Russia’s permafrost is melting and it could have a devastating global effect | Hacker News Reader

Russia’s permafrost is melting and it could have a devastating global effect

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Don't think it's isolated to Russia either.

Alaska just reported their hottest June ever (It's in the 90's in a lot of places now), and the Yukon is seeing massive, massive climate changes in recent years.

The annual Redezvous festival used to be held ON the Yukon River in downtown Whitehorse. Friends tell of driving onto the river, having huge bonfires, etc. etc.

It hasn't even frozen over enough to walk on in a decade or more, and now it actually goes above freezing in January most years..... even 20 years ago it wouldn't go above -40 for all of Dec/Jan.

Things are changing very, very fast in the North.

So, winter is not coming?

No. Cormac McCarthy's Road, or William Gibson's Jackpot, is coming.

The Road was implied to be a comet or maybe nukes.

This will look more like Paolo Bacigalupi's "The Windup Girl".

Yep. It's happening here in Canada too.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/permafrost-melting-1.5119...

The climate has changed rapidly in the Yukon (see below), but I am wondering if you could provide a (scientific) source for your claims? Especially:

> even 20 years ago it wouldn't go above -40 for all of Dec/Jan.

This seems to be contradicted by [1].

Climate has changed dramatically in the Yukon, see Fig. 5 in [2] (open access). The average temperature in the Yukon has increased by >2 deg C since 1900 AD and >1 deg C relative to the 20th century average.

[1] https://www.currentresults.com/Weather/Canada/Yukon/temperat...

[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-09622-y

We need coordinated, urgent political action on climate change. We already have the technology needed to solve this - we just need to deploy it. Now.

You could start calling it global warming. Climate change was brought forward as a term to make it sound less frightening to the voting population.

I thought climate change was preferred as being more accurate than global warming, since not all regions will be warmer, some will actually become colder as things like the jet stream evolve.

Global warming is accurate, the problem is people confuse weather with climate.

A global warming trend means more energy in the atmosphere, which in turn leads to higher weather variability, bigger storms etc. It doesn't mean everywhere on the planet will get a higher (pick your temperature statistic).

Average people don't understand local variability or averages. They hear "global warming" and think that means every place must be hot at once. There's the stellar example of a congress critter bringing a snowball in and claiming that disproved global warming. Now, climate chaos or something like that might be a better way to convey what's in store. Average people need to understand it better as simply energy added to a system making it increasingly unstable and unpredictable.

Correct – more effective terms are climate crisis, climate chaos, climate emergency.

> You could start calling it global warming.

Except that the planet has been warming and cooling for millions of years.

To put into perspective:

Age of Earth: 4.6 billion years

How long Dinosaurs lived: 400 million years

Age of humans: 200,000 years.

The human species is literally less than a blip on the earth's historical radar. I'm convinced whatever we do to the planet, it will recover, like it always has. Humans not adapting? That's the real problem.

This sort of perspective, while true, doesn't seem very germane to the conversation of our current, rapid, and human caused climate change. We collectively will have to deal with that (or die out, I suppose) and understanding it and how to mitigate effects seems to be the sensible response.

Understanding that the planet, if not the current biological configuration, is likely to be around much longer that we are doesn't seem to add much; at least to me.

Then what name would you suggest?

> Except that the planet has been warming and cooling for millions of years.

This does not invalidate calling it "global warming". Just because it's happened before doesn't mean it's not happening now. When you hit the gas, do you restrict yourself from saying that the car's speed is increasing just because it's increased before?

That particular ship, and the inherent confusion caused by people not understanding that weather isn't climate, has long sailed.

Recently people have been suggesting "climate crisis" which isn't going to help on the "less frightening" aspect, but I think that's a feature.

The Guardian’s current styleguide suggests “global heating” instead of “global warming”, and “climate emergency” to replace “climate change”.

I think more semantic arguments only detract from action at this point. It's already an "emergency" according to a number of official organizations.

Showing more physical evidence and pushing developed plans is the only way forward I can see.

How concepts are communicated matters a great deal, because one of the primary obstacles is simply lack of awareness and education about the graveness of the threat facing humanity. We have decades worth of very good physical evidence that hasn't changed much yet on its own. Disinformation tactics have been very effective so far. I'm sure people will start paying attention more when the northern ice cap goes away (though since we live in an age where flat earth theories are gaining followers, it's easy to dismiss anything as fake for some conspiracy nuts). However, waiting at all for more dramatic physical manifestations is far too long. There are also many solid plans being worked on that simply need money and support. So again, what matters is how the concepts are conveyed to the lay public. Politicians are not going to fix this until they're afraid of losing elections over it. And even then it's more likely that they'll make token gestures such as declaring emergencies without making any real, drastic changes.

I always thought that "climate change" was coined to be harder to dispute for laypeople. A global warming denier can point to a chilly day, or a day of snow, and say "some global warming, huh?" because they are ignorant of the concept of global average temperature. Much harder when the it's phrased as climate change — snow certainly isn't warm, but can one really argue that it is a counterargument to the existence of change?

Maybe climate war? That should start a fight and open pockets..

Sadly half kidding..

Climate apocalypse.

This is true, the problem is people are trying to co-opt the urgency of the problem to funnel in unrelated agendas. Saikat Chakrabarti for example, in an article published in the Washington Post said that the Green New Deal was about redesigning the economy.

From https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/magazine/wp/2019/07/10/f...:

"Chakrabarti had an unexpected disclosure. “The interesting thing about the Green New Deal,” he said, “is it wasn’t originally a climate thing at all.”

EDIT: for those downvoting me. Please feel free to leave a comment. Am I wrong to believe that we should concentrate on the main issue?

The economy is inseparable from the climate issue. The way humanity conducts itself economically greatly determines the scale of emissions we produce through energy use, agriculture, concrete production, land use, etc. There is no way to maintain indefinite growth to sustain such an economy on a finite planet. We overproduce and inefficiently distribute or waste goods. All of that energy consumes fossil fuels. There's no way to address the climate issue adequately without also addressing economic incentives, short of us stumbling on some magical technology that allows massive net negative carbon capture from the atmosphere. Nothing like that exists, and we're far past the point where planting trees will make that math work out. Just asking everyone nicely to please consume less, or pleading with the fossil fuel industry to please stop pumping disinformation out in order to continue reaping profit, is not going to cut it. This economic engine still runs on oil and we need a new one very quickly. The excess that flows as wealth mainly and increasingly to those who already have far too much is brought about by cheap energy, labor, and automation. That party is about to end, both due to increasing cost of fossil fuel extraction and the climate turning hostile.

what technology is that, exactly? genuinely curious as the way you've framed the issue is that the only thing holding us back is unleash the war machine type setup where we have tons of e.g. solar panels and batteries at the ready, just waiting to be deployed.

assuming it's not ready in the necessary quantities, the amount of carbon needed to produce and deploy it means that there's /necessarily/ an increase in carbon output required to produce and deploy said tech, not to mention environmental ruin e.g. mass cobalt/lithium/etc. production.

the only real alternative that i see is decimating current consumption levels. there doesn't seem to be any real willingness to talk about the necessary uncomfortableness people will have to go through in order to do that yet, though - people's mindsets seem to be stuck on growing or teching our way out.

Nuclear and some Geo engineering presumably.

It's quite possible that we have already passed the threshold for triggering feedbacks that make cutting consumption insufficient to ward off cataclysm. The permafrost is one, among many others that we're still discovering. Even if industrial civilization stopped on a dime today, it's quite possible that we've already initiated a runaway hothouse scenario. That only becomes more likely the more we emit. Technology will be necessary to mitigate and adapt, and so switching our energy systems to carbon neutral is the first of many steps. Consumption will also have to come down, but I don't imagine many places will manage to do it voluntarily. Perhaps some more pro-social, community oriented countries will do so, but the more hyper-capitalist, individualist countries will likely fight tooth and nail to continue consuming until nature forces an end to it. Classic tragedy of the commons, except the commons is our only known habitable biosphere.

What tech?

It is having a devastating effect.

June was the hottest month recorded in human history: https://weather.com/en-IN/india/news/news/2019-07-16-earth-e...

It crushed the record and July is tracking to break that record.

There's not a socially acceptable way of conveying how bad it is. Running around and screaming "we're all going to die" is more accurate that saying things will be fine.

It hasn't been this hot since 1880, per that article.

The article says it’s never been this hot since 1880, which I believe is when they started recording this data - it didn’t mention it was this hot then.

Do you have additional info to claim it was this temp in 1880?

They didn't have records before 1880 according to the article. So, it could have been warmer, but there is no record of it.

There have been many reconstructions of global temperatures before 1880 using a variety of temperature proxies. A nice summary in one image is given on Wikipedia [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleoclimatology#/media/File:A...

They also mix proxies but superimpose temperature records from the last 150 years. A better curve would be using one set of proxy data to maintain consistency.

Global leadership - 2016-present

Crushing it

Please don't post unsubstantive comments here.

> There's not a socially acceptable way of conveying how bad it is. Running around and screaming "we're all going to die" is more accurate that saying things will be fine.

But what solutions are you proposing? Can we afford them, without having to change any of our laws, or our lifestyles one whit? Are they going to raise cost of living for the poor, or reduce economic growth? /snark

Appreciate the /snark. It's tragic how common that viewpoint is.

I mentioned this in another comment, but it's striking how much this resembles all of Earth collectively going through various stages of the Kubler-Ross model of grief. I feel like those types of responses fall between denial and bargaining. Fair number of people still in denial/anger stages.

>But what solutions are you proposing? Can we afford them, without having to change any of our laws, or our lifestyles one whit?

No, but without too much inconvenience we can outlaw cattle ranching. Cattle are nowhere near a natural species at this point from millenia of animal husbandry and there are 1.3-1.5 billion alive at any given moment. Under extremely ideal conditions you need 1.5 acres (in other parts of the world you need tens of acres) to feed one cow for 12 months. Imagine if we let even 2 billion acres go wild in the next 2 years (it takes 18 months~ to get a cow to slaughter weight), imagine how much water that saves from land that has to be irrigated, imagine what happens if you start letting grasslands reclaim much of that land.

Better, outlaw cattle for beef. Only allow dairy cows to remain, that leaves you 250-300 cattle. Now require those to be pasture fed in months that they can be. This allows them to not only be healthier but to work their own manure back into the soil which will improve the soil quality if they are rotated from field to field. In some places you simply return it to the natural grasslands, in others you actually start replanting forests that were cut decades or centuries ago to use for farmland. Simply removing a BILLION cows makes an immediate impact over 18 months. Some of the land you still have to use for growing crops for feeding humans but only a fraction. The rest can be well on it way to restoration in 1-2 years.

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Also tackle zoning/city planning. Set up rules for new construction where commercial and retail is evenly distributed throughout residential, with solid grid roads with dedicated bike and walking paths.

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Then place quite high tariffs on fruits and vegetables to reduce out of season consumption considerably. At one point oranges in the United States, outside of states like Florida, were a special treat you got once a year if your family had some money to throw around - now you can go to the grocery and get oranges, bananas, dragon fruit, tomatoes, peppers, pineapple and coffee beans like you're some kind of Mansa Musa-rich ruler.. Most of the produce you see in stores, most of the year, comes from another country, a notable percentage of the time from another continent. Not only does this result in massive amounts of waste/spoilage, it requires massive amounts of fossil fuels for ships, trains and truck not to mention regional and local warehouses to store the stuff for days at a time before moving to retail outlets. If you buy a piece of fruit, especially one not native to the United States, at the grocery it might have been handled by a dozen people, been in a ship then on a train then on a truck, and traveled thousands of miles (in fact, the average American meal is estimated to have travelled 1500 miles to get to a plate [1]).

[1] https://cuesa.org/learn/how-far-does-your-food-travel-get-yo...

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These are three fairly simple things to implement. Will you be eating grapes in the winter in Arizona? Probably not. Will people miss hamburgers (I sure as hell will, but chicken sandwiches are good and chicken is an order of magnitude better as far as greenhouse emissions goes per pound of meat).

Or we can watch city after city in India and Africa, millions upon millions of people, go without water and say "oh how unfortunate, not my problem" and wake up one day, go to the tap to get a glass of water, only to hear some sputtering only to find, there's no water.

We can wait until we go to the grocery and corn is 5$ a cob and looks pathetic, until pork butt is 37$ a pound because the grain crops largely failed from drought or excessive rain cough which we've seen a taste of this year with the rains, there's corn knee high by my home that should already be tasseled cough or until we're paying 100$ for a 20lb bag of black beans, thinking how lucky we were to find them because Dave on Facebook just posted a picture of his grocery selling them for 110$.

edit: oh look, within 3 minutes of posting this someone went through and down voted my last few comments, in different threads.

So I’m 100% in favor of urgent and strong action on climate change. Reducing impact of cattle ranching, improving urban planning, and encouraging local food consumption are all great medium-to-long time horizon goals.

But: 1) It’s not enough. The methane and CO2 from extraneous transportation only accounts for some portion of the GHG problem. 2) Restricting peoples’ access to food (up to and including outright banning major classes of food) is an extreme solution that is sure to be extremely unpopular, correspondingly. And environmental economic theory strong suggests that command and control style policies are less efficient than market-based solutions (e.g. cap and trade, carbon tax and dividend), which also have the effect of catalyzing innovation and long-term change via the price signal. But, I do think coal fired power plants are worth a ban and rapid decommissioning. 3. That said, I also think we’re beyond the market-based solutions that economists and technocrats (like me!) approve of. I’m in favor of wartime-scale and worldwide production of renewable energy infrastructure + decarbonization efforts (including reforestation and other forms of carton capture), worldwide. Ideally, with the US leading the way, given that we are responsible for a plurality of the cumulative emissions since the industrial revolution. This also means supporting sustainable development where appropriate.

People of every political stripe hate draconian bans and love building stuff. It would be something amazing to look back on if we really went all-in and mobilized a rapid decarbonization/greening of the planet. Either way, it’s our generation’s grand challenge.

>But: 1) It’s not enough.

Obviously, the cattle methane impact is roughly 1/20th as bad as our CO2 emissions depending on cattle diet and then fudging some in for refrigeration and transportation probably double it, although that is part of the known CO2 emissions already.

But they're relatively painless massive changes that can be sold to the unbelieving masses.

Go talk to some random people at your work, or on your facebook friends list. Most will probably think global warming is fake, is a politics thing, that there's no evidence "of course it's the warmest June in recorded history, we've only been recording with good instruments for a few decades" "it's cyclical" "It's just part of the sun's cycle, it'll cool back down" "it was much warmer for the dinosaurs and they did fine" are actual answers you are likely to hear.

We can start doing something or we can keep going "it's not enough, we can't, not enough, not feasible, not enough money, too expensive, won't scale". Anything we do to slow it, buys us a little more time for some revolutionary/miraculous tech breakthrough.

I even believe in ten years the world will be completely different.

When a country like India lacks drinking water a huge mass of people will be on the move.

In Europe food production is in trouble. This will also cause a lot of trouble and people will start to move to better places.

Maybe we will survive but that's indeed different from 'we will be fine'.

It's hard to imagine an orderly retreat to more habital climates for that number of people. I think you underestimate the synergy between war, famine, and disease.

In this case the "royal we" is hiding a lot of death. I'm sure even in a 5 deg C worst case model maybe a couple of hundred million people can survive by the poles. But that means 90-95% population die-off. That's ignoring trophic web collapses and ecological damage to the world that human beings have adapted to for hundreds of thousands of years.

IIRC "worst case scenario"s are more like an 8C Eocene-like equilibrium

I think the previous poster is being charitably vague, so that the reader can substitute in their own interpretation whether resulting pressures on people will result in orderly migration, displacement, or warfare. If history is any indication, the answer likely to be a mix of the above.

But their interpretation shows a more nuanced understanding than those who seem to suggest masses of people will die in situ, or driven to the fringes of the planet to seek relief from the heat. People and societies are quite adaptable, provided they have the means to modify their immediate environment. Billions of people live in states that will likely fare all right, because they can mitigate impacts with modest effort and resource cost, despite the presence of political movements that are fixated with collective guilt.

The other billions who are less fortunate will be subject to intense pressures for their survival. We've seen this before, and should know what to expect. It's just that we're uncomfortable talking about it.

Buy real estate in the northern regions. Make bank in 50 years (assuming you can whether the riots and uprisings).

s/whether/weather

>When a country like India lacks drinking water a huge mass of people will be on the move.

Not just India,"Two million in Zimbabwe’s capital have no water as city turns off taps" https://www.climatechangenews.com/2019/07/15/two-million-zim...

Reading that article leaves me with the impression that a major component of their problem is substantially polluted water sources, which I don't think we can blame on climate change.

It mentions drought in the second line (the quote just above the photo) and failed rains on down a bit:

>Zimbabwe is getting warmer as the climate changes and heavy rains and droughts are becoming more intense.

Which apparently wouldn't be such a crisis if their other abundant water sources weren't too polluted to use, based on what I read in the article.

Two sides of the same coin. Those who are opposed to clean air standards are also opposed to clean water standards.

> Harare obtains raw water from four dams: Harava, Seke, Chivero and Manyame. Harava and Seke are completely dry. This has led Harare city council to decommission the Prince Edward water treatment plant, which is fed by those dams.

> This has left only one water treatment works – Morton Jaffray – supplying water to Harare and the four other satellite towns.

> The dams that feed Morton Jaffray – Chivero and Manyame – are larger and closer to capacity, said Harare mayor Herbert Gomba. But they are “heavily polluted”, requiring more than 10 chemicals to purify. Upstream towns dump domestic, sewage, agricultural and mining waste into the rivers that feed the capital’s dams. The city is spending $3 million a month on water treatment chemicals, Gomba said, forcing it to restrict the amount released.

50% of their dams are dry, and 1/4 of their dams are heavily polluted. It's disingenuous to say that pollution is their main problem when 1/2 of their water just evaporated. Nor is there any reason to think that their needs would be met by that 1 dam being non-polluted -- that may make it a lesser crisis, but it's still a crisis, caused by climate change.

> When a country like India lacks drinking water a huge mass of people will be on the move.

Its my understanding Pepsi and Coca Cola have been an economic boon for the country, but in the process, monopolizes a large quantity of the water supply.

Maybe doing away with these two companies might be a positive first start?

https://www.thoughtco.com/coca-cola-groundwater-depletion-in...

This last June was the hottest month of June in recorded history, not the hottest month in recorded history. Click on "Global Monthly Mean Surface Temperature Change" to see how it fits in a graph of monthly land and ocean temperatures: https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs_v4/

You are absolutely correct, and I wrote it wrong. Thank you.

That said, it's horrible. Not even a strong El Nino year.

> June was the hottest month recorded in human history: https://weather.com/en-IN/india/news/news/2019-07-16-earth-e...

No it was not - it was the hottest JUNE on record. Not the hottest MONTH. Your source even says so.

This is very serious. Errors like this make it easier for denialists to find a technical issue and then disregard the entire message.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20453568

That being said, "Errors like this make it easier for denialists to find a technical issue and then disregard the entire message" ... it is better to entirely write them off at this point. It has been decades of proven predictions. There is no standard of proof that will change minds.

The point isn't to change the minds of the denialists. It's to create an environment in which there is no argument by which someone may be convinced to join them. And that doesn't mean "outlaw the arguments" or anything counterproductive like that! It means to counter all of the arguments individually.

"This could increase global warming by as much as 0.27 °C by 2100 and as much as 0.42 °C by 2300"

The downvotes are unjustified, this is a literal quote from the headline article.

It doesn't tell us how bad this is however. And it is bad: https://xkcd.com/1732/

I understand that from a variety of factors including greenhouse gas concentration, albedo, and solar intensity you can, in principal, compute the earth's atmosphere's equilibrium mean temperature.

I understand this function to be such that any doubling of the atmosphere's CO2 concentration (while holding the other factors constant) will increase the equilibrium temperature by the same fixed number of degrees.

One thing I know nothing about is how to expect the earth's actual temperature to change over time when there is a difference between actual and equilibrium temperatures.

Suppose A(t) is the earth's actual temp at time t and E(t) is the earth's equilibrium temp at time t.

   Presumably, dA/dt = F(A,E), for some function F.

Is anyone here physics-savvy enough to know what F looks like?

Well.. it is complicated. Depending on what exactly you want to know, you could look into the concept of "Transient Climate Response" (e.g. start at [1]).

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/nature08047

Does it really matter anymore? Not to sound too fatalistic, but are people going to change? Unless people's houses are catching fire and there are food shortages in industrialized countries, there is going to be little or no change.

Yeah, I don't think so either, I already basically accepted the fate and thinking about buying a home (even though it doesn't make sense) and enjoy the last years on it... Until credits doesn't matter anymore..

probably not, but they might change their point of view enough to influence elections, or personal/community behavior, or whatever else. while it might be inevitable there could be a huge difference in outcomes, e.g. btwn 2c and 5c or whatever your worst case is.

so, while i agree to some extent, the more people that mobilize and e.g. influence the next round of policies/politicians, perhaps suffering can be reduced, however slightly you think that is.

1) I'm sure climate change models took this into account but is it worse than predicted ?

2) And if it releases land and resources.. how happy will Russia to increase their economy through uses of gas/oil ? (not helping permafrost)

"We see places in Northern Europe, Russia as you say, Northern and Central Eurasia and Canada. These are the types of countries that could actually benefit from some amount of warming in terms of sort of increasing economic growth and economic productivity. " https://www.climateone.org/audio/climate-winners-and-losers

IIRC CMIP5 models(used for IPCC AR5 2014) did not account for permafrost melt or changes in soil chemistry. Shortly after AR5 was released I remember reading an article or two describing how these exclusions resulted in under-predicting climate change. There were three emissions scenarios under CMIP5, and we are surpassing the worst. Put that in your pipe...

Permafrost melting doesn't really release land and resources; the main resources were actively mined there while it was permafrost and if it's frozen for part of the year and not frozen for a few months then it doesn't make mining significantly simpler.

if anything, it destroys the existing infrastructure there which often (especially for transport and pipeline paths) relies on the permafrost as a permanent solid foundation.

Ok, so the main issue would be potential greenhouse gas release from melting ?

Yes, it's an additional feedback loop - more warming melts more permafrost, releasing more methane that causes more warming. Due to this stopping/slowing climate change is going to be more difficult.

Russia is eagerly waiting for the day the north sea passage opens. They welcome this with open arms.

Putin did shit-talk renewable energy recently. I'm sure he's happy with all the gas that's being burned. The time when Russia runs out of gas won't be his problem.

There's also the methane hydrate just under the seabed of the continental margins of the world's oceans. A rise in water temperature may destabilise large quantities, releasing huge amounts of methane, accelerating climate change further.

https://worldoceanreview.com/en/wor-1/ocean-chemistry/climat...

Anyone working in the computer and software (or any high-tech) industry should be worried about global warming. Even if society collapses, you will have certain needs like food, clothing, etc. However, high technology requires a highly organized civilization to exist and develop.

Global warming is a risk to organized human life and it's possible we won't be doing anything related to computers in 20-30 years. It's not crazy to think people will collectively lose the ability to make microchips and computers. Progress and technological development cannot be taken for granted and requires the right conditions to function.

Global warming is an existential risk to our industry!

Where do you people get these ideas?

Take HN threads further into flamewar will get you banned. Please review the site guidelines and don't do this here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I am a farmer, was a net admin earlier in life but from what I have seen and heard myself and talking to my tribe from up north climate change is a natural event and there is nothing we can do to stop things like Earth's axis slightly changing making the sun way hotter. People that want to fight climate change should start in the cites with smog it is man made, it changes the climate in a localized area, it kills, and you can do something about it. Yet I never see these Climate change fighters completely giving up smog making devices.

You do tell them the sun isn't getting hotter right? Have you seen this? https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2015-whats-warming-the-wo...

I'm partial to this graphic... puts things in perspective and puts paid to the notion that what's happening now resembles natural climate fluctuations.

https://xkcd.com/1732/

> puts paid

I think you're being downvoted because of a typo.

I think people don't understand English.

The graphic makes it very clear that what is happening now is very different in velocity and scale from historic climate swings. In other words, the climate change we're currently observing is man-made.

It's not a typo, but a common English phrase.

https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/put-pai...

I don't think it's exactly common - at least not when compared to the usage of other idioms using Google search.

There's also not a single match for that phrase in my entire ebook library...

Idioms like "as it stands" and "at the best of times" see like 50 times more usage. Those are common.

You learn something new every day though! Now I can use it too and add to the pile of people googling for that phrase's meaning that show up on Google Trends.

> I am a farmer, was a net admin earlier in life but from what I have seen and heard myself and talking to my tribe from up north climate change is a natural event and there is nothing we can do to stop things like Earth's axis slightly changing making the sun way hotter.

Oh, well. That settles it! I guess the climate scientists who have been researching this for half a century should go find other jobs.

Electric cars have no direct smog production.

They do tend to emit disproportionally high smug levels though.

It's just passing the buck to the companies providing the electricity so the consumer can pat themselves on the back and order vanity plates that say "0 MPG" and "OIL HAHA".

This is not a good take, especially given the steady improvement in both cost-efficiency and the availability of renewable energy.

As an example: my girlfriend and I are putting enough solar on the roof to give us the headroom to charge an electric car, when it's time to switch.

and NOC024U https://www.flickr.com/photos/denisgobo/48075951728/in/photo...

They get 120 mpg equivalent, the battery metals are recyclable in a closed loop, and they can be powered by renewable energy.

It’s passing the buck to companies that do a pretty good job avoiding smog and produce a lot of electricity with no emissions at all.

Economies of scale exist; urban dwellers generally pollute less on a per-capita and on a consumptive basis. And your whataboutism is misplaced--air pollution in cities has been improving steadily since the 1970's. (The Trump Administration is rolling back regulations related to this, which is fun, but that has likely not had significant impact yet.)

If global warming reaches the point it threatens our industry, our whole civilization will be halfway through collapse, and it won't end with computers not being needed for three decades. It'll end with a good majority of the world's population starving to death (or dying in acts of violence surrounding the event) and no one doing anything with computers for the next thousand years or so.

If it gets that bad computers in a thousand years may be out of reach. We have consumed all of the easily accessible fossil fuels so it will be much harder or impossible to bootstrap a new civilisation. This is plausibly the last great civilisation.

Yes. Which is why I believe that keeping our civilization in the stable state should be the most important policy goal. A point explored here, earlier today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20447671.

It also bears reminding that climate change is not a threat to the planet or to humans as a species. Both will be fine. But it's an existential threat to technological civilization.

Or, in other words: if you want your children and grandchildren to have even a semblance of quality of life an average person has today, climate change must be stopped now.

The planet will be fine if you consider events like the Permian mass extinction to be "fine." If you doubt we could push things that far, see this recent MIT study:

http://news.mit.edu/2019/carbon-threshold-mass-extinction-07...

Humans may well make it through that, but I don't think it'd be a sure thing, especially if we get secondary effects like pandemics or nuclear war.

I think some geographically isolated village may survive even a nuclear war, and as long as a village survives, humanity stands a chance.

I don't rule out the possibility of us making ourselves extinct, but I think it's a low-probability outcome. Also, if only few humans remained, I'd still call it game over.

WRT. the study, it's scary stuff. If that threshold truly exists, we can kiss humanity goodbye.

Why is this even downvoted? One solar flare hit and the Internet takes a massive dive.

I can always work construction, electrical and plumbing lol

Because it's like saying that gunshot wounds are a problem because they can ruin your clothes.

I have at times worried about the trapped methane that could be released with the permafrost...on some accounts I've heard the amount that could be released is massive. I know that this methane can increase global warming, but I have another fear. Although perhaps farfetched, is it possible that climate change could release a dense, rolling methane cloud that can asphyxiate whole populations?

No. That is not a concern on any kind of level.

Quick look indicates asphyxiation at 16-21%. At 5-15% concentration it is explosive. Current levels are about 2000 parts per billion.

It will not release that quickly on anything more than a localized level, and it would probably kill you via explosion, first. Since it would be gradually released we would all be long dead from the greenhouse effect.

Methane is lighter than air and thus would rise up to the sky until mixed.

The molecular mass of oxygen gas is 32 and the molecular mass of methane is 16. The methane will tend to rise and mix, leaving plenty of oxygen near the surface. It's unlikely to asphyxiate humans unless it happens really, really fast.

People and animals have been asphyxiated by massive CO2 releases because they can happen very quickly, and CO2 has a molecular mass of 44, making it stay near the ground for longer, displacing lighter oxygen and nitrogen gases.

Isn't density not mass the issue? Methane still floats above air using density from the internets, though I wonder about mixing

0.656 kg/m³ methane

1.98 kg/m3 carbon dioxide

1.225 kg/m3 air.

Atmospheric gases under typical conditions behave pretty much like ideal gases, which means it doesn't matter whether you talk about density or molecular mass; they're directly proportional to each other. And the molecular mass is independent of temperature and pressure.

There are concerns about old diseases that might have been conserved in the permafrost and that could be released as it melts though.

The ocean has already started to asphyxiate [1].

[1] https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2018/01/climate-change-s...

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1871174X1...

Maybe not gas clouds of rolling death, but some think it would be pretty catastrophic.

Very few people live in permafrost areas, so it won't be a massive problem. Something like Lake Kivu on the other hand...

s/could/will/g

Yes, that’s exactly the skew popular media will give this (already way too sensational) reporting. And we shouldn’t do this, unless we want to lose the scientific moral grounds.

Melting permafrost is releasing methane and CO2. Rising methane and CO2 levels will increase climate change. There is no "sensational" or "skew". This is like all this "may" "might" for 40 years that got us into the situation we are now. We should have said "will" 40 years ago.

Sounds like Russia is going to have a lot more arable land in the future.

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