Unprecedented North Pole Heat Wave in Progress | Hacker News Reader

Unprecedented North Pole Heat Wave in Progress

cbc.ca

81 pointscf100clunk14 comments

One of the many unknown and unforseeable ways in which the climate crisis might play out is that different countries have different imperatives.

As temperatures rise, countries like Russia might well be net winners, as their frozen lands thaw out and become viable for agriculture.

When/if carbon capture becomes a reality, we'll have something of a global thermostat. What sort of wars will ensue to decide who gets to tweak the thermostat and whether it is turned up or down?

Are there any soil biologists around on who can comment on the viability of this? Because as far as I understand, the land under permafrost in Russia is pretty much tundra and in Greenland, it's gravel. So it would take centuries to make it tillable compared to the timescale of decades we have before current breadbaskets lose the production capacity.

I would also like to hear from biologists or and agricultural scientists. Beneath the frozen tundra, there's vast reserves of natural gas and other fossil fuels, does this indicate that the soil has a lot of nutrients? If animals dies to become fossils, does it indicate lots of animals died there to fertilize the earth?

>The average July high for Alert is 7 C.

...and...

>Environment Canada says Canadian Forces Station Alert hit a record of 21 C on Sunday.

If we're talking about the same exact region, those are drastically differing numbers, indeed.

Stupid question: Would it be a run-away greenhouse[0] type of situation that would explain the starkly contrasting differences?

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runaway_greenhouse_effect

Runaway greenhouse effect on Earth is impossible for a billion years or more for a variety of reasons. You're looking for doomsday cult nonsense rather than minor/major climate changes that are more nuanced and more probable.

You're right in that our atmosphere will not soon "prevent the planet from cooling and from having liquid water on its surface." In other words, yeah, we aren't going to literally boil the oceans. We shouldn't throw around the term "runaway greenhouse" in serious discussions of anthropogenic global warming.

However, reality is somewhere between "doomsday cult nonsense" and the flippant, dismissive tone of your comment that characterizes the worsening climate crisis about which our species is not doing enough as "minor/major climate changes." That's definitely understating the costs and disruptions that human civilization is facing on its current course.

I wonder if OP was referring to any of the more immediately concerning positive feedback loops: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change_feedback#Positi...

>I wonder if OP was referring to any of the more immediately concerning positive feedback loops

Yeah, that's why I prefaced it with it being a dumb question. :)

If the feed backs are accelerating global warming, it wouldn't be too distant a notion from the premise of runaway greenhouse gases.

I'll have to brush-up on my nomenclature to not ask such bone-headed questions in the future. :(

Runaway greenhouse effects are global, not local. It would be caused by a self-reinforcing feedback where the warming releases more CO2, but that would quickly spread over the entire planet.

There are lots of possible causes for the extra warming in the Arctic in particular, but the high-level view is that ice is more reflective than water, so the increased area of water surface absorbs more heat. There's going to be a lot more to it than that, from the way water and air flow within and around nearby regions, but it was expected that the Arctic would warm faster than the rest of the planet.

Sounds like it's time to start planting trees up there. Greenland is going to be green again before we get this under control.

I like your optimism. I wish I shared it.

On one hand that would help capture CO2, on the other hand the change in albedo might contribute to further temperature increase.

The North Pole doesn't have any land, and a blue water summer in the Arctic ocean is likely within 4-10 years. And, high Arctic lands also DO NOT NEED MORE TREES BECAUSE THAT WOULD HASTEN TUNDRA COLLAPSE. A Russian scientist proposed deforesting Siberia to convert it to grassland tundra using large herds of hybrid mammoth-elephants in order to eliminate trees that keep arboreal tundra from hard freezing in the winter which hastens its destruction in the summer. https://pleistocenepark.ru/

A better solution would include many overlapping approaches for a holistic strategy, including iron fertilization of the oceans and bio-energy with carbon capture and sequestration (BeCSS).

Furthermore, the best anti-desertification solutions must include extremely large, managed herds of browsing animals like goats to restore soil health. There was a TED talk on this. https://www.ted.com/talks/allan_savory_how_to_green_the_worl...

The last 2-3 weeks in South Central Alaska have been crazy hot for that region. 90F common across the area, we hit 80+F at our higher altitude cabin several days in a row. First time we ever hit 80 in the 15 years we've had it.

I hope Paul Beckwith does a video on this topic. The climate emergency is even more urgent.

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