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Comment by yosito | Hacker News Reader

Animals bodies evolve to adapt to changes in the environment. This is nothing new. It's literally the process that has driven life forward since life first appeared. And given that the planet has so far only warmed an average of 1.1 degrees celcius due to climate change, isn't it a bit overzealous to blame animals' adaptation on climate change?

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> And given that the planet has so far only warmed an average of 1.1 degrees celcius due to climate change, isn't it a bit overzealous to blame animals' adaptation on climate change?

The worldwide average doesn't really tell the full story, because there can be significant local extremes that are far greater.

See, for example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lytton,_British_Columbia, a town that broke the all-time temperature record for Canada and then burned to the ground the next day.

It burned to the ground due to a wildfire caused by sparks from a train, not from the heat. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lytton_wildfire

Wildfires don’t spread much better in 90F vs 121F. The big thing that causes uncontrollable spreads is lots of fast wind.

> Wildfires don’t spread much better in 90F vs 121F.

That's missing the point a bit. That said, vegetation sure does get dry fast in a 120 degree heat wave, though.

Yes they do, when higher temps have dried out the vegetation.

Lack of humidity dries out vegetation more than heat.

Literally in the first paragraph of what you shared:

> The fire, one of the 2021 British Columbia wildfires throughout the province, was facilitated by the 2021 Western North America heat wave.

1.1 C = around 39 F

The world temp has gone up 39 degrees? That is much higher than I thought.

That couldn't be right?

I'm tired today.

That's not how it works.

A rise of 1.1 degrees C corresponds to a rise of 1.98 degrees F.

You have read the scale¹ instead of interpreting the value as a delta, a step, a degree. ¹(1.1°C above freezing reread in °F - 39°F - which means "the difference between a temperature almost never reached in Denmark and freezing water, plus 1.1°C".)

The Celsius scale uses 0 for "freezing water" and 100 for "boiling water".

Fahrenheit uses 32 for "freezing water" and 100 for "body temperature". (The "32" comes from interpolating Rømer's scale, and 0 is somehow "the minimum temperature ever one expected in Denmark".)

The single degree (step) is halfish/doublish that of the other scale: C = (5/9)F (from freeze to body temperature it's ~37 steps in °C and ~68 in °F). And there is an offset of 32.

> there can be significant local extremes that are far greater

You're moving goal posts. Either we're talking about global climate change, or we're talking about local changes. Local changes have always happened, and animals either adapt or die when they do. There is no argument that the global average change is any more than 1.1c in the last century.

Both are important. People who go "a couple degrees average isn't that big of a deal" are missing a big part of the dangers of global climate change.

Humans can't survive more than a few hours at a wet bulb temperature (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet-bulb_temperature) of 35°C, even if they have shade, drinking water, and fans available. If air conditioning fails, you're dead.

As the global average creeps up, some of these local variations in hot, humid places without sufficient power infrastructure to reliably run A/C for everyone like Bangladesh have the potential to kill millions.

this comments are like bingo for climate science misunderstanding

evolution doesn't happen on time scales of 100 years

+1.1 avg temperature implies much larger localized changes

Agreed. Yes, some animals will handle it, and we'll hold them up as examples. But the crash in diversity from all those who don't is tragic. The genetic diversity that is the bounty of millions of years of iteration and "learning" in ecological systems is a huge loss to our planet's resources and (by proxy) our own future wealth.

Evolution happens on the time scale of "birth" to reproductive age for the organism in question. I know of no corporeal entity still considered adolescent after a century.

I have never even worked with an evolutionary biologist but the concept of "punctuated equilibrium" has been around for quite a while.

[] my sloppy use of "birth" includes cells budding, seeds sprouting and the rest of the messy details.

[] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punctuated_equilibrium

Extremely out of my league here, but it seems logical to me that if there is a mutation, it only initially happens in a single organism. Like a single specific bear might mutate, but certainly not all of them at the same time. That organism then needs to mature (if not already) and reproduce to spread the new mutation. It seems it would take several generations of successful breeding and on top of that successful passing on of the mutated gene to have the mutation actually spread beyond just the initial one. Reproduction rate of the organism would also play a huge factor I'd imagine, like a mouse can have hundreds of offspring in a single year due to a 21 day gestation period compared to a human.

> evolution doesn't happen on time scales of 100 years

Evolution may not, but selection may happen on that time scale, especially for animals that live short lives.

What is the difference between selection and evolution?

Selection is a process by which evolution works, so this is a false distinction. Modern definitions of evolution are usually something along the lines of changes in a population over time. There's no inherent time scale over which those changes can be observed, except for that of the generation time itself.

> evolution doesn't happen on time scales of 100 years

Phenotypic selection does happen on this timescale. Industrial melanism[1] has been pretty well studied.

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

Yeah – and on top of that, the commenting user seems to underestimate the gravity of "only" a few degrees:

> The study also calculates extinction risks at different warming levels. It finds that 2% of endemic species are at risk of extinction if warming is limited to 1.5C, and 4% are at risk at 2C. However, the risk rises to 20% for land-based ecosystems, and to 32% in marine ecosystems if warming hits 3C.

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/04/climate-change-will-h...

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