Barents Sea seems to have crossed a climate tipping point
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
Wicked Problems [1] are going to kick our arses over the next century, and I don't see how we're going to get through it without large-scale death and horror. There just isn't the political or social will to address the problems - and if we ever do get our act together then I can't see how it'll be anything other than too late. Mose things on HN seem utterly trivial when I'm reminded of this.
IPCC:s first assessment report was completed 1990 and the Kyoto agreement is from 1992.
Rising CO2 levels are the cause of the wicked problems, not the wicked problem itself. We know people are dying from climate change, but determining what will directly cause those deaths and how to prevent them is the problem.
There isn't political or social will because those on the extreme ends of both sides are controlling it making it impossible to meet somewhere in the middle. Which is what politics have to do to move anywhere.
Many of us understand very well that the climate is changing and that humans might have something to do with it, we just don't know to what extent.
But even posing such an idea will get you put into the "climate denier" category in a heartbeat and stop all rational discussion.
There are other ways to think about this. Here is one.
Humans have historically been living at the mercy of nature, nature is rather unforgiving and quite harsh.
Over the time we have adjusted to climate change and we always will have to as the climate will always be changing.
I would personally rather be in our current situation and have a fighting chance to improve than being left with the chances I had as a person 200 years ago for even basic natural causes.
The wicked problem isn't that there isn't political will but that we can't both secure the continued prosperity of humanity and at the same time not have an impact on the environment we live.
The way out of our problems is not to stop up but to continue improving technology and energy utilization. A great start would be to get back to nuclear but I am under no illusion that there are many rationally minded people left in the environmental organizations anymore.
On top of that clean energy is cheap, the difference between coal electricity and renewable sources is vastly less than the costs from climate change. So doing nothing has significant costs from climate changes but cutting emissions 50% is fairly cheap.
PS: Electric cars might win on their own even without considering climate change. So, we can make huge difference in adoption without significant costs.
Anyone claiming they know how this is going to turn out on either side are simply lying or are trapped in some ideological self-delusion. We have no way of knowing.
That doesn't mean we shouldn't do anything but just that what we should do might not be ignoring the reality of a majority of this world who are not rich enough to install solar panels on their roofs.
With regards to the Pascals wager argument again I am more worried about a meteor hitting us and that brings us back to the discussion again about how to ensure growth which pays for technological advancements and helps more people get out of poverty.
Clean energy isn't cheap, it's subsidized heavily (yes other energy forms are too) and it's just not realistic for most of the world to use solar cells or wind as they don't have the infrastructure at all to support unreliable energy sources.
My personal belief is that we should assume the climate is changing and then use that to build solutions rather than endless and meaningless debates about whether climate change is true or not which brings us nowhere and doesn't change the climate.
If you believe things are going to be bad then make a company that deals with the things you believe are most problematic. If you believe the sea levels are rising the build solutions to deal with that if you believe methane is going to suffocate us then figure out how we can encapsulate it.
The no-feedback warming per doubling of CO2 is 3.7 W/m^2, which is held to be roughly equivalent to 1 degree of global temperature. There are some fairly readily ascertainable facts about climate change, sufficient to demonstrate that it is happening, and that it is caused by human CO2 emissions. The Earth is a complex system, but the critical effects are at the top of the atmosphere, which is much less complex. The lower bound for the warming effects is consequently very well known. And it's not so much the case that there are large quantities of this other well-known greenhouse gas lying around, and more like we misnamed this planet. There is uncertainty when trying to model anything, but I'm afraid at this point the "not a serious problem" warming scenarios have been ruled out.
It depends on how quickly we can develop technology and make it available to everyone. It depends on how quickly people can adapt to migration situations. It depends on countless non linear interactions that are unpredictable.
I think what we can say is that the pace of change is absolutely crucial. If land is lost to deserts or to the sea at a pace noticable only by asking your great grand parents, then I think we're good.
But if a billion people have to move within 20 or 30 years because large poor cities can no longer be defended against the sea or because technology to deal with desertification is only available to rich countries then I fear the gloom and doom is more than justified.
None of the infrastructure in s low-lying city like Miami is designed to last more than a few decades anyway. Gradually move a bit inland, or elevate foundations, or throw up a levee. Big woop. Not that big of a deal. Pretty much every structure standing -- every road, bridge, airport -- is going to be demolished and replaced within the next century anyway.
That seems perfectly reasonable. Nowhere near doom and gloom. There's no doom there, that I can see. Moving a billion people is not that big of a deal, as long as there is incentive. The idea that "the sea" will push people around has been going on forever and doesn't cause mass migrations in terms of the earth. It's the food and distribution a population has to worry about that will cause trouble. Everything else is well within human abilities to mitigate (even when average lifespans decrease by a few decades).
Recently, we've had something on the order of 2,500,000 people moving to Europe and it's widely seen as somewhere between a crisis and a catastrophe.
I think I have a better conceptualization than many people "discussing" this issue.
> That would be the largest migration in human history, by a wide margin
Nope. How many people have migrated from mexico to the US over the last 50 years? Are you assuming that one day 1 million people wake up and everyone has to move because the ocean is rising? How many feet to permanently displace 1 million over what time and how far do you really think anyone will go? You get people living next to live volcanos in Hawaii where the largest island is kinda the size of Orange County, CA. smh
Calm down and rethink what we're talking about.
A hell of a lot fewer than a billion (again: 1,000,000,000) given that the entire US population is only ~400,000,000 today.
I expect the average HN user to have better numeracy than this.
However, science is far from useless when making predictions.
PS: All forms of energy are currently subsidized. Yet, even without subsidies renewable are currently cheaper than coal in many possibly most areas.
Really though, I am talking about spending well under 1/1,000th US GDP. So, that's worth it even if climate change is bad, but not devastating.
You are welcome to isolate this discussion if thats what you need, but to convince me at least you will need show a much broader perspective here and care not just for nature and the people that might be here in the future but also those who are here right now.
I am less worried about climate change than of many other things including a major or even fairly large meteor.
The technology is here, using current levels of fossil fuels is not going to aid global GDP. It's really more a question of which groups end up with the proceeds and many very wealthy people would be worse off if oil fields become worthless. That's the push-back on this issue.
PS: It's not even a jobs issue, there are only 50,000 coal mining jobs in the US. It's all about infrastructure and owning existing resources.
So I think you have it backward.
The third world mostly avoided using landlines because cellphones ended up cheaper. Coal and Oil are also likely to be skipped over for cheaper alternatives.
Consider, in the US people save money by installing Solar at home vs using the high quality electric grid. When the grid is on average down for several hours a week the incentives are even stronger.
Poorer countries are using fossil fuels today, more so than they are driving around Teslas, let alone having solar on their roofs which is an investment mostly for those of us who can afford it (a small fraction of the western world)
Niger/ Gambia / Niger / Myanmar all have ~7 vehicles per 1000 people, and Togo is down at 2 where the US is at 910. So sure some cars, but not a significant investment even
China which is a good model of where these countries are going manufactures both electric and IC's. So while they are at 154/1,000 it's a lower percentage of IC's than the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_car_use_by_country
China also has vastly more Solar panel adoption than the US because they are building a lot of infrastructure and are using the cheapest options. China even uses solar hot water heaters. https://www.asiabiomass.jp/english/topics/1209_06.html
The poorest countries are a rounding error right now, but don't expect them to use more expensive fossil fuel options.
You need to show that electric cars are the norm. Otherwise you are proving my point.
Second of all I didn't mention anything about not doing anything I specifically have stated the opposite. The fact that you will straight out lie about what I said shows your true colors.
Have a good day.
I'm not sure I believe that. There are many aspects of modern life that are way more energy wasteful than they need to be.
Ever walk down a street in Vegas? The amount of excess demonstrated there is staggering. Giant fountains in a desert.
I'm not convinced we need to live to that level of excess in order to be prosperous.
> The way out of our problems is not to stop up but to continue improving technology and energy utilization.
I'm not sure any environmentalist would argue that we should stop improving technology. I certainly wouldn't.
I think we need to invest heavily in research and technology to find better cleaner sources of energy. But I also think we need some level of regulation like a Carbon Tax/Rebate, pollution taxes, etc, in order to actually incentivize the market to be take those externalities into account.
That excess you see in Vegas is also paying the bills it's part of the growth. That's the point. You can't isolate them and have non-impact on nature and then at the same time growing the economy.
Should we also regulate the internet? How much of our use is excess? Is this discussion excess? Are 99% of discussion on the internet excess is posting images excess?
Once you start digging into it you realize that these things can't be isolated.
This is why it's better to let the market play it out as it will optimize local needs. It's far from perfect to the extent that it's useless but it beats all the other ways we have at least to my understanding and I haven't heard of any other and better solution than let growth play out and produce surplus and then use some of that to be better and better.
Because when climate change deniers could no longer deny that the climate is changing, they started saying that humans were not to blame. It's mostly the same people moving the goal posts. It is then quite natural that you get lumped into that camp when expressing that "opinion".
Perhaps, but I see this from the pro-climate-change side, too. First it was a "coming ice age" (1970s) then it was Al Gore banging the "global warming" drums (1990s), now it's simply "climate change" (either/or) -- "heads I win, tails you lose." It's intellectually dishonest.
There is a very important reason to inquire as to whether mankind is the cause of global-warming, or merely an observer. If man is the cause, then perhaps there is a chance to prevent it; we might ask what action might one take. If man is merely the observer (e.g. the sun is to blame) then our odds are infinitesimally small for having any positive effect whatsoever, and quite large for having unintended consequences.
It is not "denial" to ask for evidence, untainted by politics or opinion or data clouded by curve fitting and backwards adjustments to "compensate" for who-knows-what but always in a way that predicts gloom and doom and fosters continued grant money. That raises suspicion of any open-minded person and especially the cynical.
Personally, the groupthink hysteria surrounding this "settled science" alarms me much more than the .5 degree C/century temperature increase observed. I have lived long enough to remember the panic about the world starving to death in the 60s, the coming ice age predicted in the 70s, and recall scientists literally laughing about the idea of bacteria being responsible for ulcers, high-fat diets being "deadly", cholesterol and salt is bad for you, etc. Trends change and science moves ahead, often not hand-in-hand.
finally, you should drop the ugly "denier" label. lumping in those who ask for evidence for global temperature change with those who deny the occurrence of the holocaust is sickening and has no place in reasonable discourse.
(edit:fixed typos, and formatting)
Note the date above. AGW is older and better-established than Relativity. It's a relatively straightforward consequence of the heat physics of gases, which was first worked out in the 1860s, and can be trivially replicated in your basement. It was also, as it happens, completely disproved for about fifty years, and the overturning of its disproofs was notable for none of the political infighting surrounding the issue today. The skeptic might wonder what the difference is, and why the people complaining of bad science don't have better science to present. We've only been studying the issue for a dozen decades or so, and surely the previous disproofs would be a start?
P.S. That you can create a semantic link between the concepts of "holocaust denier" and "AGW denier" does not mean that those two things are commonly treated as being morally equivalent: non sequitur.
You can't take a local experiment and apply the findings to larger systems without a lot of uncertainty.
It's interesting that the collapse of an ice age seems to happen very fast, within a few hundreds of years, so fast changes are definitely possible.
(It's good to research this since an ice age would suck majorly for us too - and we have suppressed the next one by now.)
Could you elaborate? I was under the impression that even conservative estimates by reputable climatologists showed some pretty drastic changes.
I found this within 5 seconds of Googling: https://judithcurry.com/2015/12/17/climate-models-versus-cli...
I'm not sure how good the source is, but it is consistent with what I've seen elsewhere.
https://reason.org/wp-content/uploads/files/deaths_from_extr...
https://ourworldindata.org/famines
And the world is has gotten greener:
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/carbon-dioxide-fer...
And so we are back to the beginning. We don't really know as much as some like to claim. So what is the goal of humanity? How do we measure human flourishing? How do we ensure we still get people to become more resourceful?
We can't have our cake and eat it.
Hydrocarbons have made the modern world possible by providing a relatively cheap and portable energy source. None of the renewables come close. They're also the main source of greenhouse gases and thus climate change. There is no practical policy proposal to decrease fossil fuel usage in the near-to-moderate future that would maintain living standards at their current levels.
>humans might have something to do with it
you come across immediately as a climate change denier. The science of what humans are doing to the climate is well established. We _have_ something to do with it, no "might" about it. Of course other things are contributing -- in fact we may well have passed a tipping point where non-anthropogenic carbon emissions are being generated via feedback loops, similar to warming cycles in the past that aren't associated with human activity. But there is a very very broad consensus that as a species have something to do with climate change.
If you want to talk in good faith with me personally, there are a few things you have to accept as ground truth:
1) Human behavior has caused a change to the climate that is measurable and has real impacts to the environment.
2) Those changes are complex and driving systems in ways we do not fully understand, any more than we fully understood the systems before we started adding climate change into the equation. Despite this lack of understanding of all of its effects, this does not mean #1 is somehow disproven.
You tripped over #1 -- if we don't agree about that we will have a problem having a productive discussion.
Another commenter in this thread tripped over #2 -- if someone wants to litigate the minutiae of every historical prediction from climate scientists we will have a problem having a productive discussion.
Here it is in it's whole:
"Many of us understand very well that the climate is changing and that humans might have something to do with it, we just don't know to what extent."
So yes I agree we have an impact just not sure how much and what it will mean and if you want to debate that with me personally you either prove me wrong or agree with that.
Furthermore, I wrote plenty of other things that should make it obvious I am not in any specific camp but interested in a larger context than just debating climate change true/false silliness.
Human flourishing, how to also get people out of poverty, the ability to control nature more than it has historically controlled us etc they are all important issues and climate change doesn't mean we should just ignore those. Yet that's exactly what people do when discussing climate. They ignore all the other things that are also important and also affecting real people right now as we speak.
So I frankly don't see you doing anything but not reading me in good faith. But bygones.
That statement (unmoored from the climate change context) in its most literal interpretation says something along the lines of "the range of possibilities is from 0 to 100". I don't accept that 0 is in the distribution, and will not agree with any statement that can be most literally interpreted in that way. Maybe that's not what you meant, it sounds like it's not -- so great, problem solved. But as written, that is the most literal reading.
Instead of inquiring about what was meant you just assumed. Perhaps we should start with giving other the benefit of the doubt rather than just having "your criteria" without any context especially when you actually got quite a lot of context that would indicate it wasn't at all the case.
Great, happy to stop debating.
https://www.vox.com/2016/10/4/13118594/2-degrees-no-more-fos...
thanks for vocabulary++, and sorry for OT
I know you were /s here, but I point this out because there is a huge amount of personal responsibility implied by climate change. Even if one doesn’t believe humans are driving it, climate change is happening and humans have to deal with it. From a mitigation perspective, individual consumer choices have a large bearing in his successful we will ultimately be.
People don’t like the implications, though, and either most people don’t connect the dots or are in denial that their choices count. Sadly, this trend is worse among climate change believers.[1]
Kidding aside, ordering less fresh ocean fish during winter is a meaningful personal start.
[1] https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/may/7/climate-skep...
I wonder what is the most appropriate course of action - people need to suffer a bit to realize how bad things are and going to be. Comfortable 1st world lives need a bit of a shake up to really change things.