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Comment by bruce343434 | Hacker News Reader

So what will be the consequences of this? Article makes it clear this is not normal, but doesn't really say much else.

Accelerated calving, meltwater flows, unsafe ice conditions for researchers would be some of the immediate consequences, in addition to the obvious long-term atmospheric and oceanic implications resulting from ice volume loss.

It's still below freezing. It's just supposed to be way colder than that.

Under the hood Antarctica is way hotter way closer to the surface than you might expect. There are volcanoes, too.

We probably want the weather to stay much colder than the negative one degree Celsius technically required for it to not melt straight away. Could make a critical difference or at least soften the impact.

And it is winter in Antarctica, a mild winter can make the impact of summer worse.

It is summer and ending in a few days.

Isn't it more like < -2 Celcius ambient temperature, since it's sea water?

> Under the hood Antarctica is way hotter way closer to the surface than you might expect. There are volcanoes, too.

Thanks, I had no idea.

I found this related article interesting: http://www.plateclimatology.com/geological-hotspot-melting-p...

If it is just some kind of random anomaly, like a rogue wave, not much beyond an odd layer in the glacial ice pack.

The problem is that this is most definitely not an anomaly, but a point in a trend of massive climate change. There are many predictions of the consequences, and as far as I can tell, the actual data are running ahead of the most serious predictions. Seems like just another data point.

Also to consider is the multiplier effects of higher temperatures at high latitudes, which is already starting to release gigatons of methane stored in the permafrost, and methane has about 22X the warming effect of carbon dioxide. Not the kind of feedback loop we want to allow to run away.

One of the major concerns, alluded to in the article, is the destabilization of the Thwaites. If that thing goes, we're done.

The equivalent sea level rise numbers here are larger than I was expecting, but if temperatures are regularly above melting (are they? IDK from the article), one should expect something like this: https://www.antarcticglaciers.org/glaciers-and-climate/what-...

I'd argue that such event is the consequences.

And melting all that ice would have drastic effects on the oceans. Current changes, sea level rises, etc. we probably can only estimate at the lower range of consequences.

Nobody really knows, and it's too late to do anything real about it. Fun times.

It is too late to do something about what happens _today_, it is not too late to do something about what is now likely to happen in a decade, and two, and three.

Your comment sounds like on of the stages of the "four stage strategy" from Yes Minister:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nSXIetP5iak

originally about why the UK doesn't help foreign nations in an inconvenient crisis.

> [...] a decade, and two, and three.

My understanding is that very little of what we do now would have any effect on what happens in a decade. Maybe in three.

Amazing, I would totally have assumed that clip was referring to climate change without any other context.

Most of the great scenes from Yes Minister, and latterly Yes Prime Minister, still not only stand up today, but are also surprisingly still relevant 40 years after they were first broadcast.

It truly was a genius show.

That is wrong on many levels. Such nihilist position does not help the millions of people leading concrete actions on different scales.

You are wrong, it's not too late to change how we behave regarding climate and such way of thinking is unlikely to induce the required actions.

It's too late for what's happening now, that's for sure. Stopping the "surprises" that are going to happen in a few decades are still likely physically possible. We'll see if humanity is up to it.

Things will continue to get worse until we do. I guess until some hypothetical dystopian society finishes burning all he coal. Or someone whose entire family has died due to heat/drought engineers a nuclear/biological disaster to end the pieces of civilization that use a lot of energy. Or you know we de-carbonize and build an electrical (for energy) and biological (for medicines and food) society.

It's not a nihilist position.

It's: "we already fucked up, can we _please_ stop making these awful gambles before we're inevitably all dead?"

I was told that I could use my SUV up until the problems start, and then I could just start taking the bus to solve it.

Climate change is not boolean. It is not a question of damage or not damage.

It is a question of how much damage.

Okay, but the frightening part is that this is only true to a point.

And that point is where positive feedback loops dominate at which point it is very much boolean, habitable by humans or not.

But we do not know where that threshold is.

And we may have already passed it.

We just pretend there isn't a real threshold because scientists can't tell us exactly where it is yet so we might as well just keep doing what we've been doing for another 20 years... like we've been using as an excuse for the last 40.

I don't think there is any sort of scientific consensus that i) there is a point where its too warm for earth to be habitable for humans or ii) there is a massive feedback loop threshold.

There is certainly a point past which the Earth cannot support the same order of magnitude of humans, at similar technology levels.

It's hard to argue that there are no bad feedback loops once temperature gets higher. We know of several huge methane stores that are temperature dependent, we know how ice and clouds work as temperature rises, etc. We're gambling 90-100% of humanity on the critical points not being reachable.

I have this mental image of the scene from Erik The Viking where the island is sinking into the sea, but everyone on the island is denying anything is happening.

It's heartbreaking. We had everything and we pissed it away.

And continue to worry about scientific consensus as if the mechanisms for piles of known positive feedback mechanisms aren't numerous and straightforward. The comment a few up is textbook 90s fossil fuel company except having ceded ground on the trivial, trivial reality that climate change exists at all.

Because there's certainly *not* scientific consensus that there are negative (technical sense) feedback loops that continue to stabilize the climate (well enough) far away from the steady state climate and a lot of good reason to think that they will fail to keep up.

The Elder Things will awaken and humanity will have to choose a side between the Elders and the Shoggoths.

Nothing long term, it will most likely swing back the other way in a decade or two just like it has done for all of recorded history, oscillating back and forth like a global thermal tide.

For that to be true, it either should have swung back already, or at least it needs to do so very VERY soon.

https://xkcd.com/1732/

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