, we will never see any meaningful change. The worst part is also that those countries that choose not to have any restrictions will inevitably move ahead, economically, of those that do and slowly weaken those that do have restrictions. The only real solution to this problem is complete collapse or ubiquitous market forces that make the environmental choice also the best fiscal choice.

How is it even possible to talk about recent acceleration in melting without mentioning the abnormally large el Nino we just had? Because it would imply the acceleration was temporary.

This topic is an open ended debate. How will we reach to a conclusion? Certainly more research is a way..

Launch many satellites into space which have huge reflective screens to bounce away some 1% of the light that would otherwise reach Earth.

I heard this idea suggested at least a decade ago in Popular Science. I imagine there are many such proposals to defeat global warming (beyond cutting CO2 emissions), but somehow this one stuck with me. Musk could also do it with his rockets.

So is billions of dollars enough to dam these channels and bottleneck the melt?

US leads the world in per capita emissions. And people on the coasts(ny/sf) are the worst offenders. Guess who will history hold responsible.

California and New York have the lowest per capita CO2 emissions except for DC according to https://www.eia.gov/environment/emissions/state/analysis/

Wyoming, North Dakota have the most.

US is also one of the countries best situated to solve the problem.

Well lucky for us global warming is a Chinese hoax. Nothing to see here, move along citizen.

In 2014 Antarctic sea ice reached a record maximum:

https://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/antarctic-sea-ice-reach...

But now in 2017 we're talking about continent-wide collapse?

Sea ice comes and goes. Land ice is much more important. There is an acceleration on land ice loss.

https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/land-ice/

There's a NASA study from 2015 that concludes that mass gains of the Antarctic ice sheet are greater than the losses:

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/nasa-study-mass-gains-o...

Zwally's study is in-line with the GRACE data, and loss of land ice mass. "According to the new analysis of satellite data, the Antarctic ice sheet showed a net gain of 112 billion tons of ice a year from 1992 to 2001. That net gain slowed to 82 billion tons of ice per year between 2003 and 2008."

GRACE shows acceleration since 2008. Zwally's study uses data from 1992-2001, 2003-2008. And is in-line with the net-gain slowing down in his data-set.

This misleading comment cherry picks one particular study to suggest a conclusion that is probably not true. The commenter started out talking about sea ice, and when (rightly) that was noted to be irrelevant, switched to a different press release.

The linked study (Zwally et al.) uses satellite radar altimetry (ICESat) to measure height of Antarctic ice, and thereby quantify mass losses. Other studies use satellite-derived gravity (GRACE) to get more directly at mass changes. They conflict.

One possible reason (among several) for the discrepancy is that the overall height of Antarctica is also changing as it rebounds from ice loss in the distant past, i.e., some of the height increase seen by Zwally et al. is due not to ice increases, but to inter-ice-age rebound of the continent beneath the ice.

More: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/20...

That's a record extent, not a record volume. Volume is how much ice there is. Extent without volume means the ice is more spread out, i.e. thinner.

The way I understood it, the article is about glaciers and ice shelves, not about antarctic sea ice extent which is largely driven by wind patterns. The more northward winds, the more sea ice.

Incidentally, antarctic sea ice extent did go from record highs 3 years ago to record lows this year.

http://edition.cnn.com/2017/02/16/world/antarctica-sea-ice-r...

Second paragraph from the 2015 study linked above makes clear it is talking about land, not sea ice:

"The research challenges the conclusions of other studies, including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) 2013 report, which says that Antarctica is overall losing land ice."

How many times have we heard this story before?

Amusingly, this comment could be taken as an argument both for and against this story.

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