I'm 18 and can already see my Alaska community changed forever by climate change | Hacker News Reader

I'm 18 and can already see my Alaska community changed forever by climate change

theguardian.com

58 pointsciconia12 comments

I remember when I was a teenager and saw Portage Glacier for the first time. You could pull off the highway on the way up to Anchorage and see the glacier right there. We all walked on it.

Decades later I took a friend to Alaska and excitedly took him to Portage. The glacier was somewhere way across a giant lake, I believe. I suppose it will be gone soon.

Queue the standard ratio of about 50% of the comments being climate change denialism. This site is terrible.

Before human industrialization, was there not various types of erosion and droughts? Was temperature also completely static and never rose or fell? This is a poor article. I don’t knock this author for caring deeply, but those of us who are older than 18 might remember living through past environmental scares that never came to pass.

It did of course. There were I've ages and warmer times.

But they didn't change nearly as fast as they do now.

By the way of by the other scares you mean the ozone layer gap and acid rain, those just didn't progress because of rapid action by the international community. Like banning Freon.

If the alarm hadn't been sounded they'd have been a huge problem now. Unfortunately the climate problem is much bigger as a problem and the economic impact, which is why everyone keeps making promises but not doing much :(

Sure, temperatures have changed before. But the rate of change this time around is as much of a problem as the amount of change: https://xkcd.com/1732/

Please consider not getting your supporting evidence from a comic strip. As you can see by the full data set Randall Munroe truncated the time scale to fabricate his narrative. Here is the same data set he used except going back 800k years instead of 20k...

https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/global-warming/temperature-change

Munroe is just communicating the well known and scientifically produced ‘hockey stick graph’.

Looking at your linked 800k graph it’s impossible to see the effects of the 1800 AD to 2000 AD period, which is where all the interest is.

I think you’re confused about what Munroe is communicating in his comic.

You must not be aware that the "hockey stick" graph did not hold up in a court of Law when challenged by Tim Ball. Michael Mann was ordered by the Supreme Court of British Columbia to produce the science behind the "hockey stick" graph and when he failed the judge ruled that Mann had committed contempt of court.

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