In Antarctica, climate change is having surprising impacts | Hacker News Reader

In Antarctica, climate change is having surprising impacts

nationalgeographic.com

161 pointsNeedMoreTea126 comments

If North American culture could learn to build new small cities that didn’t need cars - as the old cities were built - and successfully market and sell them to today’s suburban crowd, we’d have a much better chance at stopping this.

It kills me, though, just how impossible that would be.

>It kills me, though, just how impossible that would be.

Is it though? It seems completely like a matter of will. I've thought about this exact idea before. How much VC would it take to build a small town? A couple billion? People are throwing gobs of money ten times that at absolute nonsense right now. Why couldn't we use it for meaningful progress instead?

The allure of gambling is powerful. Everyone can estimate ROI on a planned community. Nobody can estimate ROI on hot air, so it "could" be "the next" whatever-the-last-thing-was. Nobody wants to be the one who passed on Facebook or Bitcoin in 2014 to invest in something boring like housing.

Statistically huge pops like those are extremely rare. Someone wins in the casino but statistically it won't be you. Statistically you are better off making rational investments. But... FOMO and daydreams and... there was that one time! ... rat pushes lever, rat pushes lever...

Aside a small number of exceptions US citizens hate using public transit themselves. This is reinforced by how public transit stations are always on the most undesirable real estate. If you’re successful you have a car, only the poor/unsuccessful/unusual don’t have 1 or more cars in their household.

Good luck setting up a new government when the old government refuses to give up power...

In my view, most people have to earn a living, and choose whatever housing options are available in the town where they work. And once we're dug in, we're dug in. My family has a lifestyle where we avoid car use for the most part, but not everybody is so lucky.

There has to be jobs in those small cities, or people would just travel more and you'd improve nothing. There are barely remote jobs for programmers today - and for some creative types there are some remote jobs. But to make your scenario practical there needs to be a lot more remote work. In a few years when my kids are past high school, I'd love to move to a mountain city somewhere and enjoy the wilderness, at least for a while. I'm an experienced programmer with a good resume and even I'd take a while to get a remote job that pays reasonably.

It's much worse for people who aren't in the fortunate "programmer class" to get remote work. A little city supports a few people working in shops and restaurants and cafes, but the mass of the people need more.

In fact, there are plenty of such small cities. Lacking both transit and jobs, they are in rough shape

That's a very myopic view of the problem.

India has ~300 million people still living without electricity, and they're not going to stay that way for much longer. India also has massive accessible coal reserves; the cheapest and easiest path to bringing electricity to everyone.

You can focus on North American culture all you want, but the developing world has a far greater size and they're following North America's footsteps.

The climate situation will not be averted, not without destroying a lot of people who indirectly want to increase their carbon footprint by improving their lives.

We're headed for major conflict, and have been for some time now. Asking North Americans to reel in their consumption now is like begging the winners of a competition to not reap the benefits so the losers can have it now that they're arriving at the finish line.

It's the ugly truth, reality is unfair, and this isn't going to be pretty considering the vast quantities of people arriving.

Why not go big and move everyone into a dozen mega cities like Tokyo. Everything you can want is just one or two subway rides away, so you don't really need a car. Maybe add a touch of Copenhagen to add bike friendliness...

A thought. Bear with me, I might be catching a cold.

When a planetary climate is being intentionally altered in a large scale, it is called terraforming.

But just who benefits from terraforming the Earth to be more hostile to human civilization?

Sort of, I think "to terraform" usually means "to make more like Earth" though.

Technically, the definition of "terraforming" is constantly changing to match Terra's changing climate.

Yes, indeed. You are correct. A better term would have been "climate engineering".

Though I wonder if "venusforming" is also apt, keeping in mind what the results are said to be down the line.

There was a scifi flick a while back about aliens from a hot world infiltrating government and industry to push policies that maximize carbon emissions. Forget the title.

The Arrival: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Arrival_(1996_film)

Hanlon’s razor.

It's the lizard people isn't it ?

The rich elite, the men in power. What better way to rid the world of "brown subhumans", than to make the climate kill them in their own countries?

https://eand.co/how-capitalism-torched-the-planet-and-left-i...

That's completely ridiculous, there are plenty of far more efficient and less convoluted means of committing genocide.

Brazil just elected a literal fascist who has promised to clear cut the Amazon rainforest, and to relentlessly persecute "red political opponents".

There may be easier ways to genocide, but this one has built-in deniability.

I am still astonished that there are people out there, particularly politicians, who can look at the atmospheric co2 charts for the past 50 years at Mauna Loa, vs ice core sample data going back hundreds of thousands of years, and go "nope, no greenhouse gases, no global warming".

https://www.google.ca/search?q=atmospheric+co2+mauna+loa&oq=...

Who says they're looking at these things?

I'm surprised these politicians can hear about the trans-polar shipping route opening up, and still disbelieve.

Anyone who says greenhouse gas concentrations are not going up is not operating in an evidence-based manner.

That being said, the politicians might have been behaving sensibly. I've not been following it as closely as I used to, but there have been some data points suggesting solar/wind energy sources are now starting to cross key thresholds and become cheaper than the traditional fossil fuels. If that is so, the problem will solve itself without the politicians needing to step in and screw up the economy.

The price drop in $ per kWh generated by solar, wind and hydroelectric, etc, has nothing to do with the growing concentration of greenhouse gases. You can look at greenhouse gas causing figures such as how many megatonnes of coal are burned each year, how many barrels of oil Canada exports to the USA each year, they're all on a steady climb.

The world has an inexorable thirst for energy. It's great if there are more watt-hours being generated by green sources, but at the same time, there is what seems to be an inexorable growth in pollution causing sources. Example: Look at how many cars are sold each year to the growing middle class in China and India.

You forget the third player, fossil energy companies who are keen to protect their business and fight against this change. Politicians don't keep out, they are just as likely to help the old companies.

Still, the planet won't cool down only because we start using solar energy. We should actively remove CO2 and methane from the atmosphere. Planting trees is likely not enough.

This other article from 2017 https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2017/07/antarcti... states that

> the last time atmospheric carbon dioxide was as high as it is today, and the temperature was about what it’s expected to be in 2050, sea levels were up to 70 feet higher than today.

That's going to cause mass migrations in all countries of the world, rich and poor, and destroy the logistics that let us live like we do now. Obviously we'll adapt but there are going to be maybe billions of deaths (famine and diseases). I think I'm lucky because I'll be dead by then. However I could see the first coastal cities going a little bit underwater.

Ultimately we elect our politicians so we are responsible for what they decide and not decide to look at. We'll get what we deserve.

There is so much money in politics, it's not surprising when one of them rejects an overwhelming number of experts and sides with their donors or the short-term economic interests of their constituents.

Sure, short sighted, profit focused decisions create a long term detriment, but the system that encourages and rewards those types of decisions is also a big problem.

The point I make about climate change is we live day to day with politicians trying to maintain the status quo. Look at how free trade and globalization changed lives. I'm Australian and Australia doesn't build cars anymore. We do financial services and flip houses.

When we live in a world where humans can't survive between the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn because wet humidity will kill them. Then we're going to see a lot of migration and society is going to change in a big way.

the term "eat the rich" springs to mind.

There's your problem - Mauna Loa.

If those who want to say that CO2 levels are trending up then there is a significant need to have 1000's upon 1000's of monitoring points worldwide. This way the evidence can be gathered to show what is happening around the globe.

In addition, with these CO2 monitoring points, we need rainfall information, temperature information, plant growth rate information, vehicle usage, manufacturing and population information. We need volcanic activity information, we need land usage information, we need forest and bush fire information. This data collection is only the tip of the "iceberg" of information we need.

Without it, we do not have the evidence profile required to demonstrate what is actually happening around the world. Without that evidence, we are unable to see what needs to be done.

When it boils down to it, there are climate change effects that can be mitigated, there are climate change effects that cannot be mitigated. Choosing strategies that are ineffective is, in many cases, worse than doing nothing.

Take my country Australia for example, many of the species of plant life depend on drought conditions and the subsequent bush fires for the propagation of the species and regeneration of the land. Increased CO2 levels have a beneficial effect on the plant life by either reducing water consumption or increasing density and growth of plants, so that our tree population increases. Increasing forest coverage increases water retention.

Without comprehensive data, we are all blind-sided. There is no level playing field on which we can build the appropriate strategies.

For those who say we must do something now, how do you know that what is being proposed won't make things worse?

There are thousands of co2 monitoring stations worldwide, and they all show the same data. Mauna Loa is a good indicator for global co2 in the atmosphere because its position is exposed to high altitude winds that circulate around the entire Pacific ocean, and it is not near a extremely populated area with a lot of fossil fuel burning that would skew the results.

https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/global.html#global

Barrow, Alaska, Mauna Loa, Samoa, and the South Pole all show the re same trend.

https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/gl_trend.html

https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/...

We have comprehensive data going back a million years, from deep ice cores.

Quite right. Geologist here - I know a lot of folks who study climate and paleoclimate, they know what they're doing. If anything I'd say the evidence is even more solid than most well-informed people realize.

edit: if anyone wants comprehensive data, a good place to start is with the IPCC reports, particularly the "physical science basis" section: http://ipcc.ch/report/ar5/wg1/

This is a few years old now (they're currently working on the "sixth report") but the data was already clear and uncontroversial.

> Data are reported as a dry air mole fraction defined as the number of molecules of carbon dioxide divided by the number of all molecules in air, including CO2 itself, after water vapor has been removed. The mole fraction is expressed as parts per million (ppm). Example: 0.000400 is expressed as 400 ppm.

After water vapour has been removed? What is the effect if water vapour is not removed from the figures? Does this show a different profile or is the profile identical? What was the reasoning for removing the water vapour figures from the readings?

Simple line graphs like these don't give the kinds of profiles needed. We need much more comprehensive mapping. Looking at the sites mentioned, there does not appear to sufficient coverage of all environmental areas to give us a clear picture of what is going on.

My first question is whether or not the measurements are being affected by the local environment profiles - are there other factors we need to know about the areas in which the measurements are taking place? In other words, are there specific site characteristics that effect CO2 measurements that are not applicable elsewhere. For other untested sites, are there site specific characteristics that would show a higher or lower CO2 profile?

You note that the high altitude winds that circle the Pacific Ocean are an advantageous factor for Mauna Loa in determining global CO2 levels. My first question relates to what effects does the Ring of Fire have on these readings and my second would be related to what effects does the circulating wind flows have on these readings.

Just looking at the displayed data leaves me with lots of unanswered questions.

These are questions that can only be answered by having CO2 monitoring stations located in 1000's upon 1000's of different locations: islands, remote sea buoys, mountain ranges, savannahs, forests, high plains, low plains, continuously circling weather balloons, coastal and internal land mass locations, cities, farming communities, deserts and arid land locations, tropical, sub-tropical, temperate zones. We also need all the other data that will give us a handle on what is happening.

For ocean locations, are there dissolved CO2 levels that are affected by changing temperature profiles and is there a atmospheric and ocean transfer of CO2 that affects the readings? Does the plankton population levels change the CO2 levels, is there feedback loops here - positive or negative?

There are many more measurements that can be undertaken to give us a better understanding of what is happening. The complexity is very high and we need non-political active cooperation between many different fields to get the information required.

As I said, we need comprehensive data to be able to determine what strategies are going to be useful and what will be of no use whatsoever.

You are not an expert in this area I presume. You brought up some thoughtful questions and points which could skew measurements. Now if you a non expert can think of these possibilities doesn’t seem reasonable that the experts have thought of this too and have taken into account these things? Being able to think of possible ways that a measurement might be bad or skewed indicates a likely gap in your knowledge and is not a reflection on the science.

Your statement: ...we need non-political active cooperation between many different fields.... paints you as a troll. The only people who think the scientific consensus on climate change is the result of political beliefs and not scientifically sound reasons are of a certain persuasion.

Now if you a non expert can think of these possibilities doesn’t seem reasonable that the experts have thought of this too and have taken into account these things?

Yes, but. Look, I'm not an expert in this area and so I have to hold my hands up and say I don't have a clue and have to defer to those who think they do.

However, in most other areas of research I find people are able to make a simple, clear case with other factors accounted for in a way that climate change seems to lack. I don't know enough about it to know why, maybe it's just the difficulty in ruling out other factors on one planet. But I feel like I've lost count of the number of times a single dataset like that from Mauna Loa is held up, questioned and then... nothing. Well, nothing but pointing out someone isn't an expert.

We should probably do a better job of addressing the questions people have given the importance. Or at least, someone who's an expert should probably do better if they want everyone to buy into the argument.

I propose that the single data point perception comes from the media and not the experts. The writers of articles in newspapers and popular media are not necessarily well informed. Reporters cling to the “single data point” it seems to me because it makes it easier to for them to write their articles. I doubt very much that any expert uses a single data point to make a conclusion.

In general when I read about a study done by experts in an area outside of my expertise and I quickly come up with possible objections to the conclusion I assume this says more about my lack of knowledge than it does about theirs. A lot of times I read an article about math in a newspaper and something is just plain wrong in the article but explaining to a layman why it’s wromg is not so easy. I don’t know if the same thing is true for climate scientists but I suspect it is.

I’m all for people questioning things and wondering why a given conclusion is right. I want though for laymen to use such questions as the basis for furthering their own study and quest for knowledge in that area instead of stopping at the question and concluding the scientists have it wrong.

Let me ask you a question. Do you ask those who have done the study those questions and if so, what were their responses? Did they answer and if they did not, what do you draw from that?

I work from the basis of there are no stupid questions. Some are difficult, some are annoying, some of them challenging and some are unanswerable, but none of them are stupid.

I also don't like how any question not draped with otherwise agreement is automatically thought of as bigotry.

I didn't take the time to read all the comments in this thread but I did not have the impression you were trying to "debunk climate change" to the contrary, you seemed to accept the presence of problems, but desire more open access to the datasets and presumably tutorials and explanations on how to reproduce analysis (think kaggle scripts).

You correctly point out the danger of inefficient or insufficient diagnosis and treatment of the problems. In a sense you seem to hint at counterintuitive policies, where the straightforward policy would be more costly (and hence the difference in cost could have been spent otherwise on more monitoring or treatment).

Regarding CO2 monitoring on a worldwide scale, it is indeed a problem scientists and engineers are dealing with. None of your downvoters point out any of the found solutions for the problem you visualize, but they do have the time to downvote you, which imho is not entirely fair, so I will take a little time to respond on that front: they use remote sensing of CO2 (and other greenhouse gases), molecules have their own spectra (normal spectra or raman spectra), imaging satellites equiped with lasers take "pictures" of the concentrations of the species under study. These need to be callibrated (at least during the start of their program, and probably periodically throughout the satellite's mission). They can use selected ground stations, or airborne labs measuring CO2 levels. Then the whole picture can be interpreted.

There's a lot of unhelpful vile, I presume mostly coming from ex-denialists. There's that saying that goes like: at first they laugh at you, then they vehemently oppose you, and then they not only agree, but pretend they were on the side of history all along... These ex-denialists lack the knowledge to help others see the light, but are more than willing to poop "in the name of their new team" on anyonne who seems to be still in denial...

Do you worry or deny that carbon fiber airplanes are safe to fly, do you not use cell phones or gps because you don't believe that physics works? No, you don't. You only want to seek proof for things that are uncomfortable for you.

No I am not an expert in the field. Should the experts have seen these questions? Yes. But did they? I don't know. We don't have the data presented to us. Often, the right questions are asked by those who are not experts in that field.

Any gap in my knowledge can well be a reflection of the science. The question I asked about the removal of water vapour figures and why is simply not answered here. As a matter of course for publicly disseminated information, the reasoning for this removal should be explicitly available as well as all the graphs related to having the information included as well as what they presented. That is their responsibility if they want buy-in by the general public.

As far as calling someone a troll for stating about non-political cooperation, I have worked for many different kinds of companies and organisations over the decades, private, public and government. In all of them, politics was a normal mode of life, except where certain people were able to protect their staff from it. When politics was not involved, we could achieve much and did achieve much. You demonstrate that politics is alive and well by using the word troll.

I don't care about consensus, I care about the data and what it indicates for me and all the generations that follow. I am not interested in strategies that will be ineffective. Without the data we just don't know. If you want to believe the experts without them providing their full reasoning and assumptions, fair enough, you are entitled to that. But I want more, a lot more. I want the data so that it can be analysed by many people so that we can see what it shows. I want to know the assumptions made in the data collection and analysis done. I want to see what interactions are occurring that we can measure. I don't expect consensus, I don't expect agreement as to what it means. But I do expect enough people of different persuasions to get together to hammer out possible strategies for moving forward.

If all we have is name calling, then we are not going to develop any effective beneficial strategies for moving forward. If questions are asked then they need answered, clearly and in detail. If these questions are not answered then a major problem exists. You don't build confidence in your expertise if you disparage those who are asking difficult or annoying questions.

The important thing here is the collection of data and across a very broad range of fields. Without that publicly available data, with many eyes looking at it, do you really think somebody, anybody can come up with the appropriate strategies for the future?

Climate change is inevitable, it is very real. What we can do to mitigate the effects effectively is dependent on much more knowledge than is currently available. We need to get that comprehensive data across all sorts of fields and get it fast.

I've heard "climate change occurs in cycles" from many of my equally-educated friends. It's scientific-sounding, you can find research articles online (apparently), but from what I understand – a total myth.

But that may give some insight into /why/ so many people, including intelligent ones, disregard climate change.

It's technically correct (the worst kind of correct): as I understand it, the global climate has been warmer than it is now. But there weren't any humans, and it didn't warm up nearly as fast.

It is true though. The climate has been both warmer and colder than it is now just several centuries ago (little ice age, medieval warm period). This is well documented and accepted by scientists even though reasons are not clear (definitely not human activity at that time obviously).

In our current era humans are contributing to the changing climate in a very big way given our industrialization, the extreme levels of population and economy dependent on extracting oil and coal from the ground and burning it. That does not change the fact that climate has been changing even before humans could have any noticeable impact on it, and those changes were often very fast and sometimes cyclical.

You seem more knowledgeable on this than I am. Is it cyclical, but the change has been heavily increased by human activity?

If it's just cyclical, then why are we blaming our activity?

Just show them this XKCD graph https://xkcd.com/1732/

Its hard to get a person to understand something when they are paid to not understand it.

Trump is on record calling the whole thing a "hoax". However, the Trump administration has recently indicated that we're likely to see a 7 degree increase in average global temperature by 2100.

https://www.fastcompany.com/90243700/the-trump-admin-says-sc...

Building sea walls around your golf courses must trigger some rational thought surely?

https://www.google.co.nz/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/world/201...

It's not that they say there isn't global warming. It's that they say it's just mostly part of the natural climate cycle.

Just as astonishing as "climate change deniers" are the "climate change fanatics" who thinks climate was static until 200 years ago.

I believe humans are affecting the climate to some degree, but not all. I'm more concerned about preserving the environment/nature/species/forests/etc rather than global warming. I don't think the world is going to end because of global warming. I do think there will be winners ( global north ) and losers ( global south ). And most importantly, I'm against people fearmongering about the climate to sneak in global carbon taxation system to enrich themselves.

Also, for much of the 20th century up until the 1970s, people cherrypicked data points to assure us that we were experiencing global cooling.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_cooling

https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/GISSTemperature/g...

Hopefully one day, politics will leave climate science so that people can do real science rather than practicing politics.

Once again, I do believe the climate has been warming in the short term. I do believe humans have contributed to it somewhat. I don't think it is the end of the world. I don't think humans should give up civilization because of global warming. And I don't believe in using climate to give bankers and wall street a global carbon taxation system to gamble on.

They do have a valid argument - it's possible that future predictions are badly wrong.

It's like the early days of the space race. Scientists would say things are dangerous and were just being alarmist, or think it was safe then the whole thing blew up killing everyone aboard. Scientists can't always predict the future as accurately as they think.

I don't think this is a good reason to just blithely hope for the best, though.

"it's possible that future predictions are badly wrong"

Climate model predictions of global warming have generally been fairly consistent in projecting future warming, as shown in this animated chart:

https://www.instagram.com/p/BZ38rf7F3al/

The chart is taken from this 2017 article: Analysis: How well have climate models projected global warming?:

> "While some models projected less warming than we’ve experienced and some projected more, all showed surface temperature increases between 1970 and 2016 that were not too far off from what actually occurred, particularly when differences in assumed future emissions are taken into account."

https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-how-well-have-climate-m...

Thanks, but the animation is unfortunate, because the later predictions are compared to shorter periods and make predictions about the past (so most likely they were fitted against them). Of course it looks like a good match. At least they are honest enough to put a dashed line.

In general the climate science has been very sloppy so they lost a lot of trust. This starts with the name greenhouse effect that describes something different from the main effect in a greenhouse (warm air cannot escape vs reflected radiation). And goes on with melting glaciers in the Himalayas in the next 30 years. Climate gate didn’t increase trust either.

Of course this doesn’t prove that climate scientists are wrong. But they appear more confident than they should.

This is a tricky subject, and we're probably on opposing sides of the political argument, but if you're interested:

Sure, there are people who say "no greenhouse gases, no global warming" and stop thinking at that point. Some of them are in positions of power. This kind of attitude is dangerous and could lead to big mistakes in the long term. On the other hand, the people who say "greenhouse gases, but maybe not much global warming" or "land use and healthy ecosystems are most important" or "gradually moving toward less carbon in fuel is the best approach" never seem to get a shout-out from the activists.

It's usually more like: "We're trying to save these neanderthals and they're stupid/tricked by evil so they're going to end up killing us all."

Can you see how this doesn't lead to healthy cooperation? The "no greenhouse gases, no global warming" people might not know how to study the climate, but do you really believe that all of them were fed that mantra by bad actors, and none of them are just lashing out at bullies?

From my perspective, the activists started their political campaign to regulate CO2 back when the Science (IPCC FAR) said "the observed increase could be largely due to this natural variability" and I have been suspicious of their motives ever since. You want me to be mindful of carbon in the atmosphere, measured temperature trends, changing ecosystems, pollution, and resource use? Great, those are all smart things to care about.

You want me to support your political campaign to regulate the gas that I exhale, because otherwise there will be a doomsday, and if I don't agree I'm either stupid or evil? Ehhhhh, no thanks.

While I can appreciate your argument, particularly how some climate change activism can appear to be bullying, you lost me at your last paragraph:

>You want me to support your political campaign to regulate the gas that I exhale, because otherwise there will be a doomsday, and if I don't agree I'm either stupid or evil? Ehhhhh, no thanks.

The fact that you exhale co2 is just not relevant. It's not your exhalation that is menacing the future of humans and other animals. It's the "exhalations" of industrial-scale energy generation (and also industrial-scale agriculture, etc) that are the problem. Surely you see that, yes?

> stupid or evil

I'm not accusing you, but there absolutely are some evil people at work here. These are people who know (and in many cases have known for decades) that what they're doing - large scale atmospheric dumping of co2 - is going to cause real harm and suffering to fellow humans, but choose to do it anyway because they personally profit from it and their wealth insulates them from the consequences within their lifetime.

> It's not your exhalation that is menacing the future of humans and other animals

I don't trust you, or anyone else, with the power to make this determination.

> These are people who know (and in many cases have known for decades) that what they're doing - large scale atmospheric dumping of co2 - is going to cause real harm and suffering to fellow humans

It is absurd to suggest that anyone "knows" what a system as complex as the Earth will be like in the future. Many people believe that this is the most likely future, and I'm sure some of them don't care.

> It is absurd to suggest that anyone "knows" what a system as complex as the Earth will be like in the future. Many people believe that this is the most likely future, and I'm sure some of them don't care.

it's absurd to suggest radiative transfer and heat retention aren't well understood scientific phenomena.

Is your argument "the earth is complicated enough that nobody can ever understand it completely, so don't even bother"? Because that's a laughable attitude.

Regarding your exhalation comment, the specific problem is not CO2 itself. The problem is liberating CO2 from fossil-fuel sinks where it has been sequestered away from the atmosphere for millions of years.

And I think your comments come to the real problem for people with controlling greenhouse gases. My dad is in this boat. He might say "I deny that my actions hurt the earth. I don't want to look at the evidence, and I don't trust anyone who says I might be doing damage by driving a gas guzzler. I deny I could be hurting things. I refuse to believe anything that leads to that conclusion".

Is anyone that speaks of likely consequences an activist?

How do you react to the internal reports and information films produced by, as it turns out, most of the major oil companies in the 1980s and 1990s?

That was the time for gradual moves to fuels with lower carbon, and a gradual shift to more consideration of the ecosystem.

Whilst the scientific consensus of how serious and urgent a problem we face was still being honed, the fossil fuel industry was pretty unequivocal about it. Clearly they don't fit the same political or activist labels yet seem to be painting a future just as unpleasant as the most strident activists. A future that is going to require regulation and restriction of some choices as "being mindful" isn't going to cut any production or output from the plastic factory, or internal combustion, or any reduction in the worst forms of agriculture (grain fed cattle).

Humanity, or more precisely, political parties and industry ignored clear warnings for 40 years. We seem to have left it much too late for gradual anything to work. We ran out of time, thanks to a succession of governments across the globe, of all colours, sweeping it under the rug. 40 years of "not on my watch".

The scientific consensus is over 97% of climate related scientists find there is an urgent problem. What should we do now?

As an aside I try not to heed much from activists, political, religious or anything else, even on issues where I sympathise. The sensible and accurate discussion is usually found a little further from the margins.

Could you name a specific person you consider to be a reasonable actor and who holds any of the beliefs you cited? Eg land use.

I can't think of anyone who actually says those things, is why I ask. People opposed to reducing emissions usually tend not to think about it or dismiss it, in my experience.

Freeman Dyson would be one example. Note that this isn't an endorsement of his positions or a statement on the general question, I'm just providing the example of someone who isn't obviously unreasonable and has clearly thought about the issues.

You want me to support your political campaign to regulate the gas that I exhale, because otherwise there will be a doomsday, and if I don't agree I'm either stupid or evil? Ehhhhh, no thanks

This sounds like at least a mildly stupid mindset to me. "Some people associated with your movement made an assumption about me that I don't like, so I'm not going to participate regardless of its merit."

If not "stupid", how about "spiteful, stubborn, and unwilling to face hard truths"?

You might call it mild stupidity - and that may be accurate - but I'd call it being human.

Humans react differently to the same information based on how it is presented. It seems to me that activists - specifically those on the left - often fail to take this into account.

I almost always agree with those activists. I certainly agree about global warming. But - pragmatically - if your goal is to convince skeptics, you ought to be very concerned about tone. For better or worse, how you tell your story is at least as important as the evidence backing up your story.

If you agree, why don't you think of yourself as an activist?

Being an activist implies that one proselytizes or at least takes an active role. I do neither so I'm not an activist.

The problem is that a lot of people simply refuse to listen. That would require them to acknowledge that their comfortable lifestyle is unsustainable and needs to change to something less comfortable.

The original statement "the observed increase could be largely due to this natural variability" seems to have come from a preliminary report in 1990. I wonder if you've had a chance to do more re-search since?

> The "no greenhouse gases, no global warming" people might not know how to study the climate

Good thing there's real scientists conducting this research and releasing reports. But let's instead ignore that and go off our personal brief system instead...

It's hard to have a conversation about something important like this when anything but fervent acceptance of the party line is immediately derided as ignorant, backwards and/or deliberately obtuse. The left certainly seems to be a lot more "with us or against us" than they used to.

Funny, you could say the same thing about the Right.

Plenty of examples.

Every day we read of Professors not receiving tenure because they believe in global warming. Articles that support global warming being rejected from journals. Notable commentators suggesting the belief in global warming should be criminalized.

Whatever.

Oh, definitely. The two seem to be more similar than not, once you look past the window dressing. I don't know if this is new or I'm just more cynical these days.

> with us or against us.

Bush junior’s usage comes to mind immediately.

The linked wiki article shows a fairly even divide in its use though. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/You%27re_either_with_us,_or_...

>"anything but fervent acceptance of the party line is immediately derided as ignorant, backwards and/or deliberately obtuse."

That's because it is.

We're realizing that we're in much deeper shit climate-wise, than we used to think. It's a literal mass extinction, and yet people continue to squabble about stupid petty nonsense. But there's money to be made by appealing to the ignorant comfortable masses.

> This is a tricky subject

nope

> "We're trying to save these neanderthals and they're stupid/tricked by evil so they're going to end up killing us all."

this but unironically

> but do you really believe that all of them were fed that mantra by bad actors, and none of them are just lashing out at bullies?

ah yes, the guys with total political power are being bullied

> You want me to support your political campaign to regulate the gas that I exhale, because otherwise there will be a doomsday, and if I don't agree I'm either stupid or evil

yep

Don't have much skin in this argument, but this would convince absolutely nobody not already aligned with those beliefs. . .which was GP's point in the first place.

> Don't have much skin in this argument

Do you expect to live another 20+ years? Do you have children or young people you care about? If so, I think you have plenty of skin in the game.

Yeah, I didn't really understand this comment. Every living human has a skin in this argument.

A young resident of coastal Bangladesh has a whole lot more skin in the game than a 60-year-old millionaire in Colorado.

Nearly everyone has family or friends they care about. But point taken.

Let me rephrase. I don't have much skin in erubin and oldandtired's particular talking points on this post in HN. Happy?

Yesterday I was at a brewery in a particularly nerdy, computer-sciency part of town. There were a couple of guys having drinks at the end of the bar, and they were conversing loudly enough that I knew they wanted to be heard.

One loud guy says to the other, “my professor at [mumbled] college told us that there’s no way that smoking can cause birth defects. He said that research would be unethical because they’d have to force women to have babies and force them to smoke. Blah blah blah ...” All the guys around him nod in agreement then go on to share screeds about how the liberals are ruining all the fun the world and violating their personal freedoms.

And, I’m thinking to myself, “What the F is going on?” They were talking confidently enough that even I second-guessed my my beliefs on smoking. So, I hit Google Scholar, read the abstracts of the top 5 papers (out of hundreds), and then felt relief that, yes, the science on this topic seems legit and well-explored. And, yes, it is dangeous for pregnant women to smoke.

But, I’m still bothered. These guys seemed like educated, and likely intelligent, people. And, yet, they’re trapped in a political belief system that is making them doubt science wholesale. Some authority figures (likely with same political stance) can tell them ‘facts’ with enough conviction that these guys buy it without question. And, worse, they go on to confidently spread memes about the unreliability of science, scientists, and the liberal political agenda.

To me, as a scientist, this is scary as hell. For 300+ years, we’ve been using science as our most reliable way to understand the world and make rational predictions. And, now, people are disavowing science if it slightly goes against their belief system. What does this means for the future? I don’t know, but I can’t imagine that it’s good.

(By the way, I don’t consider myself a ‘liberal’, although that’s what I am called these days. Generally, I just try to learn a lot about things and side with what seems like the most rational position.)

>By the way, I don’t consider myself a ‘liberal’, although that’s what I am called these days.

It seems a small minority on the left and probably slightly larger one on the right love to pigeonhole people into these categories. Meanwhile the majority don't really think of themselves in those terms and are feeling politically homeless.

Yes. That kind of labeling is a nice way of short-circuiting people's though process. If you label someone, then everybody can see that they are either friend, or enemy, and you don't have to spend further energy trying to see if what they are saying makes sense. It is terrible for rational discussion, and I wish people would just stop doing it.

Not present in this anecdote:

- The replication crisis is real

- The university system is a huge and corrupt industry

- The university is no longer a "safe space" for wrong-thinkers

But sure, whenever someone rejects good science it's the fault of those darn Republicans!

I'm trying to see where he blamed Republicans, and I'm not seeing it. Do you want to rethink or reword that?

There is some truth in those comments, but it's also true that climate change is real and we are accelerating it with our choices to burn more carbon based fuels. It's basically undeniable at this stage, yet people whose lives are inconvenienced by it deny the truth. You cannot and should not use problems in certain papers as an excuse to deny the inexcusable.

no I think it's usually more like -

first 10 years - there's some problems here that maybe we should think about doing something about it.

second 10 years - ok heh heh, well the stuff we were talking about I guess you guys thought it was a joke but really we think there might be a cause for concern and we should somehow rein it back a notch. Please?

third 10 years - really, we're serious. Things cannot continue like this there will be real problems look at all the data that we have been amassing since we started talking about it.

forty years in - are you people kidding me? I am really starting to doubt some of your people's intentions are in the right place. This has civilization threatening consequences, at the worst maybe even extinction of human life. We need to get a handle on this now, look at the data. The people who say the data is lying are themselves lying or at worst very confused.

50 years in - We're trying to save these neanderthals and they're stupid/tricked by evil so they're going to end up killing us all.

Now I realize that someone doesn't like to hear that they're stupid or evil, but when the subject under discussion is extinction of human life and you don't want to support the political campaigns to do something about it because of the tone of that campaign?

That's like that one time my friend was walking around in the start of a hurricane hitting shore (not knowing anything because somewhat insular) and the cop said hey jerk get inside it's a hurricane and it could kill you! If my friend had then taken that warning and said well, I don't like his tone I think I will just walk around some more, when he finally died I guess everyone would think well he was stupid, and if he said I'm gonna make all these school kids walk around with me, they would have said well he was evil.

And of course if we were really to be accurate we are at least 70 years in on warnings that human activity was negatively affecting the climate at a serious level.

Here's another colorful retelling:

199X: We have proxies that show 1998 is the warmest year in history, and things are warming so fast that we're in serious trouble. Give us power!

200X: OK, luckily 1998 was an outlier but we're still warming too much on average. The sea is going to rise and the Arctic is going to be ice-free. Give us power!

201X: OK, the Arctic still has some ice but the Northwest Passage is opening up. The seas are still rising a bit, and here are some scary local flooding and erosion stories. Coral reefs are all going to die. Give us power!

Where are you getting "give us power!" from?

Are climate researchers trying to get elected into positions of power? I haven't seen any evidence of that.

As far as I can tell most people just want to stop burning down the house we live in.

You want to be mindful of CO2 in the atmosphere and move toward emitting less of it, but you don’t want to regulate it? How does that work?

People used to burn mostly wood for energy, then coal, then oil. Each material has more energy per carbon molecule than the last. Natural gas releases still more energy per carbon molecule, and nuclear fission is a different paradigm that doesn't emit carbon at all during power generation. Neither of the last two has come close to reaching its full potential as an energy source.

The US met the goals in the Paris Agreement this year, mostly by using domestic natural gas. This kind of progress is not going to stop because everyone wants to go back to being covered in coal soot. We'll probably be using mostly carbon-free energy sources by the end of the century.

Or, people might try so desperately to claim the power to "save the world" that a war breaks out and we go back to burning wood for survival.

Ironically, the current US government intervention, at least in rhetoric, is encouraging more coal -- more inefficiency, counter to the free market forces.

> The US met the goals in the Paris Agreement this year, mostly by using domestic natural gas.

It certainly did not. Where did you get that information?

Yep that's wrong, my bad. Emissions are going down, but not enough for those targets.

How do you know that progress won’t stop? There’s no market force encouraging lower carbon emissions.

Your statement that wood has less energy for its carbon emissions is highly misleading. It may be technically correct, but since that carbon recently came out of the atmosphere, the net emission is zero. The actual trend, then, is zero carbon emissions, then a lot, then less. That seems rather uninformative when looking at where things would head in the future.

Forests are not a linear system. If everyone still burned wood for power we'd lose millions of acres of forest very quickly, and they wouldn't grow back. Unless/until the people died off I guess.

>"We'll probably be using mostly carbon-free energy sources by the end of the century."

That's around 60 years too late, by current estimations.

Change needs to happen a lot faster than that.

> From my perspective, the activists started their political campaign to regulate CO2 back when the Science (IPCC FAR) said "the observed increase could be largely due to this natural variability" and I have been suspicious of their motives ever since.

The IPCC report is typically more conservative, as it requires a consensus of a large number of scientists. However, even in this case, this phrase is a qualifier that follows a number of stronger statements (and also notes that it could be hiding further warming). For example, the executive summary (we are certain of the following), point two ends with

> These increases will enhance the greenhouse effect, resulting on average in an additional warming of the Earth's surface.

The earlier Charney report (1979), has in its summary

> Their consensus has been that increasing carbon dioxide will lead to a warmer earth

and

> If carbon dioxide continues to increase, the study group finds no reason to doubt that climate changes will result and no reason to believe that these changes will be negligible

Even in 1979, long before the FAR, it was clear that carbon dioxide would alter the climate. Claiming that activists were jumping the gun on the scientific case in 1990 is not fair. They may have ulterior motives, but wanting to regulate CO2 in 1990 is not evidence of this.

The science has significantly progressed since then, such that the evidence is now even clearer. There are arguments to suggest that it would be cheaper to pay for the adaptation to climate change, but unfortunately it is now very clear that the costs for that will be high.

Malthusian activism goes back at least to 1972, but I doubt that any of the early climate change research was originally planned as a political weapon.

I've been following this debate for years. I constantly see people arguing against this position that "nope, no greenhouse gases, no global warming".

Yet I have never, not once, not ever seen this point expressed by any person of significance.

Every single time, it turns out to be a strawman constructed by taking statements out of context, or applying dumb overly-literal interpretations to someone's words. Always.

If someone could point to any example ever of any significant person stating that the climate is not changing whatsoever, or that humans cannot possibly affect climate in the slightest, I'd be very interested. Not taking two words out of context - I mean someone who clearly means that and sticks to that message. Does such a person exist anywhere today? What is his or her name?

“If someone could point to any example ever of any significant person stating that the climate is not changing whatsoever, or that humans cannot possibly affect climate in the slightest, ”

This is Marco Rubio, US senator, who claims global warming is not caused by humans.

““I don’t agree with the notion that some are putting out there, including scientists, that somehow there are actions we can take today that would actually have an impact on what’s happening in our climate,” Rubio said in an interview that aired Sunday on ABC’s This Week. “Our climate is always changing.”” - http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/marco-rubio-global-warming

Roger Wicker, US senator voted No on an amendment to confirm Climate Change is real. http://time.com/3677496/climate-change-wicker-inhofe/

There’s a list of senators who voted against that climate change is caused by humans: https://www.aip.org/fyi/2015/record-key-senate-vote-climate-...

The POTUS has stated multiple times that climate change is a hoax, and has only recently amended that he believes its naturally occurring (not human influenced) https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/donald-trump-global-warmin...

Even with the demand for proof of someone that absolutely denies climate change, you leave in two difficult phrases here: “significant” and “in the slightest”. Both of these give you a rhetorical out on technical merits- anyone who denies climate change will do so using FUD techniques, not outright stating their denial, therefore it’s easy to say no one uses obvious language. The effect however is still the same- politicians and significant figures are spreading FUD about climate change, which is causing climate change and human caused climate change to be called into public question and it prevents legislation being passed to regulate emissions.

Yep, none of these satisfy and it's obvious if you take them seriously and not literally, and put them in context.

>"I don’t agree with the notion that some are putting out there, including scientists, that somehow there are actions we can take today that would actually have an impact on what’s happening in our climate,"

A serious reading would indicate Rubio is saying the US doesn't have policy levers to solve the problem - not that humans cannot ever have any effect on climate.

>Roger Wicker, US senator voted No on an amendment to confirm Climate Change is real

Interesting that he was the only senator to vote no, including Marco Rubio above. Does this give you any pause about your first example? Since you know, you just contradicted yourself right there with your own evidence.

Regarding Wicker himself, his position is "scientific data on rising global temperatures is not conclusive" which is not the same as "humans can't affect climate".

>There’s a list of senators who voted against that climate change is caused by humans

Again, you are lying. They didn't vote against climate change being caused by humans to any degree. They voted against "human activity significantly contributes to climate change" which is a much stronger statement.

Again the pattern: Take any nuanced position and misquote it as saying the climate can't possibly change because of people, and then say how ridiculous it is. It is ridiculous, which is why nobody says that.

Regarding Trump, he did use the word "hoax", but that doesn't mean he thinks the climate never can change at all or that humans can't possibly affect it. Look at what he actually meant.

Snopes is a radically biased source so not useful in this discussion.

Regarding your last paragraph, you are simply moving the goalposts. You changed it from "they deny the climate changes" to "they are politicking to avoid my preferred policies". Nobody would deny that people obfuscate and double-talk in politics. That's not the question at hand.

My position stands.

It's because they realise that they will die of old age before their own life is at risk so they'd rather continue their unsustainable lifestyle and let their children figure out how to pay the debt.

Politicians realize combatting climate change is going to require drastic changes on a societal level, particularly with deep regulations, public work projects, etc. They already know what their stance is going to be before any of this data comes out. It happens every year. The status quo is too comfortable and lucrative.

If you've decided to do nothing in response to the reports, the easiest talking point to garner support is to say the science is biased, unreliable, and so on. That talking point has worked for decades. And it has a real impact with people who take it at face value.

What is the best way to invest (long-term) in climate change?

Perhaps strategic land purchases, with the proviso that "the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent."

Personally, I am thinking very hard about buying rural land in Canada, as global warming and mass migration may cause the price of land to go up substantially over time. I haven't run the numbers or pulled the trigger yet though.

What part of Canada, have you researched the best spot? I'd be curious to know. I own a swampy patch of land with some peat moss potential on PEI. Part of me wonders if that whole island will be under water just when I need it...

That seems to assume global warming will happen fast and pronounced enough to recoup your investment.

A degree average in 50 years doesn't seem like it would do it.

There is a cap and trade scheme for certain CO2 emissions in the EU[1], and you could try to get exposure to the futures[2] for those emission rights. I see JE00B3CG6315 is a fund doing that.

Keep in mind though that the price can go to zero if the actual emissions go below the emissions cap, which happened in 2007. Presumably the EU will try to manage the cap to prevent that from happening again.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_Emission_Tradin...

[2] https://www.theice.com/products/197/EUA-Futures

I think the time frame is too long to make good money investing, the holding costs would kill you as the returns eventually come. I think about it more like where do you want to put down long term roots, given the disruption that will be caused by climate change in many places.

Energy generation, possibly energy storage.

Nearly all of our modern production, processing, and logistics to move it is constrained by the cost of energy. Any sort of atmospheric scrubbing is also energy restrained, our food production is energy restrained as fertilizer is still produce from fossil fuels. Refined material costs are largely dependent on the fuel costs of extracting and processing raw ore.

The only problem with investing in energy production is it being a slow grind, you won't likely see any large gains, but it is a secure bet so long as civilization exists.

A number of reasonable sounding posts get a lot of down votes for some reason. Not sure why that has to happen, nor that is helps the case much.

It looks like it's mostly just people arguing about global warming, bringing in their usual prejudices and incomplete knowledge. That's been rehashed here so many times it can't be done in good faith.

Maybe if the comments were more focused on the specifics of the article.

There's something about reading an article like this that makes all the small things I seem to worry about go away.

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