A giant heat dome over Alaska is set to threaten all-time temperature records | Hacker News Reader

A giant heat dome over Alaska is set to threaten all-time temperature records

washingtonpost.com

54 pointspseudolus27 comments

I am currently in Alaska between 2 raging fires (Swan Lake Fire, and one near Fairbanks). Temperatures in Denali Park and Anchorage peaked at 86. I casually surveyed every AK resident I met about their views on climate change and I heard several responses (clearly not scientific). Universally no one denied climate change was occurring. They enumerated examples without qualification. (Less snow, fewer bears, more fires, severe summer heat). I have no data (didn’t ask) about political persuasions. Pretty random sample since we weren’t on touristy cruises...several low paid workers and several college grads:

* “climate has been changing since the last ice age, nothing we can do about it”

* “it’s been great, we have had so much fun enjoying the lake [water sports, swimming, etc]...it’s really not anything to worry about”

* “the lower 48 just likes to get into everybody’s business”

* “sure we might be causing it but what the hell, it’s ours to use it [the planet? Resources?] while we can”

* “it hasn’t been that bad for more than a couple years so I don’t see why it won’t change back to the way it was or even better”

* “yeah it’s been bad, I’m planning to leave”

* “too many people that’s what causes it”

* “we’ll adapt”

Overall having seen AK first hand in 1982, 1992 and now, it is striking how much has changed. Huge amount of development, wildlife much more scarce, pollution EVERYWHERE.

Really quite depressing.

That said, I have to take lumps for burning fossil fuels to come here, and while driving, so I cant throw stones.

We’re so fucked and nobody is doing anything about it. We’re going backwards actually increasing emissions. even the people who most want to do things are proposing solutions that barely make a dent in the problem. We need to impose draconian carbon taxes worldwide immediately if we want to have any hope of stopping this.

You're basically saying we should impose a massive global economic punch in the face, which is just never going to happen. That's the issue with climate change - making any kind of real impact requires a large, sustained, and global effort from governments on a scale that I don't think has ever happened in human history. In my opinion, it's far too late for prevention and the real tragedy is that we aren't spending more time and resources on looking at ways to counteract climate change. By the time things get really bad and people are starving from mass crop failures, we won't have the technology and/or knowledge of downstream impacts to be able to possibly fix things.

A punch in the face compared to the bloody good and relentless kicking climate change will deliver economically, dragging back progress for decades or centuries. I know which I think is likely to be cheaper, and better for the economy.

At least a carbon tax can be used to mitigate the effects on the most vulnerable and poorest, and used to create solutions and alternatives to emissions. Extreme events, or food shortages wont give that luxury.

Ask 10 of your friends if they wouldn’t mind losing their job, while you kept yours, while simultaneously fixing the climate problem for the foreseeable future. Your friends won’t know when they will get a job in the foreseeable future.

Now do you understand why no one wants to get punched in the face?

That's the untreated climate change disaster scenario you describe.

A carbon tax might at worst case take some jobs, but aside from in oil industries needn't take any. Yet will generate nearly as many jobs elsewhere as the proceeds are spent on projects to avoid climate impacts.

So no, I don't understand why someone would reject the far easier route.

It's entirely possible (and also desirable) to make pollution taxes such as a carbon tax revenue neutral i.e. other taxes are lowered to balance the new pollution tax. And because pollution is a marker of inefficiency, pollution taxes serve to increase productivity where other taxes can inhibit it.

> pollution is a marker of inefficiency

This is not always true. If your measure of efficiency is "total goods output value per year divided by capital invested", there are plenty of Maxima which also produce lots of pollution.

Actively kill 12 million people and you're villified for centuries to come. Kill 3 billion people by inaction, and 'meh'.

I realize it’s not going to happen. Any solution that can actually accomplish anything is going to cause tremendous economic hardship.

I should have heard this already, but why exactly would there be "crop failures" rather than "massive increases in agricultural production" which would seem to be the actual effect of warmth and more C02?

Water availability and weather events damaging crops I think are the big dangers.

Greater variation in weather events isn't good for agriculture in either direction. Flooding at one end (like the midwest US got hit with badly this year), or drought at the other. In between there's the increased occurrence of sudden events like hailstorms, wildfires.

Areas with good aquifers presently find themselves with a decent buffer against drought, but there's a worldwide phenomenon of aquifer consumers overdrawing and proving unable to properly regulate sustainable access to those, let alone factoring in the changing supply rate to said aquifers. E.g, if your aquifers are snow-fed, but the winter snowfall is gradually waning up in the mountains, then what used to be sustainable could "suddenly" run dry. The Yemen water crisis is a good example of this (aided by overconsumption for growing khat), but we've seen the same coordinated action problems even in wealthy democracies like California.

There's also other risks from heat stress (some crops affected by this more than others), and also secondary risks, e.g a lot of these same stresses (plus all the other stresses of modernity) on pollinators like bees.

more plant mass isn't necessarily better if it's not as nutritious.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/23/climate/rice-global-warmi...

There will be crop failures in some places and increases in others.

how viable do you think that solution is, politically and economically? honestly geo engineering seems way way more promising

Pinning hopes on a technological hail-mary assumes the political, economic, social and technological structures that we have built up to today will continue to be available at the time 'we' decide to put serious effort into a solution.

That's a big assumption, given the impact/disruption climate change is projected to bring (and, arguable, that we're already seeing the early stages of).

The only hope of stopping this is drastically reducing the world’s population. The problem will solve itself. Only question is when and to some extent, how.

I think most people realize this and just choose to ignore it. Make believe that recycling or buying a Tesla or writing a politician makes a lick of difference. But the reality is that simply existing in the modern world is the problem. We just like it too much to change.

Oh well. Hopefully things don’t go fully dystopian until 30-40 years from now and I’m dead.

Edit: Can someone who’s downvoting me prove me wrong? Do you honestly think everyone’s just going to be like, “Yep, this life I’ve become accustomed to, I’ll just give it up without a complaint.” I mean what planet are you living on lol.

> We just like it too much to change.

Little changes are already being accepted by people. "You can't just throw all the trash into the trash. You need to wash and separate the recyclables".

While it might be misguided, it shows that people are happy to take a small hit to their lifestyle because the government tells them it's necessary for the environment.

Decreasing population in its own won’t do it. A lot of the bad stuff will happen for millennia whether we are here or not.

We need to get net negative.

“You must be the change you want to see in the world.” --Gandhi.

I said the other day that it's time to stop having conversations with climate denialists.

By denialist, I mean someone whose goal is is the establishment of a counter-narrative to the mainstream view of the causes, risks, and imminence of global climate change. Some argue that such discrimination will hinder sincere skepticism and innocent inquiry, but neither scenario seems likely to me.

Sincere skepticism is easy: simply respect the standards of the discipline, by arguing 'I disbelieve [scope of disputed phenomenon] for [reasons], which I have detailed in article at [journal or preprint]' and exhibiting a baseline level of respect and the same sort of good faith assumptions about others that one hopes to receive for oneself.

Likewise, sincere inquiry can proceed along lines like 'I don't understand [phenomenon], can you explain as I were in [grade/ college/ graduate school]' and a similar baseline level of respect for others' time and knowledge in assisting.

Insincere disputation is often characterized by disrespect for others' time or intelligence. Temporal disrespect most commonly manifests as endless questions, especially naive or simplistic seeming ones that become more and more technical while critiquing unwanted replies as unsatisfactory - a simple but effective strategy for manipulating a conversation by faking superiority. The lazier version of this is to simply abuse people by deriding their claims as hoaxes. Attacking the claimant proceeds by discounting their intelligence, integrity, or sanity without any basis in fact.

Of course, such 'critiques' are rarely persuasive to the target person, or to other participants in the discussion. They are not meant to persuade, but are a performative display designed to swindle the gullible, cause despondency in the frustrated, and humiliate the target for the amusement of sadists. Negatives reactions are equated to negative evidence and most if not all of the argumentation involves drawing logical conclusions from an invalid major premises which are usually epistemological nitpicks.

tl;dr it's not that hard to express or detect genuine doubt, curiosity, or confusion - nor bad-faith efforts to derail discussion.

> Likewise, sincere inquiry can proceed along lines like 'I don't understand [phenomenon], can you explain as I were in [grade/ college/ graduate school]' and a similar baseline level of respect for others' time and knowledge in assisting.

Sincere inquiry is fantastic, but "skeptics" pretty much always phrase there objections as inquiry, 90% of the time you hear something like "how do we know it's caused by the sun?" it's a leading question from a "skeptic" firmly in the denialist camp, online it will often be by paid astro turfers (which I suspect the only other reply to you is at the time of writing this, a new account created to comment on climate change). This ruins the discussion for any sincere skeptics.

My main concern is that global climate change will be the excuse the world governments need to increase their power over us.

Governments the world over are responsible for the most horrific of crimes against humanity, it is time for us to find and exercise a new model of governance.

There's no alternative to control. If you don't have a government, you have a local band of thugs running things, or you have a good thing for a little while (as in the Spanish Republic) until it gets crushed by fascists on one side and Stalinists on the other. You can have limited government, but it can't be so limited that cannot achieve the goal of stabilizing the climate. Your new model has to get the job done; if not, then half the planet becomes uninhabitable and billions have to move, resulting in wars like we've never seen.

Cooperative arrangements are great when they work, but too many human beings are assholes.

I cannot read the article. Is there a non-paywalled version?

https://archive.fo/9sNgA

or use https://outline.com/

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