Antarctic sea ice – rapid decreases, reduced to lowest area in 40 years
pnas.org
pnas.org
Without proper accounting, unprofitable businesses can thrive and would-be profitable businesses fail.
No economic system can sustain itself without proper accounting.
Perhaps, free market solutions a la Tesla are all we've got?
Tesla is still promoting the idea of the individual car, and that electric cars could replace the ICE car for each and every travel that it is used currently.
If Tesla is the free market solution, then be prepared to pay the bill for climate change.
Replacing ICE cars with electric cars looks like it's better than nothing, but it's only gonna promote the business-as-usual mindset.
Today, even with limited electric car adoption, our energy consumption is growing faster than the production of electricity from renewables is growing. That means more energy from fossil fuels worldwide. We need to slow down until solutions are found.
The best illustration in recent history are probably the attempts to insulate coal power from competition by renewables. Really makes you wonder if people don’t sometimes look in the mirror and wonder “wait, how did I end up here?”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Lucas_Jr.
Pseudo-market solutions do not work. They are quickly gamed by market players. It would be just a waste of precious time.
I think physicists can say they proven something but it is in principle debatable. Economy is just witchcraft in comparison - please do not give economy more credibility than it deserves.
Not even them. It only makes sense to talk about proof in formal domains such as math and logic.
Science proves nothing. It is impossible to prove that any given scientific theory will not be falsified in the future. In fact, physics was one of the main inspirations for the idea of "paradigm shift" by Thomas Kuhn in his famous work "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions".
Talking about proof in science is damaging, and it conveys the wrong idea about what science actually is.
Is there an argument against carbon tax that can't be said by any other tax?
It's also fairly difficult to move a coal mine to another country. Of course, people could import their carbon-intensive goods, but most proposals include tariffs on countries without comparable carbon fees. Tariffs like these are explicitly allowed by trade agreements.
I would rather side with Naomi Klein that capitalism proved ineffective in solving problems of this scale.
Pseudo-market solutions in healtcare (pricing procedures with ICD and allowing market participants compete) are currently proved as inefficient. Net gain for market participants but net loss for people and goverment budgets.
So my reservation is for carbon tax as gigantic wealth transfer without real benefits to climate. I am not against urgent action on climate.
But with a tax you can only evade. The income tax still raises revenue and discourages income, even though it can be evaded and often is. I think a carbon tax would similarly raise revenue and discourage carbon, while letting us cut worse taxes like the carbon tax.
And still politicians do nothing. What we need is an effort to build renewables, insulate homes, and build charging infrastructure that rivals the Apollo program, what we get are "freedom molecules" and "clean coal".
Politicians long ago forgot that their job is to instigate improvement in society, and now relegate themselves to either decrying or defending the status quo. I'm beginning to fear that the Apollo program might actually be the greatest societal effort the US will ever undertake.
Eating a plant based diet is great, but even switching to locally raised, pasture grown animals can be a positive. But ultimately pastures need to be re-wilded into natural forests. Beef needs to become an expensive luxury and not a dietary staple.
Maybe you don’t eat meat but instead buying something else which hurts climate 20 times more? Nobody knows.
Historians don't look back only a few decades. That's still politics. Sorry if that wasn't clear.
Since we're into definitional pedantry, you're incorrect anyway: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contemporary_history
Getting hit at 25mph is likely survivable if hit by a sedan (you'll land on the hood), but an SUV often flattens a person, as the force is applied to their mid to upper body rather than their legs.
Car accidents are also much more catastrophic, our current testing in the USA only tests SUVs against SUVs, sedans vs sedans in crashes, and impact absorbers on SUVs are often higher, meaning the SUV will end up atop a sedan in an accident.
These negative externalities are poorly regulated, permitting these needless deaths and injuries to occur.
GP's key point is that individual action would not be enough and you're not actually addressing that argument by just saying that not everyone wants to be political and that other choices would be nice.
https://climatechoice.co/ (plenty of small issues up for grabs https://github.com/impactmakers/climatechoice/issues)
https://fixathon.io/ (more sponsorship opportunities available, get in touch. https://bit.ly/fixathon-sponsor)
The third link is a tracker app.
Following over 3 decades of gradual but uneven increases in sea ice coverage, the yearly average Antarctic sea ice extents reached a record high of 12.8 × 106 km2 in 2014, followed by a decline so precipitous that they reached their lowest value in the 40-y 1979–2018 satellite multichannel passive-microwave record, 10.7 × 106 km2, in 2017. In contrast, it took the Arctic sea ice cover a full 3 decades to register a loss that great in yearly average ice extents. Still, when considering the 40-y record as a whole, the Antarctic sea ice continues to have a positive overall trend in yearly average ice extents, although at 11,300 ± 5,300 km2⋅y−1, this trend is only 50% of the trend for 1979–2014, before the precipitous decline.
Seems like there is a lot of extreme variance, but it's hard to imagine that the ice is going to come back quickly from such a huge and steep decline.
TLDR: He went on to say that many climate models actually predict a short-term increase in Antarctic sea ice, under conditions of global warming. He spoke of factors such as increasing fresh water and higher wind speeds that promote ice growth and expansion, and, as is clear from this year’s Antarctic sea ice maximum, these factors appear to be dominating right now.
Sounds like the trend is an increase in the overall area of ice?
> The ice covers of each of the 5 sectors of Fig. 1 and of the Southern Ocean as a whole have experienced considerable interannual variability over the past 40 y (Figs. 2–7). In fact, the Southern Ocean and 4 of the 5 sectors (all except the Ross Sea) have each experienced at least one period since 1999 when the yearly average ice extents decreased for 3 or more straight years only to rebound again afterward and eventually reach levels exceeding the extent preceding the 3 y of decreases (Figs. 2–7). This illustrates that the ice decreases since 2014 (Fig. 2) are no assurance that the 1979–2014 overall positive trend in Southern Ocean ice extents has reversed to a long-term negative trend. Only time and an extended observational record will reveal whether the small increase in yearly average ice extents from 2017 to 2018 (Fig. 2C) is a blip in a long-term downward trend or the start of a rebound.
And:
> I hope that the 40-y record discussed in this paper will encourage further studies into the atmospheric and oceanic conditions that could have led to the extremely rapid 2014–2017 decline of the Antarctic sea ice cover, the comparably rapid decline in the mid-1970s, and the uneven but overall gradual increases in Antarctic sea ice coverage in the intervening decades.
Does that mean over 40 years ago it had an even lower area or that they are at all time lows (as far as we can tell)? Could account for why my grandparents are skeptical, they're like "yeah, yeah, this has all happened before, environmental political fads come and go..."
From the article:
The one other several-year period during the time frame of modern instrumental records with an estimated loss of hemispheric sea ice coverage comparably as rapid as [the current one was] in the mid-1970s. Calculations based on a variety of datasets [..] show rates of decrease of ∼600,000 km2/y for the 4 y from the start of 1973 to the start of 1977 and for the 3-y subset from the start of 1974 to the start of 1977
The concluding remark is helpful to reproduce in full:
I hope that the 40-y record discussed in this paper will encourage further studies into the atmospheric and oceanic conditions that could have led to the extremely rapid 2014–2017 decline of the Antarctic sea ice cover, the comparably rapid decline in the mid-1970s, and the uneven but overall gradual increases in Antarctic sea ice coverage in the intervening decades. More broadly, the environmental datasets may be nearing the point where they are long enough and rich enough to enable the linking of several of the modes and dipoles and oscillations now spoken of separately, just as the El Niño and Southern Oscillation phenomena were linked together years ago as ENSO; once that further linkage happens, the understanding of Earth’s very interconnected climate system, including the sea ice cover, could be markedly enhanced.
Are we accounting for positioning and skewing of the sun (on it's natural cycle)?
So much more goes into temperature regulation than simply "carbon emissions", if we were to realistically tackle an environmental disaster I would point to the plastic waste in the ocean and the fish farms.
How society responds to ecological disasters, basically don't think the government going to tackle it, it will just ignore it.
Is there any indication what a 'tipping point' or irreversible positive feedback loop would look like once it had started? Would it resemble a graph such as in TFA? Or would perhaps not be an irreversible first swoop, so to speak, but instead oscillate deeper each time?
Unknowable and unlikely, perhaps, given that it's not happened before. But a part of me wonders what it looks like when we get to the point where the charts and graphs don't go back up again.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/may/16/thinning...