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Comment by bellyfullofbac | Hacker News Reader

I'm no expert, but to sell this to the skeptics (if they'd even buy it), I guess an analogy would be, if you wanted to preserve an ice cube in a freezer where the temperature is -20C, incrementally rising the temperature won't matter, until it does: when it reaches the melting point of the ice.

Are we at melting point now? Or very very close to it?

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What is happening is more melting is occurring in Summer then what freezes during Winter. This a net loss of ice.

In the past, over a period of time, an equilibrium existed, CO2 broke that equilibrium.

To add to this, there are also feedback loops involved. Sea ice is very white (high albedo), and as it melts at the margins it is replaced by sea water with a much lower albedo that absorbs more light and heat energy. So as the ice goes, the water around it warms ever faster. Once the ice is mostly gone, that will accelerate global warming by an appreciable amount simply through loss of reflectivity. That's just one of many feedback loops that make things more complicated than "move the CO2 thermostat up or down again".

It's not just about the melting of the ice. I mean, it is. Point 2 in this list is about an ice shelf that itself is mostly floating (so that melting in itself doesn't really contribute to sea level rise), but this shelf blocks a glacier on land, preventing a massive amount of land ice from sliding into the sea, and from what I understand, it sounds like once the shelf collapses, this glacier flowing into the sea could lead to quite rapid sea level rise. And that glacier is connected to other glaciers that could soon follow, leading to the collapse of all glaciers across West Antarctica, which would be quite serious.

And that shelf is already melting, and cracks are appearing. It's currently kept in place by an undersea mountain, but when it melts too much or breaks up, it could lose that grip, and things can start moving very quickly all of a sudden.

The fact that global temperatures are undeniably going up and are continuing to rise, isn't exactly helping with keeping all that ice in its place.

Skeptics gonna skeptic, no matter what now. Only thing left is to prepare for the crashing and brutal transition, and explain things to skeptics but not for their benefits but in the hope it tips off in the right direction the hesitant people who are silently listening to conversations. Like with covid.

The problem is that it's a continuous event.

A lot of places are on the margin where 1c or 2c matters a lot. This margin moves up the more we increase heat.

But more than that, the volatility in the climate system increases at a much greater rate than the mean temperature.

Extreme weather events will continue to get more frequent

While this is a good argument, people's revealed preferences point in the other direction

The countries that are closest to that margin, like Saudi Arabia, Qatar or Iran, are actually perfectly happy with pumping more fossil fuels. Bin Salman was actively trying to sabotage COP26 talks. Brazil continues the deforestation, with Bolsonaro being perfectly happy with it

Florida beach front properties are not dropping in value. Migration towards Sun Belt in the US is a real thing. At the peak of summer heat, significant chunk of Europe's population temporarily moves to the hottest parts of the continent. Despite the global warming prospects and economic disparities, Greeks, Italians and Spaniards aren't flocking to Scandinavia. etc., etc.

That would only work on some. The skeptic I know acknowledges that the world is getting warmer but doesn't believe this is a problem. I do believe it is a problem and find it hard to convince him.

it's a hard sell for skeptics because basically every major politically-charged doom-and-gloom x-years-from-now climate change prediction has ended up not coming to pass thus far[0]. obviously it's not like it's literally impossible for such a scenario to occur but at some point when a boy cries wolf enough times over the decades it's hard to take any headline phrased like this one immediately seriously at face value.

[0] https://extinctionclock.org/

Most of the predictions issued by climate scientists have been correct or overly conservative. We are also seeing just the same amount of warming that Exxon predicted in 1970 in their se ret study.

At some point climate “sceptics” are like the people avoiding vaccines. Dumb babies indulging in sophistry while ignoring real actions that can alter reality in massively useful ways.

I find the way many people very easily equate covid vaccine skepticism and apocalyptic anthropogenic climate change skepticism, as you've done here, to be incredibly interesting. nothing I wrote above made any sort of correlation or even allusion to any correlation (I did not bring up vaccines) yet you made it yourself, unprompted, and characterized the apparently unified belief system between the two as "dumb babies." there's many conclusions that can be drawn from this that I personally find incredibly interesting but there's probably not much use in expounding on any of this here (flamebait rules etc.)

Well above. Witness the rising sea levels caused by the glaciers melting.

Hm. I don’t think that’s a good model. The temperature isn’t the same everywhere, and the line on the ground between “fine” and “not fine” moves around much more within any given year than the average between years.

First time I visited the USA was Dec 2014-Jan 2015; strong and opposite temperature anomalies across the USA, so I found people surfing in California on Christmas Day[0] while around the same time Trump was tweeting sarcastically about the snow in NYC disproving global warming.

[0] for all they know that might even be normal for California, I’m not American

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