Cloud-Making Aerosol Could Devastate Polar Sea Ice | Hacker News Reader

Cloud-Making Aerosol Could Devastate Polar Sea Ice

quantamagazine.org

40 pointspseudolus58 comments

> “The more the ice melts, the more sea surface is exposed, the more iodine is emitted, the more particles are made, the more clouds form, the faster it all goes,” Kirkby said.

A positive feedback loop. Not good.

Reminds me of a passage from Daniel Quinn's "Ishmael". A man jumps off a cliff in a winged contraption. As he plummets to the ground, he truly believes for a short period that he is flying. If our biosphere is more fragile than once thought, I wonder if our current period will be humanity's short flight?

Meta - I only recently discovered Quanta Magazine, and I'm very much enjoying it.

Many years ago I abandoned Scientific American when it became overtly politicized. I don't necessarily disagree with the values they demonstrated, but part of the reason I enjoy reading science publications is for the opportunity to get away from political polarization for a while, and their editorial change took that enjoyment away from me.

So I left SA, and found American Scientist magazine, which up until the last issue or two had maintained a separation from politics. However, they've now become explicitly political, as demonstrated in conversation here on HN about a recent article [1]. Not only have they dragged in the woke politics, but if this issue, and this article especially, are any indication, they've also drastically affected the quality of the science reporting.

In disgust from AS's capitulation, I looked around for other sources of science journalism that could deliver something a couple notches more in-depth than, say, Discover or Pop Mech, but still stay aloof from politics. So far Quanta Magazine is the only thing I've found, but they are pretty good.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25799514

I've noticed that too about Scientific American. Its like circa 2015 a switch flipped and they became a completely different magazine. Anyway I found it much more informative to just go straight to the source in most cases and subscribing to peer-reviewed scientific journals. For example, can select any subject in Nature and get a RSS feed

https://www.nature.com/subjects

There are various open access journals in PLoS

https://plos.org/#journals

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/find-and-read-articles#l...

As well as many others listed in the Database of Open Access Journals

https://doaj.org/

The style of this article reminds me of New Scientist. You might like that publication.

As arctic ice has decreased over the last couple of decades, I wonder if there is now noticably more cloud coverage over the arctic, and/or whether, over that period, the coverage has diverged upwardly from what current models would predict for the period.

so as long as clouds are above snow/ice they have a net warming effect and if they are above open ocean they have a net cooling effect?

It would make sense that it depends whether the clouds have a higher or lower albedo than the surface they cover

That's what TFA says.

I imagine that the latitude matters, too. Near the poles, the sun is coming in at such an oblique angle that any given surface area isn't getting much heating effect from it anyway, so it's easier for the insulating blanket effect to be a net positive.

I only skimmed the article, but it had me wondering about the same.

There's been talk before about trying to form artificial clouds over the ocean in order to reduce warming. I'd be very curious to hear how this might relate to that. Is it possible that man made clouds could drift to the poles and make everything worse?

They can be relatively localized. Consider contrails, which with the grounding of air travel in the US after 9/11 had climate impacts that could be studied.

https://globalnews.ca/news/2934513/empty-skies-after-911-set...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/tvradio/programmes/horizon/dimming_t...

One of the interesting aspects of that is that it returned to normal (well, contrails being normal) rapidly.

After this covid fiasco, im done with models. You guys have fun supporting the climate austerity that is to come, I'm going to just believe that the earth has it's own regulation magic that we have not uncovered yet.

I share your pain in society's mishandling of covid, and understand your skepticism towards poorly applied models. Society is much more complex than most models can address.

The issue with the faith in the earth's own regulation magic is that it also assumes that the regulation magic is friendly to us, and/or that the goal of the regulation is to maintain a steady state which is good for humanity, or that it is even to maintain a steady state (maybe it's idea of 'regulation' is maintaining a chaotic cycle).

I used to joke that climate change was really the dinosaurs trying to come back; we are pumping FOSSIL fuels into the air with an end result of recreating a climate more similar to the warmer days when the dinosaurs roamed.

by issue, I mean "problems even if we assume that the earth's regulatory/homeostatic mechanisms are properly functioning."

That assumption is also problematic, if one allows for the possibility that our technological powers and population size mean we are pushing on the system faster than its regulatory mechanisms can compensate. Our bodies have highly tuned regulatory mechanisms to control body temp, which work amazingly well as long as ambient temps stay within a certain range. Outside that range, not so well.

> I'm going to just believe that the earth has it's own regulation magic that we have not uncovered yet.

Well, it, er, does, but it isn't very good (see ice ages), and operates on timescales that would be inconvenient to us. If humanity died out tomorrow, then CO2 levels would likely get back to normal eventually, but it's not really a _great_ solution, is it? We can hopefully do better.

Venus has a quite stable climate. It just happens to be extremely hostile to life.

This type of 'extinction leade' typifies why i switched teams. no one thinks that earth will become Venutian. flooding, soil loss, bio loss, whatever the worst part will be; extinction is not even on the table. fuck these models and the horses they ride in on.

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