The toll climate change is taking on oceans | Hacker News Reader

The toll climate change is taking on oceans

nationalgeographic.com

116 pointscodermobile37 comments

Articles like his do a great job of communicating change, but a very poor job of communicating threat. I'm going to be unpopular and say I still can't see why the metrics being listed here rate higher consideration than all the threats that could reasonably be imagined over the next 40 years. The risk of running out of fossil fuels without being prepared is much more threatening than the statistics listed.

I'm going to single out "Sea levels are rising." for special mention - entire cities can be constructed in 40 years (I'm thinking Shenzhen); 9 inches over a century isn't that scary in context of all the other radical change that has happened over the same period. There was a period in there where nuclear annihilation was an imminent threat. Nuclear annihilation is still a concern.

It is obvious the situation is changing, it is not obvious in this article that any of the changes are important over the timeframe given. There is always going to be radical change over a 20 year period that we have to roll with.

Easy to focus on "how can people escape the change". Not so easy, for coral reefs that take 100 years to regrow, and the fisheries that utterly depend on them in a food chain. And the billions worldwide that eat those fish. We're all safe here in the West, but billions may die worldwide.

Unless the refugees overrun us all. Like they did in the 'ring of fire' years, back when Ur and Hammurabi were writing. A chain reaction of failed crops, refugee migrations and overloaded ecosystems culminated in Egypt being nearly destroyed by the 'sea people', a flotilla of desperate refugees. It only ended when Egypt armed everybody and defeated them (killed them all).

1/7 of the world population wiped out by a 9 inch change in water levels over 100 years? Seems a little unlikely. My point today is there isn't anything in the article that supports your comment.

Nothing in that article is a risk to billions of people. Look at what is happening with Swine Flu in Asia right now - there is always a risk of a given food source collapsing; climate change or no climate change.

I get that this is interesting, I don't get how we can link a 0.04 change in pH to requiring action to avert the apocalypse. The 'drastic toll' they are presenting isn't very expensive. This article is a call to inaction rather than action.

To inform: Reefs are on sloping continental shelves. Reefs grow at exactly a depth, temperature and clarity of water. Change the water depth an inch, the optimal location moves by feet or yards. Reefs are not ambulatory. Reefs take decades to regrow.

Interesting choice of example, given that the African swine fever epidemic, which is also occurring in Europe, is in part being driven by climate change, as it has changed the ranges of the vectors - wild boar and warthogs.

> I'm going to single out "Sea levels are rising." for special mention - entire cities can be constructed in 40 years (I'm thinking Shenzhen); 9 inches over a century isn't that scary in context of all the other radical change that has happened over the same period.

The problem isn't the sea-level rising, it's the people that would be displaced, migrate over, and cause havoc to the systems of regions unprepared for such a massive ingress. Consider that there are housing crises around the world today and these cities aren't built for them today.

Look at the social and political havoc caused by the European refugee crisis in recent years for a concrete example.

This. And the possibility space is daunting. And many of the changes can unfold drastically faster than sea level rise. Consider things like:

The difference in the number destabilizing European politics, compared to the numbers at risk of displacement via sea level rise.

The potential for people to be displaced by shifting weather patterns. How many years of draught, wildfire, dust-storms, crop failure, 500-year floods, weeks-long power outages, etc. will it take to permanently displace people? Will the die-roll throw these effects at low-productivity, low-population areas, or will some hit breadbaskets, transportation nexuses, industrial centers, or cities?

Or will the people bearing the brunt of these effects stubbornly stay put, and disrupt internal politics by repeatedly rebuilding with taxpayer assistance?

Yep. Europe can barely deal with a few million refugees from Middle East. Just wait until they start getting tens of million, if not more, from the Indian subcontinent and surrounding coastal countries.

> I'm going to be unpopular and say I still can't see why the metrics being listed here rate higher consideration than all the threats that could reasonably be imagined over the next 40 years. The risk of running out of fossil fuels without being prepared is much more threatening than the statistics listed.

While it's unfortunate that you can't see the danger, it's comforting that that view is increasingly "unpopular."

Let's take the "risk of running out of fossil fuels without being prepared" as an example. Absolute tripe. A fiction bordering on incoherence. First of all, there is no "risk" of the scenario you have described, in the sense that the probability of "running out without being prepared" are indistinguishable from 0. Fossil fuel prices will climb. Transportation and energy prices will climb to the point that some forms of transport and some uses of energy will either become unaffordable or change to the second-best option (relative to now). This is already happening with hybrid and electric vehicles and wind and solar energy. It will just continue. We won't "run out" in the sense that we've mined the last lump of coal or pumped the last drop of oil. Rather, the costs of extraction will climb until it's no longer feasible to extract. This takes time, and one of the mechanisms that drives that time scale is cost. On this matter, we can breathe a sigh of relief.

On the other hand, the collapse of the ecosystem, or it's (or large parts of it's) sudden transition into a new dynamic regime, is not at all unlikely on the face of it. Mussel shells are an example of a large change due to ocean acidification over the last 50 years: https://news.uchicago.edu/story/mussel-shells-much-thinner-5... . Whole sardine fisheries have collapsed. (It'll be interesting to see if the increase in microplastics will build to a threshold that leads to a sudden die-off of plankton-feeding whales. It's not difficult to imagine a system with that much lag building to an irrevocable state.) The bread basket of the United States is a happy coincidence of wind-blown silt from the Rockies and weather. That good weather is moving north into Canada. These all represent signals from gigantic systems that are careening out of whack. Here, we can only cross our fingers. And hold our breath.

"Running out of fossil fuels" is not the problem. The problem is quitting them before we destroy the systems that keep us alive.

Related: GoogleX co-founder Tom Chi gave a fantastic talk on carbon debt (with a rather depressing 238 views at the moment; I hope more people watch...):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QyQvfaW54NU

Great talk. I was expecting him to be working on some of the areas mentioned in the video but seems like he's just doing seminars now... https://www.prototypethinking.live/

Agreed, this is an excellent talk.

Main takeaway is to view the problem as debt which has to be paid off. Simply stopping new purchases will not pay off the debt.

Above point summarized here, timestamp 22:15 - https://youtu.be/QyQvfaW54NU?t=1335

We currently have a one trillion ton carbon debt. As a though experiment, for a starting solution to iterate upon, this can be "paid off" with 20 billion trees / year, for 50 years. It would take 9000 drones, 450 staff, $80 mil/year. And a total land area half the size of Brazil. Using current technology. Compare this with alternative approaches being thrown around with price tags of 1 trillion+.

Man I'd hate people to just read this summary and not actually watch the talk. There's just so many important points in it and it's laid out so well that it just doesn't do it justice to summarize it here. Like just to give an example, here's another one:

> Even if we emitted no more carbon from this point on, the planet would continue to warm on average and destabilize for about another 500-800 years.

Please go watch it. It's just 30 minutes of your time and it's very unlikely you already know everything he's about to mention.

In the past 200 years alone, ocean water has become 30 percent more acidic—faster than any known change in ocean chemistry in the last 50 million years. https://ocean.si.edu/ocean-life/invertebrates/ocean-acidific...

Climate change is not only a threat to the nature around us, it’s a threat to us humans. It’s an international security issue.

While I agree with your general sentiment, I fail to see why 'national security' would trump 'destruction of habitat'. When my house is burning down I don't give diddly quak whether the doors are locked.

When it’s your neighbor’s house, most people tend to care somewhat less than if it was their own. At least until your now-homeless neighbor notices how nice your house is. Climate change will affect some people more than others in at least the short term.

Short term thinking is not going to solve the global climate crisis.

Politicians are mainly incapable of thinking beyond their term - the next election. Just look at politician's willingness to commit deliberate national suicide via Brexit. All the current Tory leadership candidates are now trying to out-extremist all the others. There was no plan B, there remains no plan B.

National security is perhaps the one issue that can partly escape being expressed solely in economic and short termism of this administration's term only.

Now whether politicians can start to believe climate actually is an issue of security remains to be seen.

There is no solution in building walls and upping border security. That is expensive fighting against the symptoms, draining resources and attention from the real issue at hand. Trying to trick politicians and decision makers into at least some action will not solve anything. On the contrary, it is going to be harmful for the overall cause.

Eh? What does building walls and border security have to do with solving the climate crisis? Nothing at all. Nor is it a case of tricking anyone.

I'm talking in terms of treating it as an existential threat to national (and global) security. As it is for some countries already, and will inevitably become for all if we don't move orders of magnitude faster. Which deserves a reaction akin to the existential threat nations faced in WW1 and WW2.

Directed production, rationing, war economy budgets, a long term view as well as short term tactics etc. If the world leaves it long enough conscription too.

Right now we're in the equivalent of the appeasement years of the 30s. Cutting budgets that should be raised, tokenism, and ignoring the problem.

Neither is collectivism.

It isn't a question of one being more important than the other.

Climate change is already having systemic impacts in the form of displacement and migration. This has, for the most part, been internal, however as ecosystems degrade, the people who depend on them will move farther afield to try to at the very least maintain the standard of living they had prior to their displacement.

I think it's both important and relevant to raise the security issue - there is a militant core who are in absolute denial over climate change, and unfortunately, a substantial and vocal proportion of policymakers in major developed economies fit into this category.

Those same policymakers tend to be extremely hawkish on migration and security issues, so to frame climate change as a threat to security is a potential route to getting them on board.

Sadly, the effect so far seems to have been to encourage them to build walls and razor wire fences, as treating the symptoms is quicker and easier than treating the disease. Nobody wants to embark on a costly multi-decadal project that will see them out of power forevermore - so instead they go for the quick wins that they can shout about on the campaign trail.

If climate change continues to be framed as a security issue, it will hopefully cause policymakers to think more holistically about their strategy for dealing with it, as if it ends up posing an existential threat to the continued existence of their state, then hopefully this would trump party interests.

That said, the UK government seems to be putting party interests ahead of the state, unless of course brexit is actually an attempt to put a ring of steel around the UK to protect it from climate-change-driven mass migration, and the costs therein - but I am probably giving the powers that be too much credit.

Correction: For the next generation or so it’s a threat to poor humans. Exactly why nothing’s going to happen.

That is unreasonably cynical. Charitable efforts for poor people are unparalleled in today's world. I can agree however that nothing will happen and disagree on the question of 'why'.

These articles always leave me wondering what I can do today to contribute. Not money, not scientific research, just daily change like not using plastic bottles (or something).

This problem is always presented as a massive unsolvable thing that the government or someone with deep pockets needs to contribute focus to.

A few weeks ago I was outright downvoted right here on HN (edit: and also right now, within literally the first 30 seconds of posting this very comment!) for merely suggesting people start by getting their companies and coworkers to see business travel as a carbon liability to be minimized rather than a work perk to be maximized. I'll leave you to draw your own conclusions as to how much we're genuinely willing to even consider entertaining the remote possibility of sacrificing from our own lives.

i upvote you because i agree with you.

5 year Oxford Ûni study concludes not supporting the meat & dairy industry is the single best thing an individual can do

https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families...

Well, to a degree, that's precisely right. Only a massive movement will fix this systemic problem. Throwing out plastic bottles won't fix the problem, although I wish it would.

A movement starts with a small number of people who believe in it. If an article convinced me to change something in my daily life, I'd probably tell other people to change it too.

Better than an article that leaves me with no action points.

Why not money? In a capitalist society, it's the one thing that really counts. Money represents resource allocation.

Trying to solve the problem by changing your own behavior, and only your own behavior, is low-order thinking. The real problem is that the cheapest behaviors are not also the most eco-friendly behaviors. Sure, you personally might be able to afford to (for example) pay more for glass containers, mentally chalking up the difference as an unaccounted externality in plastic bottles. But until that difference is accounted in the price, society's behavior will not change.

If you really want to solve the problem properly, it's better to spend your money on things that will change everyone's behavior, not just your own. That means things like lobbyists and scientific research. It's less personally satisfying but more effective.

Not everyone has money to give.

Not everyone has the freedom to make arbitrary lifestyle changes either, if they don't make economic sense. This isn't about only taking action that's available to everyone. It's about each of us doing all that we can.

Forgive me if I misread, but you seemed to exclude monetary contribution as an option on principle, not out of poverty. What principle?

I'm always left wondering what every person regardless of socio-economic standing can do to contribute.

There's going on 8 billion people in the world. Whatever little things you do to make yourself feel better and shed the guilt they created in your mind isn't going to fix or slow down anything.

This is what they want to do--program your head so that you will accept a more totalitarian form of permanent global government that you can't question because it is all based on an un-provable environmental need. It is a brilliant tactic, to be sure. Every solution I have seen for this includes some kind of neo-serfdom where I have no rights. If I were in charge I would take every leftist and globalist I could find and hang them from the nearest lamp post. That would be a very carbon-neutral solution not only to overpopulation but also to the mind plague that dreams this crap up.

Also, hasn't the earth been warming since the last ice age 10,000 years ago? It is disingenuous to start graphs in the 1880s and then blame human industrialization. Oh hey, didn't Marxism also get started in the 1880s? Maybe Marxism caused global warming?

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