Heat Domes Are a Red-Hot Warning on Climate Costs | Hacker News Reader

Heat Domes Are a Red-Hot Warning on Climate Costs

bloomberg.com

120 pointsmontalbano78 comments

Keep in mind the scale of the experiment we're living in: between the peak of last ice age (when most of today's developed countries were either under a thick dome of ice, or dry cold steppes with roaming hordes of woolly mammoths) and pre-industrial climate, the global temperature increase was only 5°C, occurring over a few millenia (though this increase was enough to destroy completely this environment and its mammoths, wooly rhinos, cave bears, etc).

Now we're talking of adding 4°C in a couple of centuries. What could go wrong, really? Yeah, about everything, and really strong and fast.

People don't worry because they think of having 4°C daily increase temperature, no big deal: temperature swings daily by tens of degrees. But they should instead think of a fever: a 2°C fever is already pretty strong; a 4°C fever is a very serious condition, potentially deadly.

Global increase of 4°C means about 8°C increase on land (roughly double). Anything past 3-4°C global increase is just destruction of a massive scale. Just 2°C would be manageable, but we are going to shoot past that really fast (me things).

EDIT: My first sentence is scientific fact (double land temperature). My second sentence is mostly accepted by climate scientists, though the details can be debated (just how bad it's going to get). The third sentence is my personal opinion and only time will tell. But sure, downvote me.

I’m not a climate scientist and a few degree increase used to seem like a small thing to me. Then I realized that increasing the global temperature average by a few degrees means putting in a massive amount of more energy into the system and then it clicked for me how much of a big deal this is. This massive increase in energy into the system over a very short period of time means lots of chaotic events will ensue before a new equilibrium is obtained.

It’s interesting that you touch on energy — temperature is a measure of the energy of a system, but most people don’t think of it in those terms.

If you consider how much energy it takes to raise the temperature of your living room by 4C (about 840J per m3), and then extrapolate that to the entire planet, it’s a phenomenal amount of energy, incomprehensibly vast. Then, consider that the oceans, with a heat capacity of 4.2MJ per m3 and a vast volume are also warming by entire degrees, and it’s just staggering.

Yet, the core is even hotter. So we're mostly talking about the relatively thin crust layer on top. Core and mantle has practically unlimited energy supply as well. The planet is basically alot larger, and contains lots more energy than we normally account for.

What does the energy of the Earth’s core have to do with climate? Outside of the effects of volcanoes I can’t think of anything.

I just can't imagine why the bigger picture is never interesting.

https://duckduckgo.com/?t=lm&q=earth+mantle+core+climate&ia=...

From the first link it appears the effect is based on how the liquid flow of the core affects the orbit of the planet. The energy of the core does not play the same role on climate change as the energy that we’ve input into the system.

I don’t think anyone is claiming the bigger picture isn’t interesting. Indeed, I did ask for clarification precisely because I was interested in learning something new.

The NASA study seems to be yet another vector to validate human-caused warming of climate. Validation is one thing, but also understanding exactly how and why we're moving away from an equilibrium vs core cycles, and what that may mean, may say something compelling.

We're like fleas on the back of a giant elephant, and it might help to reorient to gain clarity. Mind you, I don't bring answers, only unasked questions and some wonder.

The other thing is the enormous amount of geothermal energy, trapped beneath our feet. We may require energy, ie. to trap greenhouse gases and as replacement for fossile fuels.

https://www.greenandgrowing.org/how-long-does-carbon-dioxide...

Another issue I think is that the average hides a lot. Both (1, 2, 8, 9) and (4, 5, 5, 6) have the same average.

Now extend that to 365 days, and there's a lot of room for wild events leading to "just" a 1 degree increase in average temperature.

But then, maybe the average temperature is not the right thing to use in this context.

In France, the usual term is "climate warming", not sure about other places. Maybe we should use a term that shows that there's an increase in unusual temperature swings and / or exceptional events. These should be much more intelligible for the average person.

1º increase? Meh, 32º or 33º feel roughly the same.

Huge storms that tear the roofs off houses ever other week? Yeah, that might actually be a concern.

In the US, the term "climate change" has come to be used in favor of "global warming". It probably helped, but the nature of the propaganda and misinformation also shifted to adapt.

I think that the words "climate drift" are more accurate: the climate won't change back on human timescale, we will never have 2021 climate ever again.

And with the system inertia (the physical system, i'm not talking about our inaction), unless positive feedback loops are discovered as the drift continue, we will never have 2030 climate again. Even if every emissions stopped tomorrow.

I've always thought the term Climate Destabilization would be better. No one cares if it gets warm. Everyone cares if their way of life gets destabilized.

Weather Volatility?

The biggest historic polluters don't care because their temperatures were nice already. It's primarily those regions that had awful temperatures to begin with that will suffer.

You hear all these people coming up with reasons why more CO2 is a good thing but this is always under the assumption that you live in a country that is not impacted by the negative effects. Everything is positive if you are blind to the negatives.

Tell that to British Columbia. BC is famed for stable temperatures. Thats why it is the most desireable place to live in Canada. Vancouver rarely gets below -5 or above 30, and then only ever for a day at a time. Then last week Lytton BC became hotter than a Saudi summer, shattering Canada's all-time hottest temperature by several degrees. Over a period of _days_ everything dried out. Lightning started fires. Now Lytton doesnt exist anymore. 90% burned to the ground and many dead. Climate change means change: the stable is becomes unstable and the moderate becomes extreem.

Roads in western canda are literally failing under this heat.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/alberta-infrastructu...

I think that's the part people need to hear - we're moving from semi-stable to a more chaotic climate.

The extremes are moving, and it doesn't take many shifts to destroy everything. E.g. dry + fire, or ice + time, or storms + floods, or humidity + time

Not entirely sure what people need to hear. We need better models and problem definitions.

So better documentation of exactly how badly we are screwed? The ship is sinking. We can measure water inflow to better predict how long we have, or we can start plugging the holes asap and pray we can do so in time.

The story at the moment is a 2 deg c up tick, that sounds pretty fine to me. So we don't get snow so often? OK, but the summers are nicer. All good.

But if the reality is that wild fires burn my house to the ground and snow storms cut me off, freeze my pipes and stop me getting to work - now I'm listening.

Lytton is in the middle of the Fraiser River valley, it has always been hot AF in the middle of summer. Vancouver is far away on the coast. Median temperature in Lytton around Aug 1st is 30C and it has hit ~40C a bunch over its historical record.

This event was, of course, very extreme, but its not that surprising it happened in Lytton.

And the whole Frasier river valley is getting hit hard by climate change and forest fires, pretty much every summer.

It might seem weird because its so far north, but its climate is more like drought-striken areas of WA/OR/CA.

‘Fraser’, no ‘i’. After Simon Fraser, an explorer of western Canada.

Would you swear on your life it wasn't named after Dr. Frasier Crane, esteemed psychologist of the Pacific Northwest?

I didn't think so.

So far north? London is further north than both vancouver and lytton.

London is anomalously warm for its latitude due to the Atlantic Ocean conveyor belt.

Is global yearly average temperature what increases. It is an average that takes into account from the coldest night of winter in the south pole to the hottest days in the sahara. You should not see it as "today's temperature + 4ºC", specially in something as complex as the global climate system.

What you will see in the day to day scale is more extreme weather, reaching new highs, changing in climate features (like some essential sea currents, like the gulf stream, and also air currents like the polar vortex) and not so friendly weather for things that implies predictability, like agriculture, because bad weather in some critical stages mean the loss of crops.

Also, the increase of temperature, the extremes that it reaches, are not evenly distributed, the highest temperature anomalies happen around the poles, where you have a lot of factors that will provide a positive feedback to increase global warming (releasing buried/frozen carbon, less albedo due to ice melting, etc)

If I were to predict the future, I'd say we will see a move away from focusing on passive measures (such as reduction in carbon emissions) to active measures pretty quickly as the passive stuff is not fast enough.

Telling people they will collapse under the heat now while increasing taxes etc. for a long-term agenda will not work well in most societies...

If the average is raised in a process that is described in as implied form by say a gaussian distribution, the tails of the distribution increase by far more than the average. And for climate change the std deviation will increase too.

> Martin Weitzman, one of the few economists who warned that these risks were being ignored, was snubbed for the Nobel Prize.

Is failing to win a Nobel Prize now a snub? That seems ridiculous on its face.

It was a political snub. The Economic Prize is always political. They gave the prize to a soft denialist, a guy whose message has always been to downplay the costs of climate change.

Exactly. See the damning presentation from Steve Keen for OECD in 2019: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EtKW3OK2_lk

From this cycle : https://www.oecd.org/naec/averting-systemic-collapse/

"Damning" seems a bit strong because Keen's complaint is a bit flimsy. If there isn't any obvious structural link between temperature and wealth or comfort then there does need to be a clearer explanation of why one would develop.

Calling the research "stupid" isn't an argument. I also don't really think quoting Twitter threads qualifies as evidence either - this sort of policy deserves a bit more than 140 characters per thought bubble. If he isn't serious about making an attempt to debunk this stuff, then he probably doesn't have a slam dunk case.

No argument that economics prizes are highly political, though.

Your hot take is ungenerous, inaccurate. Considering the stakes, it's also highly irresponsible.

Noob layperson's TLDR for the viewing audience:

Using his damage function, Nordhaus concludes 4° warming is "optimal" economically, balancing costs of action and inaction.

Keen's first point is that 2° is game over, ending civilization as we know it, rendering equatorial regions uninhabitable, the death of many many people.

Then Keen systematically, surgically dissects Nordhaus' assumptions, analysis, and conclusions. Lies by omission, misuse of data, inappropriate contexts (eg assuming continuous functions, ignoring tipping points). More egregiously, Nordhaus completely ignores the physical world.

Keen finishes by recommending: including energy and climate feedback into econometric models; reforms to IPCC, including replacing old school economists with climate scientists and climate savvy economists.

> is that 2° is game over

Errata: 4°. I musta fat fingered my edit.

> If there isn't any obvious structural link between temperature and wealth or comfort then there does need to be a clearer explanation of why one would develop.

What do you mean "if?" Thanks to my affluence, I sat out the heat wave in the comfort of central AC. It was a little warm upstairs; my principal discomfort was that the kitchen was so cold that I needed to wear a sweater. I went outside to take the trash out at the peak temperature just because I wanted to feel it. I drove my air conditioned car, already cool from the garage, to the air conditioned grocery store, and had to walk about 30m in the heat. I could have had those groceries delivered, but again, I preferred the "adventure." Only... we couldn't get food delivered because, I presume, not enough delivery drivers have AC. They're not as affluent as myself.

Wealth, comfort, and temperature are strongly linked. You know Bezos wouldn't need to go for takeout like me. Worst case, he'd call a dealership to deliver a car to a driver to do his errands.

William Nordhaus is not a “soft denialist.” He’s the economist that has done more to consider the cost and benefits of climate change than anyone else.

4°C being the "optimal" change and his damage function ignoring pretty much how balanced system works is not soft denial then.

Soft denial is saying "climate change does exist, but its impact on the population will be lower than mesures destined to curb it". I hope his grandchildren and great-grandchildren will hear this speculation.

“Climate change is actually good because of reasons that others highly disagree with” is denialism.

I'm on team- Stop caring about the Nobel Prize.

It's political not merit based.

Either don't bring it up, or only mention the fails.

My respect for Nobel prizes ceased when they awarded the peace prize to Obama for simply having won an election. Nothing against Obama, but it revealed how meaningless and political Nobel prizes are.

The peace prize has almost always been very bad. The ones you should take seriously are the ones in various sciences.

Henry Kissinger getting the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973 was kind of sufficient already.

Being nit-picky, there's no such thing as a Nobel Prize for economics.

This is good news for climate action. The less predictable climate change costs are, the more likely it is that the ones holding the reigns of power will act. If it was entirely easy to predict that such and such places were doomed, then these people would just divest from those regions and leave them to their doom.

Was thinking this yesterday, hopefully this is a wakeup call for moderates.

People are very quick to cry "someone should do something" when these extreme events happen. You offer the same people something, in the grand scheme of things fairly moderate like the Green New Deal, and they calcify back to their party affiliations. We're so doomed.

Don't worry. There will be mass migrations of people as oceans and deserts encroach upon inhabited areas. There will be wars over access to fresh water and agricultural land. Yet once mother nature has gotten humanity's behaviour in check, the hairless ape will persist.

(This response is not intended to taken literally. My point is that we will survive, though the process of adaptation may be painful and we may not like what we may not enjoy what we are adapting to.)

"we" in human terms doesn't mean "you".

It also doesn't even mean "Americans" as a collective - whom the pandemic shows are not that concerned about dead Americans citizens when their isn't a country to bomb in response.

The green new deal does jack and shit about climate change.

I think this author is probably unaware, but in the case of the recent pacific northwest heat wave, it was due to something called an omega disruption of the northern jet stream, a phenomenon which IPCC models predict will occur less frequently with climate change. A shame he wrote an entire article based on not knowing this and did no research on it.

> Climate change is almost certainly involved

No, it's not. Please, stop doing this. stop presuming that every weather phenomenon is in some way causally related to climate change. There are things that are. But know which things are before you write about them and blame climate change. You make "trust the science" look like a joke and it's no wonder so many people are beginning to think it is. Do your job. Do some research. Know what you're talking about before you talk about it.

I wish we could un-invent the notion of averages. Look at it in this case, 2°C increase. Everybody shrugs their shoulders. Yet it's these outlier events which will stop being outliers.

Article by a guy called Noah!

We need to mourn a normal life. We won't and we shalln't live the same life with the same goals than the previous generation. Mourning does not mean to become nihilist. But that the only way to get excited by new sustainable and resilient projects.

Wait I thought outlier weather events like blizzards and heat waves weren't indicators of global climate as the media so likes to lecture about when it's not in favor of their narrative.

The trend is what matters, not the individual events. These "outlier" events are now happening regularly, so the trend has changed. Because climate change.

But this isn't happening regularly. For example the temperature record that was set in Canada in this heatwave had stood since 1937.

That’s looking a at max and minima. Look at max monthly or yearly temperatures and you’ll see the trend that was mentioned. By looking at monthly and yearly temperature trends you are less likely to be swayed by one off outlier events.

Global Warming.

Wait, no, Global Cooling!

Actually guys, it's "Climate Change".

And now the latest hotness (pun intended) is an increase in "extreme" weather events.

Why does the alarmist metric always seem to be changing to something that is more difficult to actually measure?

I feel like climate change and increase in extreme weather events are the same thing though. I’ve been familiar with this term for decades. It’s not new.

Or perhaps they simply latch onto metrics that lend themselves well to confirmation bias.

And the more scary and unpredictable this all seems, the more political will is generated for unbridled and unquestioned spending.

I believe something quite similar to this happened about ~20 years ago: Scared populace, constantly shifting threats/objectives, incredible amounts of money unproductively spent chasing shadows.

It's not more difficult to measure. The measurements exist and the data is publicly available.

If we didn't have data on it, nobody would have even got the idea in the first place.

Climate change is what right wing pundits started saying in the 90s instead of saying global warming. It was an attempt to obfuscate things. Words and phrasing of things change over time. It’s not the words used that matter; it’s the data. The trend line is clear. The increase in co2 is undeniable. The melting of ice is undeniable.

Almost as if earth's eco system was very complex, barely understood and very hard to predict. That really makes you think....

Well yeah that's actually the right way to do it.

That is why I would like to see more in depth reporting on the topic of extremes. We are being told to expect them to occur more often and for new records to be established, but little (if any) reporting sets this out quantitatively.

I think this is important. Temperature trends confirm that global warming is happening, so a lot of the argument we see is over extreme weather events. A freakishly cold winter will be used by one side to claim that global warming is not happening. It will be used by the other side to claim it is a sign of climate change.

If there is a match between expectations of extreme weather events and temperature change, the deniers have less of a leg to stand on. If there is a mismatch between the expectation of extreme weather events and temperature change, climate models can be adapted and improved upon. Either way, it is a net win.

Yes. I would like to see more data on this in the same way that I have seen data on the overall warming. As it is it just seems like a convenient way to point to global warming ever time there's a disaster.

And that’s just “recorded” history. The West Coast of North America has only been colonized for a few hundred years, even in recorded human history that’s barely a blip in time.

There is plenty of oral history among Native American tribes of great fires, droughts, and natural disasters that come along every 100-200 years. There are also many ancient civilizations that were wiped out before European colonization due to climate change (Chaco Canyon, for example). Western North America has always had an unstable climate regardless of Climate Change.

> Wait I thought outlier weather events like blizzards and heat waves weren't indicators of global climate as the media so likes to lecture about when it's not in favor of their narrative.

It's probably fair to hold two ideas at the same time.

. Climate change is a way to accumulate rank and wealth in society.

. Climate change is real

It's interesting to ask what everyone is really after in terms of climate. Lack of change or natural events occurring. Would an upcoming ice age result in a cry for more CO2?

I like to think of it in terms of carrying capacity. Too many people results in environmental degradation (of all sorts), social unrest, scrabbling at the bottom for wages, squabbling at the top for status.

Well not many are after actually fixing it. If anyone clams to be worried about climate change and doesn't support nuclear power I stop listening.

Why is everything portrayed in a sensationalist outrageous bad negative way.

This is ultimately a neutral thing.

Climate change has been happening since the dawn of time.

The transition period will suck but human beings will adapt.

There may be positive things that come out of it as well.

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