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Comment by redis_mlc | Hacker News Reader

I read the article. The author (a tropical geologist) mixes up weather (temporary) with climate (long-term), among other things.

The concern of arctic residents is if the weather is hot enough, for long enough, to melt the permafrost. That has numerous repercussions, including emissions, transportation and wildlife.

For example, any highways or pipelines on top of permafrost will dislocate if permafrost melts.

But overall, Canada is in favor of glabal warming. Most of our land mass is not arable with the current climate.

Source: Canadian, eh.

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Melting permafrost does not make arable land.

Soils under boreal forests are not good farm land.

Thin soils over the Canadian shield are not good places to plant crops. Or Northern Ontario, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan, wouldn't be mostly forests.

Mass forest fires don't make good ranch or farm land.

Climate is not the obstacle for agriculture moving further north in Canada -- the Canadian shield is.

And Canadians aren't making use of the farm land we have already. We used to be a net food exporter, now we are a net importer. Which hasn't been great during the COVID crisis.

Overall Canadians (but not the major opposition party, or most Albertans) are very concerned about climate change and not "in favour" (spell it right if you're Canadian, please). However they fear the economic reprocussions that result. Like most people.

Source: Canadian, eh. Also Ipsos polling https://www.ipsos.com/en-ca/new-survey-canadians-views-clima...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Shield: "Glaciation has left the area only a thin layer of soil, through which the composition of igneous rock resulting from long volcanic history is frequently visible."

> The author (a tropical geologist) mixes up weather (temporary) with climate (long-term)

Right, sure, the guy with a "PhD from Duke University where I studied the geology and climate of the Amazon", understands less about climate and weather than you do.

Do you truly not understand that this is extremely basic stuff to everyone except the Climate Change "Sceptics"? They really do have this bizarre habit of quoting schoolkid level science as though it's some amazing insight they've just discovered.

I'm afraid you're not painting a correct picture here. There are climate sceptics (they call themselves realists) that used to work for the IPCC. There are established professors among them (no not psychologists, geologists).

Please do not act as if they are dumb fks. That is not the case.

I'm afraid most of them are. Would you care to give an example of one who is not? I'll happily look over a blog or video and give my opinion.

I don't think you are sincere since you already mention blog and video, which are the usual mantra words of the politicizing discourse but I encourage everyone who is interested to look into https://judithcurry.com/ for an example.

You don't think I'm sincere, because I asked for a link to a blog, so you give me a link to Judith Curry's blog?

I'm familiar with Curry's "work". I wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt, but then she went from warning about caution to outright lies. Frankly, I'd rather someone who was honestly stupid than Judith Curry who knows she's lying, but does it anyway.

See: https://www.skepticalscience.com/Judith_Curry_arg.htm

Oh, FFS, I just read through her last few entries. She's got worse. Now it's the Anthony Watts technique of linking to articles with suggestive headlines without commentary. Example: "Misconceptions of global catastrophe [link]". Now, that article is about the real issues that will arise from Climate Change, and about people's misconceptions about them, but she knows very few people will actually read the article, and will instead take the wrong implication from the title.

They just had a massive diesel oil spill in Siberia due to permafrost loss, which broke equipment. Oil is now following rivers up north to the coast.

If you swap out "overall" with "in isolation".. I sincerely and hopefully doubt that most Canadians would ruin a lot of the world, for a bit more arable land.

i think it'd be smarter to keep Canada's land the way it is until you figure out how to handle a few (dozen) million of immigrants per year whose land used to be arable...

My understanding is that the bulk of the US's arable land (i.e., the Midwest) won't be much affected by climate change. It might move sideways, but it won't turn into desert.

Conversely, Canada is not expected to be a great beneficiary of climate change (except for the Northwest Passage becoming passable), because most of what is not currently used isn't because of temperature, but because it is muskeg.

It'll be largely underwater. See Hudson Bay? It's going to expand.

Not catastrophically though, and "largely underwater" seems incorrect, especially since the land around Hudson Bay is part of the Canadian shield, with only a thin layer of dirt over rock [1]. Even if all polar ice melted, and the sea rose 70m [2], it looks like Hudson Bay would only increase in area by ~20%: https://www.floodmap.net/?ll=62.144976,-87.451172&z=4&e=70

By contrast, practically all of Florida would be gone with that rise.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Shield

[2] https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/how-would-sea-level-change-if-all-...

Canadians are throwing away farmland to build McMansions and freeways at a record pace, so I don't think there's anything sensible to the commenter's line about Canadians "wanting more farmland" (which makes no sense anyways).

Source: I live rural on farmland in greenbelt in Ontario.

> My understanding is that the bulk of the US's arable land (i.e., the Midwest) won't be much affected by climate change. It might move sideways, but it won't turn into desert.

From David Wallace-Wells's "The Uninhabitable Earth":

In 1879 the naturalist John Wesley Powell [..] divined a natural boundary running due North along the 100th meridian. It separated the humid—and therefore cultivatable—natural farmland of what became the Midwest from the arid, spectacular, but less farmable land of the true West. The divide ran through Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, and the Dakotas, and stretches north into Manitoba, Canada, separating more densely populated communities full of large farms from sparser, open land that was never truly made valuable by agriculture. Since just 1980 that boundary has moved fully 140 miles east, almost to the 98th parallel, drying up hundreds of thousands of square miles of farmland in the process.

Maybe it won't turn into desert exactly but it won't be productive for growing food.

Here is an extensive 2018 study on climate impacts in the Midwest: https://nca2018.globalchange.gov/chapter/21/

There are expected to be agricultural impacts:

> The Midwest is a major producer of a wide range of food and animal feed for national consumption and international trade. Increases in warm-season absolute humidity and precipitation have eroded soils, created favorable conditions for pests and pathogens, and degraded the quality of stored grain. Projected changes in precipitation, coupled with rising extreme temperatures before mid-century, will reduce Midwest agricultural productivity to levels of the 1980s without major technological advances.

I know you're responding to a comment talking about climate refugees ... the HN comments often jump quickly from realistic scenarios to Mad Max.

But even the projected impacts are significant. Other concerns are impacts to the Great Lakes and to extreme heat events. All covered in the link, which is really very good.

I don't know if you live there or keep in touch with people there. The changes in snow and rain patterns since my childhood in the 70s/80s seem noticeable to me -- although I'm open to correction since I haven't looked at the numbers and this kind of change is not covered in the above report. I don't remember rain in February in Kansas, for instance, but it happens now.

I grew up and currently live in Michigan, in around the same areas (within an hour or so of each other) - anecdotally, our winters of late have been odd. The last couple years before 2019-20 saw a great deal of icefall around March, as well as the arctic vortices where we got down to -20 degress F, which were a bit odd but not crazy, but this last winter was very strange in how unbelievably warm it was, and I've never seen it like that.

I realize that Global Warming != Warming Winters because climate is more complex than that, and odd weather has always been a staple of Michigan on account of the Great Lakes, but this just felt unprecedented, and a bit concerning if it continues in this direction.

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