Global warming has begun to make Norway warmer and wetter
nrk.no
nrk.no
When confronting climate change deniers the standard response is "weather is not climate". Saying it's hot today or cold today isn't an indication of climate change. It's what occurs over hundreds of years but especially the last 150 years.
It seems we are sending mixed signals saying that one day or a decade shows climate change. Then on the other hand we try to tell people one day or a decade is too short of a time to see changes. Yes we are certainly are seeing the effects of climate change now and it is real, just look at atmospheric carbon levels.
But saying it should be colder this time in the winter or last summer it was unusually hot. Anecdotal evidence isn't very reliable. My mother in her mid 70s told me her father (my grandfather) was out plowing the field in late November when my mother was born. Now if it's warm in late November people scream climate change.
Again, I do see and accept the evidence of climate change but I know people will see my comments as denial. I'm not denying it at all I'm 100% convinced it's just the phrasing and personal anecdotes I see disrupting the message.
† In America, few TV weathercasters are actual meteorologists anymore. Some stations will claim they are, but often they are not. One way to tell is to look for the AMS logo next to the person's name on-screen.
So I don't see what the problem is with charting, say, the 98% confidence interval, calling it normal, and stating that values outside that range are 1-in-50 year events.
Most people never understand this aspect of statistics. Living in Houston, and having survived 3 out of 4 years with an above-100-year floods, I understand firsthand the clumping of events. But the "typical" guy on the street (oops, now I just violated my own rule!) has no clue what a distribution is.
Not sure how to solve this problem. Teaching statistics to everyone in not a solution (see the Monty Hall Problem [0] ).
1) Scientists predicting the probability of an earthquake in a region that just had one. "If it doesn't occur, they'll say it was only a probability, and if it does, they'll claim they predicted it! Stop wasting taxpayer's money on this nonsense!"
2) "My mother chain smoked all her life and she's in her 90's. So smoking doesn't cause cancer."
To the best of my knowledge, few places have tracked temperature longer than the last 150 years and beyond that we have estimates and calculations that have variances/tolerances built in. Is 150 data points for a given location enough to KNOW both the "correct temperature" and that it does/doesn't move?
People don’t change their minds if you throw a bunch of data at them. People change their minds if you make them feel.
Weather is not climate. Even when it supports climate change.
I think everyone will agree tht the tree line can’t be 100m higher just because it was warm one winter. Trees take a while.
It's certainly been quite a shift to watch. 10 years ago, you'd hear "Sure is cold today, so much for global warming eh?" followed by cries that weather is not climate. Today, it seems that a hot summer day, or a cool summer day, or a warm winter day, or a particularly cold winter day, is just more proof of climate change.
I say this as someone who thinks climate change is real, by the way--but I am amused at how this all looks.
This is clearly false. Anecdotal appeals to emotion convince many people of many things, and the history of the climate change debate so far tends to suggest that appeals to emotion are much more effective than actual science.
> We can't conclude that these isolated incidents are caused by climate changes. > > On the other hand, we can conclude that such incidents have already become more common. And that it will likely cost us several hundred billion NOK to arm ourselves against all this water.
If it takes a slight misunderstanding about weather relating to climate change to get immediate action, isn’t that a good thing?
These events were definitively contributed to by climate change, perhaps not direct cause and effect as some assume, but there is more than just correlation.
Probably not, since people will point out that this call to action is based in falsehood and the credibility of the movement will be compromised.
For one thing, a day and a decade are pretty different.
But more important, while a decade is really short on geological timescales, and probably isn't long enough to see natural/geo driven or many astronomically-driven changes... a decade is long enough for humans to get a real idea of trends in human-driven changes, or crossing of certain boundary conditions for long-horizon changes.
Is that a double standard, or is that a more finely articulated view?
> In some places, the timberline is over 100 meters higher than before.
You give the impression the article is saying “oh it is currently warm in Norway”. It seems to be much more than that.
True. Yet, as climate change accelerates it's absolutely reasonable to expect that we will be able to sense its effects in our daily lives.
I also have quite a number of personal observations that point to the idea that the planet is warming up. On the one hand I try to remain rational and say that this is a long-term trend, but on the other I'm thinking: holy crap, things are happening so fast that I now have memories from when the world was noticeably cooler.
I think therefore that over the next decades we should start accepting anecdotal evidence as real evidence, as global warming starts having a real impact on our lives.
I have memories of world 30 years ago being hotter than it is today. I don't credit it to "global cooling" because I'm not that silly. You shouldn't be either. You'll never notice a degree C of average temperature change. You regulate your body's environment's temperature with clothing, housing, heating, etc. And it varies much more dramatically hour-by-hour than over decades. If you simply changed your bedtime a little, you could experience global warming or cooling of the same magnitude as what actually happened.
The scientific reality is that climate models have made decently accurate predictions so far. The whole point of the models is that 1C or 2C of change is not just about your own personal subjective experience of how warm it is.
The predictions are about everyone's personal subjective experience of having their home flooded, or destroyed in a fire, tornado or hurricane - all of which become more likely as temperatures rise.
This has literally been understood for decades now - by climate scientists, by the fossil fuel industry, and also by insurers.
Those are the obvious first order effects. The longer term second order effects - water shortages, crop failure, economic instability - are at least as important, if harder to model. And the third order consequences - homelessness, resource wars, mass migration - even more so.
Just because you have failed to educate yourself properly, while persuading yourself that your subjective opinion about "clothing and heating" is as credible scientifically as that of thousands of climate science PhDs working full-time on modelling, and don't understand that these are specific, actionable predictions doesn't mean they won't affect you personally.
For example, Dr Semmelweis who literally prooved hand washing saved lives. He was mocked and committed to an asylum by his colleagues, where he ironically died from infection after a beating.
> It seems we are sending mixed signals saying that one day or a decade shows climate change.
The article isn't making these points at all; it definitely seemed to be looking at a much longer picture, at least that was my takeaway.
I know you're not practicing active "denial", but consider the degree to which you chose to be a headwind or a tailwind. Tone policing is being a headwind.
Articles like this make me want to sniff glue. What should be written — and disseminated widely — is the truth that climate catastrophe is on our doorstep.
Who gives a shit if Norway is warmer and warmer, or if some other place is colder due to the chaotic nature of weather? The point is, "global warming" is rapidly destabilizing — no, destroying — ecosystems that we depend upon for our survival, and unleashing feedback loops that we are helpless to stop.
It's only going to get worse. Most articles don't go far enough in explaining the severity of the situation, because it'll frighten the neoliberals and trigger the neocons.
If Hacker News is still around in the next decade, I can't wait to read all the comments by the people here who love to bikeshed about "optics" and bullshit when actual widespread famine is beginning to rear its ugly head. I'm afraid most of you will turn inside out with all that navel-gazing.
> When confronting climate change deniers...
The article doesn't give me the impression that it's aimed at those wishing to support their arguments with climate-change deniers.
I don't want to make assumptions about where in the world you're from, and I do acknowledge that climate-change denial is a serious problem we need to combat, but in Norway and most other developed European countries, climate-change denial isn't really a thing* anymore. Most people in this field have moved on and are just trying to get to grips with impact and timelines (like this article).
* That's not to say climate-change deniers don't exist, just that they're not mainstream and are often either ridiculed or ignored.
I feel a little hopeless in these discussions. I have little hope for change. I cannot argue against the fact that our impact in Europe will not be enough. This requires a global, concerted effort and it's hard to argue against the logic that it won't matter what we do in Europe if everyone else doesn't follow suit. We are just delaying the inevitable.
This kind of feels to me like mutual assured destruction. Nobody lay down their weapons because of the other party. If you are not changing habits because the source of the problem doesn't lie in your geographical section, you are turning your back to the fact that climate crisis is a human kind crisis. We need to change habits as a whole, so that even when we are not directly helping, we are setting precedent and example.
Edit: the talks are frustrating though, I am not arguing that! But let's not give up. Giving up we are assuring our defeat.
Has the colonists accepted the responsibility for their plundering of once wealthy countries that's called "third world" now ?
Any one country isn't enough to make a difference, but we're all in this together, and The West bears more than its fair share of responsibility. Pointing your finger and India and China just makes you look like a selfish hypocrite.
And it _is_ a political problem at this point. You cant really demand change from people around you if you’re not prepared to do the same yourself.
First of all it suggests that wealth is the be-all and end-all of human progress. It also implies that wealth creation is equivalent wherever it happens - that somehow if a place is more efficient at creating wealth than it should be privileged.
Finally, of course, this means that poorer countries that produce less wealth will almost certainly be less efficient by this metric, and hence should be penalized (of course, we shouldn't mention that a lot of their production actually ends up being consumed by the rich-world which can this way claim to be highly CO2 efficient).
You misunderstand. The point is to quantify economic power. ...because economic power is the ONLY way fix global warming.
The whole thing looks very gloomy to me.
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.PP.GD?end=2...
Unilateral changes actually have a net negative impact because other parties simply consume more (CO2 in this case).
I fail to see your logic. If many people consume less petroleum maybe the price goes down and others consume more, but I don't see how they're going to consume more than what was the state of things in the first place.
Honestly it seems like a shallow rationalization to avoid taking personal responsibility for your actions. That might sound harsh but I'm a firm believer in extreme ownership as espoused by Jocko Willink. I'm allergic to excuses and rationalizations.
It's a net negative for the world.
It's not that simple, there are many unilateral choices a country can make that would not have a net negative effect. For example if you close a coal power plant in Virginia, China is not simply going to build one and sell the power to the US - there are physical limitations there.
You have a valid point that a country needs to think about unintentional consequences of their decisions, something politicians are notoriously bad at, but claiming that all unilateral action is net negative is such a ludicrous strawman that I don't actually beleive that's your position on the subject.
Eg a carbon tax is better than individual action. And if combined with an international effort to apply it to imports, it would be even more effective.
But the people in question tend to say “oh, it could never be done. Others would oppose. [let’s do nothing]”
Setting a good example doesn't inevitably result in everyone following along, but a proven solution is a whole lot easier to sell than a proposal that's never been tried at scale.
It's worse than that. And this always receives a negative reaction...yet this is the truth nobody seems to want to talk about save a very few brave researchers:
We can't do a thing about it. Period.
I've written about this many times. This isn't about denying climate change or our contribution to atmospheric CO2 concentration --that would be silly, it's as real as it gets.
This is about pulling our heads out of the sand to take a look at the data in order to understand what it is screaming at us very loudly. It goes something like this:
If humanity --all of us-- left the planet tomorrow and we took all of our technology, cars, planes, buildings --everything-- with us...it would take somewhere in the range of 50K to 100K years for atmospheric CO2 to come down by 100 ppm (which is roughly what we need).
This isn't me saying it. This is the very accurate data we have. We know, with a very high degree of certainty, what the atmosphere looked like and how long it took for CO2 to increase and decrease when humanity was but a bunch of apes on trees.
This data is provided to us by the 800,000 years of ice core atmospheric data we already have. Ice core atmospheric composition sampling is a highly accurate way to learn about what the atmosphere looked like in the past. And, again, to be redundant, we have data going back 800,000 years.
This means we KNOW how the atmosphere behaved when we were not here.
This also means we KNOW how it will behave is we all left.
If it takes the planet 50,000 to 100,000 years for a 100 ppm reduction there's NOTHING we can do at a small scale (solar panels world-wide, stop using cars, stop using planes, ban all fossil fuels, etc.) that will accelerate the slope at all. If we stay on the planet the rate of change is GREATER than 50K to 100K for 100 ppm, because we are contributing more CO2 to the equation.
Please don't take my word for it. Look at the data and you should have the same revelation about this issue I had many years ago. This does not mean we should not make an effort to clean-up our act, there are many reasons for which this is a good idea and none of them anything to do with climate change. I does mean we need to not lie to ourselves and start having real conversations about this stuff rather than, on the one hand, denying it, and, on the other, thinking we can actually affect planetary scale problems with truly insignificant measures. Hint: Everything is insignificant when compared to humanity leaving the planet. Both extreme positions are unreasonable and delusional.
Finally, a problem: Scientists, researchers, don't want to talk about this reality because their careers would be over if they did. At the very least their grants would evaporate. This is a terrible side-effect of the religion climate change has become. We need to free our researchers so that they can be honest about what we know and we can put them to work on how to deal with reality.
Here's were you will find the 800,000 years of ice core data:
https://cdiac.ess-dive.lbl.gov/images/air_bubbles_historical...
https://cdiac.ess-dive.lbl.gov/trends/co2/ice_core_co2.html
Here's a paper that explains why it is that atmospheric CO2 will continue to rise exponentially even if we switch the the most optimal forms of renewable energy world-wide:
https://storage.googleapis.com/pub-tools-public-publication-...
I have looked into this issue in depth and I have yet to find any argument or proposed solution that can do better than all of humanity leaving the planet, which is to say we can't fix it. We better start talking about how to live with it soon rather than propose ridiculous "solutions" that are far more likely to kill us all than fix anything.
Going 100% renewable alone isn't enough. We also need afforestation programs and carbon capture programs on a massive scale.
The problem is greater than that. I urge you to read the paper and look at the data. We are talking about planetary scale issues here, which means solving the problem in 50 or 100 years by forcing it (chemically or whatever) is far more likely to kill all life on this planet than to fix anything at all.
And, so, sadly, 100% renewable --which is impossible-- and reforestation will not do it either.
First of all, aside from the fact that 100% renewable --again, global, planetary scale-- is impossible, we already know that, if we did that, atmospheric CO2 levels would continue to rise exponentially. That's the paper I linked to in my comment.
That leaves reforestation. So, we start with atmospheric CO2 continuing to rise exponentially and want trees to fix it.
Here's the other dose of reality, which comes from a simple question:
How did the planet "fix it" on its own when we were not around?
Simple:
- Trees grew - Storms, cyclones, hurricanes, rain
And it took 50,000 to 100,000 years for that to drop atmospheric CO2 by 100 ppm. Again, please, don't take my word for it, I'm just another delusional moron, go look at the data and challenge that. I'd be very interested in learning I am wrong and how.
The other question is:
How did the planet cause CO2 levels to rise?
Simple:
- Massive continental scale fires burning for tens of thousands of years
Look at what's going on in Australia. Even with all of our technology we can't stop it. I have no idea how much CO2 got injected into the atmosphere so far but it can't be trivial. Now imagine that at a global scale, with massive country and continent scale fires raging unimpeded. That's how the planet did it.
Which brings me back to the reforestation issue. Yes, we need to restore the Amazon and other areas. What we've done is criminal. However, we are not going to fix the problem in 100 years by doing this. We can't.
The other danger is, once again, fires. If we plant trees on every available square meter --assuming that was possible-- we would be creating massive amounts of fuel for fires much larger than what we are seeing in Australia. In other words, just planting trees isn't a solution at all, and doing it without an understanding of the dangers involved could kill more life on earth than the alternatives.
It's a very difficult problem. I don't claim to have any solution. All I know is that we are not discussing the truth. All we have are two religious camps, one saying it isn't real and the other saying we have to destroy entire economies to fix it in 50 years. Both are crazy.
The hope that people might choose reduced/more expensive energy availability was always slim to nonexistant. Collective action is not going to fly; the only things that will work are (1) running out of fossil fuels or (2) Renewables/nuclear being a cheaper, better choice.
They've been trying social efforts for quite a while now.
Are there other similar groups that try to educate and motivate the rest of the population ?
With enough of these groups, I believe most people will feel motivated, they just need a headstart to follow (we're too social).
It's quite scary.
But now there's a lot more northwest winds in autumn, which causes heavy rainfall that floods rivers. And likewise, the spring "monsoon" when continual nor'westers are the defining weather pattern (when I lived in an alpine village, 29 days of continual rain in November was the usual) now extends significantly into Summer. And of course, the rainfall events are getting more extreme, damaging roads and hiking infrastructure - like this: https://www.odt.co.nz/regions/fiordland/routeburn-closed-for...
It comes after an incredibly hot and dry summer. My place is supposed to be very green and wet: this year it rained only twice in 3 months! And those were not even summer rains, those two rainy days looked like small November rainfalls. When I was a kid we had short summer storms several times a week (in the end of afternoon / early evening), especially in August (less so in July, but still there were a few). The system has completely changed over the last 2 decades.
And then the autumn was dry too, except for 1 month. And now the winter is warm and dry.
And that comes after a similar year the year before, which was just a little bit softer.
--------
That's not just anecdotal: the long term measurements show huge changes, and acceleration. Short term measurements too: monthly records get beaten all the time those last 5 years.
Wetter and colder places have been impacted more by the warming, apparently.
It's a massive structural shift in the earth's environment. So I wonder if not for some they happily welcome the change as an opportunity to seize the commanding heights of the future.
If climate change cannot be avoided, than the next best thing is to get ahead of it in terms of advantages over competitors in terms of technology, territory, products and services that the newly impoverished and vulnerable will require to survive.
I wouldn't be surprised if this was the real thinking behind billionaire oil tycoons or climate deniers. They see it as fundamentally political as opposed to scientific in nature.
1) Some industries refuse to even consider it because it means they're effectively dead -- coal, oil, and a few other industries. They fuel propaganda because of this
2) Sheer ignorance
I say because it's very difficult and fragile to try and profit off a genuine catastrophe. We are indeed heading for a disaster (2C warming) even under quite optimistic assumptions about world politics and people accepting climate change and whatnot; if there is not enough action, if some technologies are not developed quickly enough, we are facing genuine catastrophe (I think there's far too much faith in a magical technological solution (rapid carbon capture) in current scenarios) -- 3 or 4C warming, where you start to talk about civilization collapse. This seems like a very weird thing to gamble with, specially since gambles require long term payoffs. If the economy and politics is a mess and there's general instability, how can you guarantee ability to monetize your bets?
No, I think most people are just genuinely not aware, willfully ignorant, don't believe humans could alter the climate, etc.
In a way it's good, because it means you can fight it to an extent with information.
If coal/oil/gas is dead then most of humanity is dead too. Do you realize that coal, oil, gas are responsible for almost all of the world's energy production?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Bp_world_energy_consumpti...
Not to mention the world's agricultural production is dependent on oil, not just for transportation, but also for petrochemical fertizilers.
Also, almost every product ( medicine, electronic, clothes, etc ) have petrochemical derivatives in them. If those fossil fuel industries are dead, then civilization ends and most of humanity dies.
> They fuel propaganda because of this
There are plenty of propaganda on both sides along with the fearmongering. And the propaganda and fearmongering doesn't help anything.
Unless there is some technological breakthrough in energy production, we aren't going to stop using fossil fuels.
Much of the world is underdeveloped and looking to industrialize.
There are 1.3 billion people without electricity. Can you believe that?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/world/world-without-...
Climate change isn't a political issue. It is a technological one. Europeans aren't going to give up fossil fuels to end their first world lifestyle and destroy their society and starve themselves to death. The chinese are going to use as much fossil fuels needed to reach the first world lifestyle of the europeans. Indians, once they get their act together, are going to follow in china's footsteps. Same goes for ASEAN. And eventually Africa, etc. Can't expect the poor nations to stay poor forever. And of course, we aren't going to give up fossil fuels anytime soon in the US, especially since we just became a fossil fuel energy exporter recently.
So given these realities, what do you think the climate change issue is really about? It certainly isn't about fossil fuels or reducing fossil fuels because it's simply not possible anytime soon. So what is it about?
Europe is already on IPCC 2C targets, and it's clearly not starving, its economy is fine. What they need to do is show the rest of the world how we're toast without action.
Just look at the 3 or 4C targets -- that themselves largely predict quick oil phase out! Civilization runs real risk of collapse before the end of the century in those targets, and 3 decades from now it'll already start looking bleak. Imagine if we do nothing.
I guess the most dark humor thing is (most) people imagining their kids living in happy wonderlands, making retirement plans, etc. while the world is literally going to hell.
It really feels like a failure of science, technology and engineering community. We're failing at communicating. Because I owe to and admire so much of our scientific history and people, I'll gladly campaign for climate action to my last day (or at least until we're at a somewhat sane track).
Renewables make up almost 0% of the total energy used by the world. Getting rid of fossil fuels or the fossil fuel industry is simply not possible. This is basic economics and physics. It's science.
> in fact it's happening even without subsidies in many places
Name one place where subsidies didn't prop up renewables.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jun/05/home-sol...
https://ieefa.org/subsidy-cuts-result-in-sharp-drop-in-u-k-r...
The green energy industry itself admits it needs subsidies to exist hence why they lobby for more subsidies.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffreydorfman/2015/09/01/solar...
> Europe is already on IPCC 2C targets, and it's clearly not starving, its economy is fine.
That's because Europe's fossil fuel use hasn't dropped. It has actually increased. Not only that, europe is building or trying to build pipelines from russia and the middle east to meet their energy needs. What do you the instability in syria was about? What do you think the geopolitical skirmish with russia is about? Pipelines and fossil fuels. Europe wants more of it, not less.
> It really feels like a failure of science, technology and engineering community. We're failing at communicating.
No. The communication is fine if you actually read and understand the science, technology and engineering. If you get your information from fearmongering newspapers, cable news or social media, then you have a real problem.
While you worry about the end of the world, the science/tech/engineering community is planning future research into the 30s, 40s, etc. Space flight into the 30s, 40s. Mega construction projects in the 30s, 40s, etc - some of which will last decades. Surely if the world was going to end, these highly intelligent people wouldn't be wasting time and resources on such projects.
I don't want to add to your anxiety, but the indian subcontinent, ASEAN, middle east, south america and africa are going to industrialize heavily in the coming decades. Conservatively, they make up about 40% of the world's population. So fossil fuel use is going to go up in the coming decades.
So economics, science and reality says that fossil fuel use is going to increase. So if you are really sincere in what you say, then ask yourself, what is all the climate change rhetoric really about?
I am part of the science/engineering community. I also know oceanographers (personally), a handful of climate scientists (indirectly), several biologists from several fields, physicists, and more. People usually leave this stuff to specialists -- a physicist usually won't delve deep into climate science. Everyone I know that is informed (i.e. that doesn't say "I haven't looked at the climate data and projections") is deeply worried, and the oceanographer and climate scientists I know are the least hopeful (which should be worrying). Engineers generally just assume it's going to be fine for practical purposes -- I know a handful of civil engineers and electrical engineers working on large projects. The electrical engineer is informed on climate change and doesn't know how it will impact the project long term.
Just look at the data. It's the ethical thing to do, at least I believe. If you don't, we're both wasting our times.
Where to start?
I recommend simply reading the wikipedia article in its entirety:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming
paying special attention to this section: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming#Mitigation
Look at the emission pathway -- it demands massive, immediate action.
Also read this:
https://archive.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar5/wg3/ipcc_w...
again pay attention to page 11:
https://archive.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar5/wg3/ipcc_w...
again the emission targets. You can see if emissions keep increasing, i.e. pathways RCP6.0 and RCP8.5 are unlikely to keep warming under 3C (see table on page 13) -- likely to go to 4-5C of warming.
Finally, you can see some of the effects here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_global_warming
(note that no emission reduction, i.e. RCP>6.0, >3C warming isn't given much attention, given it's quite apocalyptic)
and also here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change_and_ecosystems#...
It's anyone's guess what would happen under this scenario, almost certainly mass extinction on ocean and land, the tropics become literally almost uninhabitable, effects on civilization anyone's guess in the range of catastrophe to collapse (imagine all of India and large parts of China trying to migrate).
A lot of smaller island nations won't have that luxury.
They should pledge at least 75% of that fund for CO2 removal technology R&D and other mitigation solutions.
It is an investment fund which is heavily invested in the stock market (up to 60%). A lot of the money in the fund is investment profit. They've been investing for 30 years now.
FYI, happened last year: Norway refuses to drill for billions of barrels of oil in Arctic, leaving ‘whole industry surprised and disappointed’. Government made the right choice, but a few (prosperous already) affected by making less money complained: https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/norway-oil-drillin...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010s_oil_glut
There are economic reasons as to why drilling for oil isn't a good idea right now.
Somehow, during the last 2 or 3 decades, people have been nudged to believe that snow and ski times are February and Christmas/new-year holidays. Only. Easter has disappeared from the picture: now what is sold for Easter is a holiday in the sun, a stay by the sea (and nowadays, it means flying abroad, not trying your luck on your national shores). And that is stupid, because people come for Christmas when in fact there are 50% chances that there is no snow at that time of the year, and leave disappointed because the White Christmas thingie they were sold didn't exist; and they don't come any more around Easter, while there is basically always snow (soft snow, admittedly, but with a sufficient stock accumulated along the whole winter to enjoy). So basically the only time left to make money for a ski resort is February: can't open around Christmas because there is no snow, can't open around Easter because there are no customers.
Politicians - including our sitting president - figured out that leveraging the ad tech of the FBs / Googles etc to micro-tune and micro-test messaging wins elections.
Who is doing the same for climate change?
Start with massively targeted message testing attached to an outcome that demonstrably has an impact on the problem.
No bullshit "awareness" vanity metrics.
I'm talking direct donations to projects that reduce co2 or recapture co2.
Direct donations to organizations or politicians that are demonstrably impacting in a similar way.
?????
Is somebody working to harness the brutal machinery of FB / Goog's advertising platform to do some good?
Can I help or write your first check as an investor?
This is how it was given to me:
1. CO2 is a green house gas, but a very weak one. Like, homeopathically weak. We could increase CO2 100x in the atmosphere and it wouldn't change a thing temperature- or climate-wise (other than inducing more plant growth).
2. The reason we see CO2 increases associated with warming in the geological record is because the oceans sequester CO2, and the amount they sequester depends on temperature. As the Sun heats up the Earth, the oceans release CO2 into the atmosphere. As the Sun cools the Earth, the oceans re-sequester the CO2 they previously released. That's why CO2 concentrations are linked in the geological record to temperature.
3. Thus, the Sun is what heats and cools the earth, not CO2. CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere are a bi-product of warming and cooling, not a cause.
The Sun very obviously heats the Earth. However, in what will come as a complete shock to many, things can have multiple causes - particularly things which occur on a planetary scale. The Sun is a source of heat that everyone is well aware of. If that was all there was to it then the models would be extremely simple. We can measure the Sun, we know what it is doing.
Building a climate model based on a single variable would be fantastic if it was predictive. Definitely important and good start - now add the other 10,000 variables to the model.
1. Can't CO2's "strength" as a greenhouse gas be measured directly? That seems like a relatively simple physics problem. My understanding is that the direct effect of CO2's "heat trapping" is easy to quantify. What scientists continue to disagree on is how significant the cascading effect is, but of course we do know there is one. But even the most conservative estimate (no cascade effect) shows that as we add CO2 to the atmosphere, the planet will continue warming to life-altering levels.
2. I don't think I understand this argument as long as the denier will acknowledge that the planet is warming (which is directly measurable). If the planet is indeed warming, this 2nd argument seems to indicate that CO2 levels are cyclical based on the sun's behavior, but that's not what's happening now. Maybe I'm misunderstanding the implied timeframe over which this is supposed to happen...but this, again, seems directly disprovable.
Let me know if I missed the point, but it seems like the whole argument falls apart as soon as you show that CO2 has a significant warming effect, which is something scientists are confident about.
Tech and UX folks need to step back and realize that it's not just a silly design but a discriminatory one at that. Not everyone can enjoy literal flashy articles.
I actually only think things will be done once insurance companies start accounting for costs here.
Human beings adapt. We are now a technological species, and can alter our surroundings to quite a large degree. As things change, we should be working toward improving lives - our own and those of others - and better positioning ourselves to exploit the advantages that our future holds.
Probably World War 3.
What come next after climate havoc, possible nuclear war - who knows.
"But it is frightening just how much a few tenths of a degree can change the seafloor. The changes in the ocean are massive." It's misleading to pursue this idea that tiny changes in temperature, which fluctuate up and down as well, are somehow the primary drivers of such things. Such changes happen constantly, all over the ocean.
Species of moths and insects come and go, and sometimes cause what we perceive as destruction. This may be due to a variety of factors.
I think what happens in such situations, is when you take a kernel of truth (like climate change), that also happens to be emotional for many people, they can easily turn anything anecdotal into evidence to support their view.
The best (worst for humans) stuff is buried.
It forced me to slow down, parse each line one at a time, read line-by-line, image-by-image, and let the gravity sink in. I would have just skimmed it if it were a text article with a photo gallery, to no great effect.
Meanwhile we are radically altering the natural environment. As the TFA spells out, so superbly.
The point being, the takes here are pretty on-brand.
recommended words per slide: 20
recommended time per slide: 2 minutes
Average academic words per page: 600
nobody is sitting through a 10 hour ppt deck either.
Also: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/23/what-jeff-bezos-learned-from...
It can also far more emotional and evocative, while reading can be more analytical.
Why not combine the two? After all, that is literally what advertising does -- give some message with an emotionally-charged visual to reinforce it.
I'm not saying this is advertising (though you could make that argument through a cynical lens), I'm saying it's using the same tools that have proven to work so effectively you see you billboards literally anywhere on earth where humans congregate.
The layout genuinely hurts my eyes to read. I have vision problems and the continuous picture changes after every sentence is very uncomfortable to view. The contrast changes rapidly from bright to dark or completely black. Then there are light pictures with white text rendered over them. After the first few "slides" I had to close the article. It was too uncomfortable to read. Perhaps you should think before you run with your ableism.
There is no lowest common denominator. Stop moralising.
Moderation can help, because once we see it happening in a thread, we downweight the off-topic subthreads. But ultimately the only fix for bad discussion is good discussion, and discussion about bad discussion (even about how much you dislike it) is bad discussion.
While I find the format a bit cinematic for my taste, I can't help but respect their efforts to drive home the tangible effects of global warming in an emotional way.
I wouldn’t be the first to point out that the medium is the message.
Kudos for those guys for trying to tell the story differently in a hope to reach a broader audience.
I think they choose the right medium for the message.
This is a tech forum, not a climate news forum.
I wasn't suggesting that all topics must focus on tech, but that the majority of Hacker News users come from tech, and may therefore have an interest in the technical presentation of the submission.
My apologies if this was not clear.
I think that if users find technical aspects of an article a more interesting topic of discussion than the content, they should be free to discuss it in this forum.
I do not think that the guidelines should be updated to prohibit "off topic" criticism, as the parent comment suggested.
We're inundated with articles pointing out small unimportant changes and unquantified waffle about serious future changes. But never any actual predictions of global disaster. What's the expected cost in money or lives? Nobody has a clue beyond "catastrophe", whatever that means. I saw one estimate for the economic cost to Canada but it was so low that the citizens could actually just pay it as an additional tax and carry on with life hardly affected at all. Alarmists were actually critical of that data being published because they were afraid it might support people's belief that it's not very serious. Maybe because it's not?
So if you're going to say global warming is serious, can you also quantify what you mean? Otherwise you're only conveying your personal subjective feeling.
Well that can’t be right; it would turn the entire topic of climate change on its head.
Who do people think this is how users want to ingest information?
Its the 2020's equivalent of a flash based website.
The photography was great.
A picture says a thousand words. It also contains far more kb of information.
Edit: At the same time, my wife, who tends to prefer her phone: "I haven't finished it.. But such a visual treat. Interesting how they did that. Makes it feel very interactive."
So I'm clearly just not the target audience, which is fair enough :-)
And it would be really nice if someone could do this for, say, Bangladesh, Yemen, or Guatemala where it's becoming life and death.
Text-only browser is easiest way.
links -dump https://www.nrk.no/chasing-climate-change-1.14859595
x=$(echo y|tr y '\004');
curl https://www.nrk.no/chasing-climate-change-1.14859595|sed "s/<p /$x&/g;s/ *//"|tr '\004' '\n'|sed -n '/<p /!d;s/<\/p>.*/<\/p>/;/./{/<p /,/<\/p>/p;}' > 1.html
firefox 1.html
curl https://www.nrk.no/chasing-climate-change-1.14859595|grep -o https[^\"]*1080p.mp4|sed 's/\\u002F/\//g;s/.*/<p><a href=& \/>&<\/a><\/p>/'|uniq >> 1.html
firefox 1.htmlReader mode in Firefox (probably also in other browsers) gives just the text of the story, without the images.
I like the "Source" buttons.
I really thought I was somewhat informed about the effects, but what happened there is way beyond anything you get from reading papers.
But sure, HN, go ahead, discuss if it's the right format/UX to deliver the message that we're fucked. Heaven forbid we talk about the message itself.
Please don't contribute to the problem by going off topic in this way—it just adds more of what you're complaining about. (As, alas, does this comment.)
Either the police had probable case to make an arrest or the arrestees can sue for false arrest. In general the police do not arrest people without a reason in England.
Honest question, how is 1 degree not in some kind of normal range or within measurement error?
If we take extremely conservative numbers and say the current average temp is 0C and death is certain at 100C then we moved 1% closer. I suspect some krazy kooks might suggest that the Earth would be uninhabitable long before 100C is attained.
I greatly appreciate the science and am glad for progress in our efforts. But I think we are not competent to solve planet-wide issues when we have largely rejected the instructions given by the earth's Creator (like, honesty, the Golden Rule, etc, etc): we have a hard time trusting each other even when we say we agree. I'm glad we can share our own thoughts. We need His help both to address important issues globally, and in our personal lives.
And importantly, we can be OK. Related, more detailed thoughts at http://lukecall.net/e-9223372036854581820.html , a simple site w/ no javascript or sales).